OPTIMIZATION SUPPORT SEO

Optimization Support

To SEO or not to SEO

As I have mentioned in my previous articles, the power of SEO “gurus”, as they like to be called, has been for a while now under continues questioning as their efforts have been giving limited results (even useless) as they have not being able to offer their customers the desired boost of traffic they promise.

What is SEO:

Optimization Support

The acronym “SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization which has been growing and expanding in the minds of internet tycoons to be for a while now. The last ten to fifteen years more and more people have been naming themselves as SEO specialists in an effort to convince website owners that they can do miracles and boost website traffic in just a couple of months.

The SEO myth seems now that has been rebutted and many website owners start to dispute the value of SEOs as their results are not the expected ones. We are going to examine this in more detail however lets see what an SEO can or better could had offer to a website owner in the past:

The services of an SEO:

Before the 24th of February 2011 (first Panda update) the services of an SEO were pretty much straight forward. The weaknesses of the Google algorithm (the most used search engine in the world) were easy to detect by the highly involved Internet people.

In short, anyone could have chosen any subject which was high in online search queries and set up a website. That website could have been loaded with material (e.g. articles) which were useless, low quality but full of keywords relative to the subject. From there on the so-called SEO would easily build hundreds of thousands incoming links from worthless similar or not websites. The links would target specific keywords, which people usually use in their searches. The Google keyword tool was mostly used to detect these keywords, which were usually a set of words rather than a single word. After following the above steps the selected keywords would have had high chances of appearing in the first page of Google search results and even sometimes among the first five search results. Such a success would mean definite boost of traffic for the website and increased incomes for the owner. There were cases of websites, which with just 2-3 successfully targeted keywords would have huge number of visitors. Definitely this was unnatural and most times useless as the Internet users were not receiving valuable information from real specialists.

What has changed?

Google easily detected the weaknesses of their algorithm and soon started working on it to minimize the influence of the SEOs on their search results. After a number of updates on their algorithm (Panda and Penguin) they managed to successfully minimize the influence of the SEO “gurus”.

Today we reached to a position where the link building and keyword targeting are offering minimum or even negative results to a website. Even websites which in the past had huge numbers of visitors due to increased SEO actions (mainly link building and keyword targeting) were easily detected by the algorithm updates and were successfully penalized loosing their search rankings and ultimately their traffic and income. I personally had my own share of penalization and experienced the harsh loss of traffic and money from a well SEO website.

Is SEO useless now?

Well, I wouldn’t say that. Even with the Google algorithm updates there are still some features, which an optimizer could work on to increase the potentials of a website’s visibility. Although this is not the subject of the current article I would like to refer you to a relative article of my personal friend and colleague Alex Chris. His article titled “SEO tips for beginners – 15 ways to Google boost your web site” gives a well explained guidance for a potentially successful optimization of a website or blog with minimum chances of getting penalized by the major search engines.

In an upcoming article we will examine the extend of involvement of an SEO in the running of a website or a blog and how much of the available budget should be spend on optimization in the pursue of a successful traffic boosting.

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