Setting Realistic SEO Expectations
Those who’ve been in the SEO business for a number of years know how much more competitive it is these days compared to a few years ago. The number of web pages indexed by search engines has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in past years. On top of that, a good portion of website owners and webmasters know just enough SEO to be dangerous. In the golden age of Search engine optimization (SEO), the vast majority of websites hadn’t given a thought to the search engines, and when they did, it was only to place some keywords in their Meta tags. (Which, incidentally, didn’t help then either?) Those were the days when anyone who knew even the slightest bit about SEO could easily rank highly in all the major search engines, with very little effort. Even competitive areas were doable with just a little more work than their non-competitive counterparts.
The Competition Is Fierce
These days, it’s almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for can sometimes be hard to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you’re doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day and gone the next. The problem is puffed up for new businesses and new websites. If your website isn’t at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.
It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings
As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to move their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. Unfortunately, a large portion of those looking into SEO services are still seeing the small picture. For instance, on the contact form on our High Rankings site, I ask people to tell me a little bit about their “business goals.” A good number who fill it out want something like “top-5 rankings in Google and Yahoo for this keyword.” Huh? That’s not a business goal! A business goal is more like “Bring more people to my website who are searching online for the types of products we sell”
Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.
Does this mean that SEO is dead?
Absolutely not! But SEO that focuses on rankings for the most highly sought-after keywords in any given space is most surely dying. This doesn’t mean that you have to reconcile for keywords that receive few searches. It just means that you have to broaden your horizons and see the big picture.
To read more please visit: http://www.creativewebpromotion.com
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