Search Engine Optimization Philosophy

Today there is a common misperception that natural search engine optimization is inexpensive and easy. There is a persistent myth that SEO consists of cheap tricks that can give any website a high Page Rank in just a few weeks, and that anyone with a five-page website can have top-ten rankings for their favorite keywords if they just pay some SEO company $100.

If you were under that impression, here's the bad news. All keywords are not created equal, and neither are websites. The most popular keywords have a lot of competition. If you wanted your website to rank high for something like "life insurance" or "debt consolidation," for example, you would need hundreds of pages and possibly thousands of incoming links.

Fortunately there's good news too. If your website has the most relevant content for a user's search, the search engines do want the user to find you.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all other search engines want to provide the same thing: a prioritized list of links that point to most relevant web sites for the user's search criteria. And the search engine that does the best job of delivering the largest quantity of the most relevant results will attract the most users. That's why they constantly tune their algorithms to weed out the "spam" (less relevant websites with artificially elevated ranking).

Very simply, the best way to do search engine optimization is to "partner" with the search engines by adopting the same priorities they have. Provide the high-quality, relevant content the search engines want to present to their users. Focus your budget and attention on creating more and better content. Optimize that content to clearly demonstrate its relevance to the keywords your prospects are searching for. That is the essence of Architectural SEO™.