Why Content is the Key to Search Engine Traffic
The first step to understanding what it takes to attract search engine traffic is to forget that you have a website and look at search engines from the perspective you have when you are searching.
The Searcher's Perspective
When you are searching for something that is important you are very focused on your goal. You are not interested in random surfing. You want quality content that provides answers to your questions. But all too often what turns up in your search result is not only frustrating but even insulting.
How do you feel when you click on a page in your search engine results and find a page that looks like this? "If you are looking for [keyword term you used], the best source is always right here. Our [keyword term you used] is the best [keyword term you used] in the [keyword term you used] industry. So remember, for [keyword term you used], be sure to contact us."
When you are looking for real information you want to find something that represents a sincere effort on the writer's part to provide value. A website that contains keyword spam, or that only lists links to affiliate sites, or that contains nothing but a few shallow paragraphs on your subject just wastes your time.
When you are doing intensive research to find something important you want to be presented with abundant, high-quality information that is organized in such a way that everything is right at your fingertips.
The Search Engines Perspective
The second step to understanding what it takes to attract search engine traffic is to still forget that you have a website, and look at search engines from the perspective of the search engines.
Very simply, the search engines are trying to provide what you are looking for when you are searching for something that is important to you. That's what they exist to do, and if they don't succeed at it, they will lose your business.
The bottom line is that everyone who uses a search engine wants abundant, high-quality information that is organized in such a way that everything is right at their fingertips. But a search engine is not a human, so how can it tell the difference between that kind of website and one that has only a little bit of shallow information, or a lot of keyword spam, or nothing but affiliate links?
That's what its ranking algorithms are for.
Your Perspective
The third step to understanding what it takes to attract search engine traffic is to take a fresh look at your website and think about what it will take to make it provide what the search engines and the users of the search engines really want. And that is, of course, abundant, high-quality information that is organized in such a way that everything is right at their fingertips.
Search Engine Optimization
Back when the web was young and search engines were new it was easy to get a website to show up in the top ten by using tricks to fool the search engines into giving it a higher position than any human being would give it based on its actual merits. Therefore, that's pretty much what search engine optimization amounted to. Tricks.
Over time the landscape for SEO has evolved and changed radically. Even though there may be tricks that will work for a while, sooner or later the search engines figure out a way to detect the trick because they are single-mindedly determined to provide the high-quality results their users want.
So, if SEO isn't going to offer tricks to get your website better placement then what will it offer?
Nowadays truly effective search engine optimization is all in the architecture of a website. Why? Because search engines are not human, so they have to rely on algorithms to detect such subjective things as relevance and quality. Search engines now analyze not just the content on the page but also the position of that page in the context of the website, and even the position of that website in the context of the industry it is a member of.
Effective search engine optimization starts with a body of high-quality content and arranges that content in an architectural structure that "encodes" the website's relevance to important keywords in the ways search engine algorithms can understand. Effective SEO establishes a logical hierarchy of industry-specific, and product or service-specific keywords that clarifies the relationship of every page on the website to the key topics it covers.
Effective, modern search engine optimization takes a basic resource (high-quality content) and performs a kind of alchemical process on it that has the result of transforming the way it is perceived. If there is a trick here, it is much like spinning straw into gold. But what it really does is to simply provide the kind of organization that spells "relevance" and "quality" to a search engine spider.
ROI-SEO brings experience, skill and powerful proprietary technologies to this task so that we are able to provide results that are impressive, measureable, and affordable.
