SEO: A Tool For Boosting Your Ranking, Not A Silver Bullet

There are lots of people who have a rough understanding of the way the Internet and search engines work to know that SEO is essential, but not enough understanding to realize that it will not fix all your website’s ranking issues. SEO is not something you can apply and after that sit back and wait on searchers to visit your site. Yes, it is necessary and it is an exceptionally creative principle, but the incorrect application of SEO will no more increase your website traffic than giving out complimentary balloons will make an ice cream shop’s revenues go through the roof. Yes, it can assist; no, it is not the entire deal.

It is no good setting up a site and paying lip service to the fundamentals of SEO – throwing up some back links in other locations, using keywords and creating a sitemap – and after that, when the doors are not beaten down by enthralled readers, grumbling “but it is SEO’d! Clearly SEO isn’t as good as I was informed it was!”. Correctly applied, SEO will definitely improve your site’s Google ranking. Whether it will get you to the first page or not, time will tell – however it is vert useful.

The significant error people make is in treating SEO as the silver bullet that will make all the difference! If that were true, then Google ranking would be totally meaningless because everybody would have SEO done on their website. It needs to be ingrained in your mind that great SEO and good content is the most powerful combination for your website’s Google rankings.

Is There Such A Thing As Too Much SEO?

It is obviously not easy to write good, SEO-compliant content for a website and still have a standard of content which will impress your readers, and this often shows in the more amateurish attempts at writing a website. One mistake a lot of people make is in thinking that the more they use a keyword, the better it will be for their website. This often results in the writer frequently using the keyword once every other sentence or a similar density. Their reasoning is understandable. If some SEO is good, then a lot of SEO will surely be excellent?

However, SEO is not just about use of keywords. It is more accurate to say that SEO is about the relevant, appropriate and substantial use of keywords within good content. It is true that Google sets rankings based on keyword density, but the search engines don’t just look for “a lot of keywords”. If they find a suspiciously high keyword volume they are actually likely to downrank you, and if your website is barely readable on account of the excess of keywords then you are unlikely to get the back links that will also be used for higher rankings.

It is this balance that you need to achieve, and it is not a matter of too much or too little SEO. SEO encompasses a number of different elements which should all be present if you want to make the right impact on the search engines – or at least, you should include as many elements as you can without negatively affecting the readability of your website.

Black Hat SEO – A Bad Idea Disguised As A Cunning Plan

Since the development of Search Engine Optimisation as a concept, there has been a fairly obvious temptation for some people to try to rig the system in their favor by using the principles of SEO in a less-than-honest way. Because the idea of SEO is they keywords create cash, the idea that has occurred to a lot of people can best be summed up in the following sentence: “If they want keyword volume, we’ll give them keyword volume”. This tends to occur in the shape of website text that contains nothing but keywords.

Of course, this means that the website will be scarcely readable, if it is readable at all, but the trick is usually applied by webmasters who don’t really care if you actually read what is on the site. Usually they will use it as a landing page that immediately redirects you to the site they want you to read. It will happen instantly and you will not see the landing page, but it will have done its job. For the reader it may be little more than an inconvenience, but for other people operating in the same niche, it is cheating.

The main reason that tricks like this are a bad idea has only a small amount to do with the fact that it is cheating. In actual fact, it is incredibly limited as an SEO tool because Google and other search engines check for such tricks and will relegate any such site in their rankings – so not only is it dishonest, it is also ineffective, which is what will really stick in the craw of the people doing it.