Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

Do you remember the time when the only thing that mattered in SEO was that you got your Web site submitted to hundreds of engines and directories? SEO was heavily reliant on Meta tags and on page factors. Now don’t get me wrong on-page factors still matter as the bases of good SEO but it takes more these days to be successful on the Internet. 

The search engines became polluted with the on-page spam and they needed to start to look at your trust from other sites so link building was a requirement. Now days those links that you get easy have disappeared from the Web, through no follow tags. More important Goggle has recently removed the recommendations to submit to directory submissions and link building from their guidelines.

These are the two guidelines that have been removed from their guidelines:

1.  Have other relevant sites link to yours

2.  Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as other industry-specific expert sites.

That was the old face of Search Engine Optimization …the new face looks like this.

Every new link you create to your site and each additional page published makes Google smarter.  The Web is becoming a big social network and the search engines are starting to follow people.  Once you start thinking of the Web as being a big social society then you will have an advantage over your competitors who are still building one link at a time.  

So what does this all mean?

It means that the search engines especially Google wants your site to be well connected throughout the social society. 

The new face of SEO now looks like this: 

·     search engine submission

·     on page optimization

·     link building

·     and a big one on ….advertising, viral marketing, public relations & social interaction 

So to recap …on-page optimization is still very important as well as targeting the correct keywords with your keyword research and the structure of your site.  But as you continue to build your sites visibility on the Web you need to keep in mind the social interaction such as blogs, bookmarking, PPC advertising and belonging to on-line communities

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!