Worth The Wait: Sustainable SEO Methods For Long-Term Success

Sustainable SEO Methods For Long-Term Success

Sustainable SEO

As with most business and online strategies, seeing results from your search engine optimization (Sustainable SEO) efforts may take time. While your efforts may not produce drastic improvements in your website’s search results ranking overnight, every little bit helps. When executed properly, your company’s SEO strategy can produce sustainable, short and long-term results that can drive online success.

Sustainable SEO

Until your site is indexed by search engines, it will not appear on search results pages; this can take months or even years. Instead of waiting for that day, take a proactive approach by registering the homepage of your website with the most popular search engines: Google, Bing, and Ask. This speeds up the process considerably, and many websites and online applications will register your site for little or no cost.

Sustainable SEO

If you’ve ever performed an online search, you’ve probably experienced frustration as a result of a run-in with black hat SEO. Doorway pages, hidden text and keyword-stuffing are all unscrupulous methods of boosting site ranking. Have you ever searched for information and generated search results that had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand? Clicking on these links leads you into a labyrinth of misinformation and may even expose your computer to unwanted intrusion. Irritating, isn’t it? Yes, the site may have made it to the first page of search results, but does it meet your needs? Absolutely not! These methods waste your time and that of your would-be site visitors.

Sustainable SEO

Regardless of your industry or target market, keywords play a vital role in the optimization process. Your website should include keyword-rich content in both body text and image tags. Like most things, however, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. You needn’t include the same keywords over and over again within a single sentence or even in every sentence; this adversely impacts readability and makes your site appear unprofessional in the eyes of site visitors.

Sustainable SEO

If your online presence has not yet been established, you may wish to consider whether or not your domain name is working for you. A website’s domain name plays a large role in its visibility on search results pages. Ideally, your domain name should be a single, highly relevant keyword. If the only available domain name contains two words, consider adding a hyphen between them. Otherwise, many search engines (including Google) cannot distinguish both words; consequently, non-hyphenated domain names carry no advantage in establishing search rankings. Again, this is a drastic move and should be used only as a last resort and in the absence of a strong online presence.

Sustainable SEO

While it is unreasonable to demand overnight results from your search engine optimization efforts, it is natural for you to experience anxiety as you monitor your site for increases in site traffic and search results ranking. Fortunately, these guidelines have consistently proven effective at producing sustainable, long-term improvements. Until you see the desired results, continue to learn as much as possible about SEO and how it can help your business or blog. New techniques are constantly under development, and any single one could be the driving factor in your website’s success.

Over-Optimization vs Optimization

by Joost de Valk on 19 March, 2012 at 16:10

So Matt said something at SXSW last week about Google introducing a filter / penalty / change. As my inbox is already overflowing with emails from people asking whether they should stop optimizing their site and/or using my plugin, I thought I’d do a quick post. What Matt said was vague at best but he said one thing that leaves little room for speculation:

All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.

So, Google wants to do something about over-optimization. That’s not saying they want to do something about SEO. As Matt said on that same panel one more time, they have nothing against SEO, they have something against spamming.

So, if you write texts with a keyword density of 25%, you maybe should be worried. If you install an SEO plugin that helps you write more search engine friendly content (and even warns you when it thinks the keyword density is too high) and optimizes most of the technicalities for you, there’s nothing to worry about. Several Googlers use my plugin, do you really think they’d do that if they considered it over-optimization?

Now, stop over-analyzing everything Matt says and get back to work, building good websites for users.

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Sustainable SEO