October 11th, 2009
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) as opposed to search engine marketing(SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence. One aspect of SEO is link building.
Link Building… Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for your website to achieve higher rankings.
Link building doesn’t work like it used to back in 2004. Not anymore – unfortunately.
If you have done link building over the past years you must have been wondering why things stopped working the way like they did before. But first let’s quickly recap what DID matter in link building a while ago, but doesn’t matter anymore today!
What stopped working in link building?
Precise Anchor Texts
Before, SEOs were used to do optimising by using the same anchor texts for their links over and over again. Since anchor text filters are in full effect since 2006 varying your anchor texts is key today. It does NOT look natural if suddenly everyone starts to link to your site, all using the same anchor text i.e. “Whey protein”.
Google PageRank
The famous green bar is not a metric that enables you to learn more about the strength of a page. Google returns random page rank data if they feel like to – just because it’s fun and they like to fool us SEOs.
This was even confirmed by Matt Cutts of Google
http://www.marketingfan.com/matt-cutts-confirms-we-return-ed-random-pagerank-data.
Alexa Rank
This metric is skewed towards online marketing people and is therefore not an adequate traffic metric to be used. Alexa Rank only collects data from people who have actually installed the Alexa Bar on their browsers and thus those data are not really significant.
Google Backlink Data
The number of Backlinks reported by Google is only a fraction of what is really there. Furthermore, random samples are returned, so you might see the spammiest of all links you have in the results. This was also confirmed by Google. The metric was crippled in 2004 and shouldn’t be used for making decisions either.
Google Cache Date
This metric was also crippled as it is heavily used by SEOs. Juicy pages that rank are often returned as having no cache set. Therefore, you can forget about the cache date, too.
That’s it for now.
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I am willing to bet that in 2010 goes on, the way of on-page and off-page SEO are going to differ as we know it. I think we will see a transition to client metrics in deciding ranking results. That combined with advanced personalized results and we’ll be seeing a huge molding of the users experience with Google and the other search engines. Every search result will not be created alike, take a look at things like user involvement, bounce time, bounce rate, etc… Put your energy on a better website all around, and I think you’ll see better results in 2010.