Increasing Your Website Traffic – Is Only SEO Enough?

Everything is King sized- The Internet & your Competition

Today, from humble beginnings, Google has emerged to be the undisputed authority when it comes to bringing your business online legitimacy through a website. And the World Wide Web has massively expanded too- accounting for over a million websites pertaining to any topic that you might think of this very second. Finding your website amidst this heap or finding the most prospective customers for your products or services over the internet has become a very cumbersome and difficult task. Enter ‘Search Engine Optimization’ or SEO for short. This specialty was rather simple in the past and worked exactly as its name signifies. Sadly, with intense competition for good Google rankings, the SEO tricks that assuredly worked in the past have a significant margin for non-performance in the current scenario. What changed?

The Dark Age of SEO- And the Coming of Age of Google!!

Google caught onto the trend rather quickly. It’s just like a viral infection- successful survival tricks are copied or if success through legitimate options aren’t assured than the desperate turn to the forbidden tricks. Thus, the basic SEO concepts helped those websites that had a strategy, were intently focused on quality and weren’t afraid to innovate and expand their domain knowledge and proficiency. However, a rather significant number of SEOs, under the threat of stiff competition, resorted to rather unsavory tricks like keyword stuffing and other black-hat techniques to score better rankings on Google. While these ideas worked for a while, Google with its infinite wisdom caught on quickly.

Google- the Warlord in a Saint’s disguise!

Google is a believer and practitioner of quality. Today, it has made the strict adherence to quality and ‘provision of real value’ to the website visitor, a necessary criteria when judging a website for its search rankings. Thus, it encourages you to stake your claim as a subject matter expert, an authority on the information you are posting on your website. Based on the response you get from the eager ‘Google’s’ over the World Wide Web, your website is ranked better for its relevance and value or demoted to accommodate other websites that might be seen as giving a better user experience and value to your target online demographic. Keywords are still relevant, but mostly as shiny lures that help your target audience express their requirements over a search engine like Google and find a compatible website that gives them all the relevant information. A new weapon has thus emerged in the arsenal of a resourceful SEO- Powerful, relevant Content.

The not so Cute Creatures- Penguin and Panda!

Recently, Google released two major, far-reaching updates to its search algorithms. Deceptively named the Penguin and Panda updates, these updates when implemented would negate the good Google rankings enjoyed by websites that weren’t giving ‘real value’ to their visitors. On Google’s radar were websites with badly composed, unprofessionally optimized, irrelevant content that were designed to be so by ambitious SEOs with a sole intention to score good rankings over Google. These websites, including some from well known brands, were severely affected in terms of their rankings. Suddenly, the often repeated slogan, ‘Content is King’ started to make sense. The equation is simple- upload good, relevant content online and based on the number of people visiting your website, Google acknowledges its authority and provides your website a good ranking. Simple!!