What is SEO?

It’s often seen as a bit of a black science, SEO (search engine optimisation). It’s expensive to find someone to ‘SEO’ your website, and if they guarantee results…they are probably trying to con you. If you hope to rank first for ’small tent on a hillside in Tibet’ you are OK, but to rate high for ‘cheap software’ will take longer.

But is it really so hard? Well, no, not for most sites. But it takes a long time. Forget all the whispers and dark arts you’ve heard about, mostly they don’t work, and those that do, well they won’t work for long.

Let’s get one thing clear. If you want your site to rate number one in google for its subject, the best and probably only way is to actually have the best site on the subject. If you throw together a five page site using free articles and expect to rate top for your keyword, you usually won’t unless it’s that Tibetan hillside phrase above.

You can SEO your site all year, and add 1,000 link pages of link exchanges, but if your competitors are attracting natural links because they have a better site they will continue to outrank you.

Most big sites (see note at bottom for exceptions) rate well because they have lots of pages about lots of related issues on their site, not because they happen to be first for one single phrase. And each of their pages is as high quality as the site can make it. They write interesting stuff that people like to link to. They have learned that keeping their site visitors informed, and therefore happy, is much the best way to stay ahead.

It is no longer easy to cheat you way to the top with SEO, at least in the long term. SEO is still important, but for the opposite reason to what is usually believed - you can have a very good site, but without SEO it still may not show up in the SERPS.

So ‘traditional’ SEO - careful choice of a page title, an awareness of keywords, an understanding of the importance of relevant inbound links etc are still important to ensure that you reach the place in the SERPS where you naturally ‘belong’, but are no longer very efficient at forcing your site to outrank other sites if they are, quite honestly, better than your own.

So the conclusion is - an awareness of SEO is important, although less crucial than ever before, but an awareness that content is the most important aspect of SEO is of overriding importance.

Note: some sites, especially older, very large, sites, have historically rated very highly and now seem to maintain a position that they don’t merit. Examples? about.com and answers.com are two that spring to mind - the former has many sections of little substance that rate much higher than they should, the second is more or less a wikipedia copy so rarely deserves to rank highly. We can only assume that sites of this type will decline in importance as time goes by.