In the days when Kings ruled the lands, they sought taxes from the landowners. Those owners of course tried to avoid paying them. It was the proverbial “cat and mouse” game. An example of such that was played out for many years involved taxes on real property transfers (sales, inheritances, etc.). Landowners used devices like trusts, subleases, “straw men” and “pepper corns” to avoid them. The King, and subsequently governments, accounted for such with new and more complicated laws.
So what does this have with Search Engine Optimization (”SEO”) you ask? Well, there’s been a similar back and forth between SEO professionals and Search Engines since the web became too vast of a sea for surfers to navigate without guides (i.e., Search Engine Results Pages). Over time, Google and its ilk formulated rules (i.e., algorithms) so as to produce quality search engine results. In turn, those in the SEO community developed strategies to have their websites rank high up in those results.
Where the cat and mouse game really came into play was with the segment of the SEO community that tried to “game” the system. It should be said that the majority of SEO professionals were only attempting to best serve their clients by understanding the algorithms so that their sites were properly ranked. But there also was an element in the SEO community engaging in schemes that sought high rankings regardless of the quality of the results. In the SEO community such became known as “Black Hat Tactics”.
On the mild side of trying to game the system were strategies such as “keyword stuffing” of a webpage. Literally stuffing a page full of keywords that the website sought to rank high for on a SERP. To rank high for “Los Angeles Singing Telegrams” a site would use the phrase in practically every sentence of text on the page. Inevitably search engines adjusted their algorithms to account for the percentage of times a keyword appears on the page in comparison to the total number of words on the page (i.e., “keyword density”).
More notorious and definitely Black Hat in nature were “Link Farms”. Early on search algorithms gave much weight to the links from other websites to your webpage. The thinking was that if others linked to it in relation to a keyword, then your site must have a level of authority on the subject. So “Black Hatters” set up websites that had the sole purpose of selling links to other sites to provide the appearance of such authority. And of course the search engines discovered that and in addition to tweaking their algorithms to account for such, Google penalized the linked to site by removing it from the SERP altogether (the dreaded “Google Penalty”).
In the realm of taxing real property transfers, eventually the rules left landowners without many methods for gaming the system. Something similar is occurring in the SEO world as well. As has been noted in our blog posts many times, the search engines are in the business of providing the best search results possible (its what drives their advertising revenues). Search algorithms have been tweaked and the system adjusted to the point that the quality of the content of a webpage is what drives search engine rankings for SEO purposes.
Now we aren’t saying that you can disregard the need for “White Hat” SEO practices when it comes to your website. That would be foolish of us since SEO is a part of the LAD Solutions business you know. But in all seriousness, in addition to quality content, technical SEO strategy is a baseline necessity. Proper Meta Description Tags for your webpages can mean the difference between somebody choosing your webpage from the search results as opposed to that of your competitor.
In conjunction with ensuring that your website is on a level playing field by covering all the bases of technical SEO, providing quality content is now critical. The content of each page must be relevant to the keywords you seek to have it rank high for in search results. And it must be “fresh” content as well. For example, your “About Us” page shouldn’t be the same text from when the site was launched 5 years ago or include extraneous content such as your favorite links to other pages.
Kings no longer rule the land in the majority of the modern world. But on the worldwide web content is fast becoming the king of search engine optimization.
LAD Solutions has a team of professionals that can assist you with technical SEO best practices as well as quality content creation for your small business website. To learn more about these services, please call (888) 523-2926 or submit your request and one of our representatives will be in touch with you shortly!
