- Online advertising (buy advertising for traffic from other websites) is not SEO (it is site promotion, although the advertising links can help your search rankings).
- Public relations (press releases, media mentions, blogging coverage) is not SEO (although once again, it is site promotion, which may lead into your site getting links).
- Building a website that exploits a loophole in search engine algorithms to rank #1 for select keywords for a short period of time is not SEO (that’s search engine spamming, which we’re not going to discuss here).
- SEO is not a gimmick designed to drive X thousand visitors to your website in 24 hours.
- SEO is not always free traffic – several very effective SEO techniques will cost you money.
- Writing a book and giving it away for free to your site’s visitors is not SEO
The thing about most of these activities is that they CAN be part of your SEO strategy IF you chose to use
them that way. However, as SEO is usually part of an overall strategy designed to promote your site, separating other promotional activities from SEO work is important.
Understand How Search Engines Work
It goes without saying that if you want to rank #1 for your target keywords, you need to understand how Search engines work. This means that you must not only know what factors search engines use in ranking websites, but also how they ‘read’ web pages and ‘index’ them (This topic is discussed in detail in the next chapter).
Search engines have evolved considerably in the last few years, and continue to update their ranking algorithms periodically. So apart from learning how search engines work right now, it will also pay if you:
• Understand what each search engine is trying to achieve when ranking websites
• How you can track changes in search engine algorithms
• How you can keep a ‘pulse’ on the latest developments in the search engine world
We will discuss search engine behavior in more detail later – for now, just keep in mind that a key component of your SEO strategy will be to stay on top of developments in the SEO world, especially when it comes to how the search engines are evolving.
Until next time ! See you around :-) ...
