MMO SEO

Search engine optimisation is constantly moving at an astounding rate. All of the search engines are always updating their algorithm to try to give their users the best possible results.

There are two basic views that people share on the way search engine optimizers are adjusting their web sites to get in the way of qualified traffic, and they are that it is a fair way of manipulating search results, and second is simply that it is an unfair way of manipulating results.

In truth, if SEO didn’t exist to adjust websites so that they’re readable by the search engines, then the search engine results you would get a lot less organised and all over the place really. Search engine optimizers are necessary to ensure that the most qualified websites rise to the top. 9 out of 10 web designers don’t know how to make a website rank well in search engine results. They tend to miss all the key on-page criteria that SEs look for and so a well built, all-singing all-dancing expensive website will most of the time be doomed to float around among the masses of other websites that will never be found, or to sit in a pay-per-click listing for the rest of its life.

I see so many clients who are sold expensive websites as the answer to their dreams, when it truth they are nothing of the kind. I see so many clients who wish they had spent thousands less on the design so that they could spend it on SEO instead.

Common sense will tell you that there’s no point in having a website that no one can find. Even in these harsh economic times as turnover is dwindling and profits are all but gone, the forward thinking website owners will look to increase their market share by either starting an SEO campaign or adding new keywords to their current campaign. There are still buyers out there to be had, but they are simply shopping more cautiously and in fewer numbers, but what you as a site owner, you need to ask yourself is, are you going to be proactive and move forward to take your share of the market, or will you hang back and end up as another failure statistic?

As more traditional forms of trade begin to suffer, online sales increased during the Christmas 2008 period by over 25% on 2007. Some companies are making money by embracing new technologies and moving with the times, others are going to fail if they don’t evolve successfully to meet the needs of the 21st century consumer.

I think it is unfortunate, but the Internet will kill the British high street, and in the fullness of time, the retail park too. More and more, bricks and clicks retailers are seeing theirs shops used as fitting rooms for an online purchase at a later date. To a certain extent, we as people are shooting ourselves in the foot somewhat as once the shops are gone we will have to manage with just the virtual world to shop in…….. which isn’t the same experience at all.

SEO will be brought into common light by retailers having to save money while increase turnover at the same time. This year is going to be interesting as I think we are bound to see more big names bite the dust along with MFI and Woolworths. The question is though, what will you do ensure you keep your market share in 2009 and will it be enough?

t is no secret in the online world that in order to get a high profile for your site and for lots of new people to see it, it has to have lots of links pointing at it from other sites that are seen as valuable by search engines.

Links can be gathered using many different methods and some are worth more than others. One of the least effective ways of building links is reciprocal linking which is where two sites simply exchange links with one another. This method was effective once upon a time but its day has been and gone now.

The reason that these links aren’t worth a great deal anymore is because what search engines like Google like to see is links building naturally as more and more people find your site, but if sites are both linking to each other, then the search engine can see that an arrangement has taken place to try to gain links faster, and therefore the links aren’t natural.

These links are not completely worthless though. They still have some value because sometimes it would be natural for two sites to links to each other, like a shop and their supplier. This would probably however be worth more than any old reciprocal link because the websites would most likely have similar themes; therefore the links would be valued higher than two relatively random sites linking to each other.

One way links are therefore the links that are preferred method, but you will still have to give people something in return for them to give you a link without you linking back. And so 3 way links were born, but in order to make 3 way links work, either you, or the person you’re linking with has to have two sites.

The 3 way link model is essentially this: site a places a link to site b, site b then places a link to site c, and if you want to, site c can then link back to site a. This method creates unprompted one way links in the eyes of the search engines that appear completely natural, and therefore will be more valuable.

For example, say you owned site A and site C and you wanted to get a link for site C, you would simply use site A as somewhere to offer a link from and in exchange, the other person would link to site C, meaning that their site becomes site B in the model. This strategy will do you far more favours than reciprocal linking, but when used alone you will probably make fairly slow progress, however when you use it alongside some other methods (which I will go into in my next article) it is highly effective.