SEO and Link Building: The Only Way to Digital Marketing's Heart

Let’s talk about your website. How’s it doing? How’s the inflow of your site traffic, or its position within the rankings of a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo?

More specifically, what have you been doing to optimize your site via these search engines?

Not really sure what I’m talking about? Don’t worry—you’re not alone.

According to Smart Insights, a whopping 50% of businesses claimed to have no digital marketing strategy at all. But that’s why sites like Moz and other informational blog posts exist. With these resources, we can learn more about what Search Engine Optimization is, how specific tools like Link Building are helpful, and what some of the main current issues within the SEO world today are. Let’s dive into the basics of this topic together, piece by piece:

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?

Every time you as a user enters a search in some search engine--such as Google or Yahoo—you are instantly fed back thousands to millions of results. Usually, a user goes for one of the first results to appear, automatically assuming it will give them the most relevant answer to what they are asking.

Search Engine Optimization is the general idea of applying certain techniques to increase website traffic and visibility via search engines, both on and off a site. This means web marketers can use different tactics to place their site within these top-ranking results, automatically putting themselves where the user needs them.

Some key ideas and best practices to be aware of when practicing SEO:

               Search Engine Results Page (SERP): As this informational page from Search Engine Watch put it, a site’s SERP refers to “how high up your site appears for certain search terms in the ‘organic’ results”. A webmasters wants their site’s SERP to be really high up on the results page, so users will gravitate to their site first.

               Indexing: In order to decide if your site is valuable enough to place higher up on a results page or not, a search engine will start looking through your site for valuable information or content it can index (or store in some large database it constantly refers back to). This way, the search engine knows what the key ideas of your site are while deciding how high up to place your site.

               Site architecture:   Make sure your site is crawlable. This means that the information you place on your site should be easily and quickly accessible for the search engines to reach while indexing. A good site structure can also help increase UX, or the user experience design, which can help both users enjoy their time on your site, as well as help the site designers better understand the flow of each user’s experience and why it is that way. (Check out my previous blog for more information on UX/UI!)

               “Build for users, not for SE’s” (Moz, 2017):  Some of the main goals users have when visiting a search engine is a) how to do something, b) to know more about something, and c) to go to some sort of site. By focusing on meeting some or all of these goals of the users within your site, you are practicing good SEO. If your content is relative to a user’s search, a search engine will recognize this, and in turn, point the user towards you by placing you higher up on a results page.

               Remember how search engines see your site: While a site with a lot of buttons and intense visuals might look pretty, its SERP may suffer if the content itself isn’t as detailed. A search engine does not see the visuals, but rather the content, information, and links placed on a site. A site that has relevant content (and possibly great aesthetics as well) has a better change of being placed higher on a results page than one that relies on its visuals alone, simply because it is also speaking a search engine’s language.

Speaking of links, the idea of Link Building is something that every webmaster toying with SEO should be aware of.

WHAT IS LINK BUILDING?

Links Building is the way to connect other sites to your own. Moz’s Beginners Guide to Link Building describes it as the process that search engines use to crawl the web, both between individual pages on your site as well as between entirely different sites altogether.

According to Moz, search engines use links mainly for two reasons: to discover new web pages and to determine how well a page should rank in its results.

If a web page has gone unnoticed and is picked up on while a search engine is crawling through your site, this new web page can then be indexed by the search engine.

Similarly, a search engine can also use these links on your site to determine how accurate and of high quality they are, which in turn affects your site ranking. Many believe the higher quality links on your site, the better your SERP, but this is just one of the many factors search engines use to determine a site’s rank.

Link Building is crucial in the fact that it…

               …strengthens relationships between sites. If you use links to connect with other high quality resources, it improves the trustworthiness of your site because of the connection with another successful resource.

               ….gains referral traffic. If there is a link from one website to another, that latter website should automatically gain more traffic because it was a trusted reference of the site the user had initially chosen.

…builds your brand and expertise level. Constant connections between sites will absolutely help users see the relevance of your site to their goal, and they will be aware that they can come to you for more answers on this topic due to their view of your expertise level within the industry.

One thing to keep in mind is that no matter where the link lies, it should be between two valuable sources. Building a link to a site that seems lest trustworthy or full of incorrect information could damage a site’s ranking, simply because the search engines have recognized that this link is not of high quality.

CURRENT SEO ISSUES AND TRENDS

Lately it seems as though talk of SEO is everywhere. In this digital age, people are not only discussing the topic, but discovering a lot of controversial trends within it. Here are a couple major issues currently going on in the SEO world:

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs): Within the last year or so, Google came out with some basic structural guidelines for increasing the speed of web page delivery speed for mobile devices. Supposedly, using AMPs will make these pages load four times faster and use eight times less data in the process (Forbes, 2016). Many digital marketers have begun to use these guidelines and try out AMPS, but others are hesitant. There has been some speculation that Google’s search engine now favors AMPs over regular websites when it comes to determining a page’ rank on its results page. Many have questioned the fairness of this, since AMPs were the product of Google itself.

Cloaking: Cloaking is the action of a site posing as something else (within its own link) on a search engine results page in order to increase traffic flow and possible even have a higher placement on a results page. This idea has historically been a practice that digital marketers have believed a site should steer away from because it could potentially harm your ranking among search engine results. However, it has become increasingly more obvious that a lot of larger companies do not feel the same. In this article from Forbes, DeMers gives us a list of some major online resources that do in fact use “White Hat Cloaking” to their advantage. The main question here—and why this topic has become so controversial—is where do we draw the line between “exaggerating” your page’s link on a search results page and just plain taking advantage of and tricking a search engine?

I’d love to hear your opinions on Cloaking and AMPs, so feel free to comment away, as well as share any other info you’ve found of these subjects with me.

Cheers,

Aubrey McNeil