Since the inception of the Google search engine in addition to the much publicized "do no evil", their principal objective has been to return applicable search results to the person who is trying to find information. It's very important to remember this as their objective isn't to help firms and associations promote their website (however good it could be)!
Old way to boost rankings
Due to this objective, many small business web site owners have looked for techniques to help their website improve in the search engine positions. Some have had success, others have not. A whole industry offering search engine optimization (S.E.O) has been made, again with a varying degree of success. S.E.O can be split into 2 distinct areas, on page (the structure and content that is on an internet site) and offpage (incoming links from other websites, directories, etc). It should additionally be added that social media (how many Facebook 'likes ', Google '+ 1's ', etc that your internet site is receiving).
Over recent years, Google gave a very high ranking to websites with several inwards bound links, especially where the anchor text of link was an exact match to a search phrase. Anchor text is just the text that appears in a link i.e. Click Right here. Many SEO firms focused on adding links with the anchor text matching the search phrase a domain wished to rank well in the search engines. So if you were running a building company in Colchester, the anchor text would typically be 'builders in Colchester ', 'Colchester builders ', etc.
Old way made the searchers sad
The Google algorithm used to equate many links with the same anchor text to mean that the internet site must be a good match for the search phrase. This resulted in websites who practiced this approach rising to the top of the Google rankings. Sadly, the final results that got to the top weren't always the end results that the person searching was hunting for. This means that the searchers were unhappy that in turn means that Google was sad for not meeting their objective.
Google comes to the rescue
In April 2012 Google addressed this my adjusting their search process to discount inbound links that seemed like they were synthetic and/or being employed to manipulate rankings. This change hit several web sites quite hard, sadly many innocent websites were caught in the crossfire. While there's still much debate on what's the best approach for S.E.O (just search for best SEO approach post penguin), one thing is sure, building links employing the same anchor text is now not as useful. In fact it can hurt your rankings.
Critical lesson
Like in business, you should never depend on one buyer for all of your business. What occurs if they go 'bust '? The same is true for search site traffic. Google regularly makes changes to their search engine algorithm. If you're unfortunate, you could lose all of your traffic overnight. Therefore , it is smart to look to other channels as well for search traffic. For example, Facebook is the 2nd most visited website every month with many folks using it to seek buying advice. Each business should set up their own business page on Facebook. It provides another source for visitors, and lessens the risk of single point of failure with Google.
About the Author:
Simon Wilkinson is the founder of Digital, Ark providing professional website design and complete online solutions for small company.
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