By Robert Pryce
Head of Online Marketing
It is inherent that users want to get things done faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. This desire for progress is vital for innovativeness and creativity. It is similar to the quest to find that improved mouse trap that must be better because it's newer. However it is sometimes worth stepping back and analysing how things are done--sometimes the old ways are still the most effective.
One of the greatest attractions of search engine optimisation is how it continually evolves to ensure the best user experience. It must be remembered that users primarily search for information and that the medium grew due to its ability to deliver this relevant information.
There will always be those who employ underhand tactics such as cloaked pages, keyword stuffing, invisible text and duplicate site creation to improve their organic rankings. They constantly search for the fast way to get that elusive top ranking. They focus on the short term gain at the expense of their medium to long term success. However they need only refer to SEO 101 to realise that the most efficient way to get that top ranking is by providing good content and using links effectively.
Good content and quality links go hand in hand. Good content will always be the most important element for a good search engine ranking. While visitors and search engines crawlers don't always like exactly the same food, they must be satisfied by the same food. If your website is not deemed relevant to your human users, it won't be relevant for the crawlers either. Just as mice ignore the mousetrap in the absence of cheese, crawlers will largely ignore your website in the absence of content.
Quality inbound links take time but, with the aid of good content, will happen. In addition to creating inbound links, focus on improving all internal links. Crawlers need to be able to move seamlessly from page to page. Therefore avoid links that depend on JavaScript, session IDs, cookies, or passing more than two or three dynamic parameters.
Other common roadblocks are incorrect server redirects, robots.txt files, splash pages, file/directory names with non-standard characters or just about anything in an .htaccess file can impede a spider's progress.
Good content is also important from a search engine point of view. Google currently displays "snippets" of the website's content in its results pages. For example if a user searches for "discount hotel new york", Google tries to locate that term within the content and "snips" the sentence that included those keyterms to use as the description. This "enhances the user experience" as it gives the searcher a clear understanding of what to expect.
While there are a large number of techniques that can be employed to improve your rankings, it is more productive to concentrate on the elementary rules of SEO, good content and a quality link strategy will stand the test of time. Stick to these basics, exercise a little bit of patience, and your site will be the perfect bait for the crawlers. Just as that mouse still prefers the cheese.
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