Posted by This fundamental aspect of SEO may be one that may confuse us more, there are lots of articles and videos about it, most of them are valuable information but you must take into consideration that those resources worked out for very specific business models and their creators invested a considerable amount of time and money in their effort to get the visibility they wanted.
These days organic results may take a lot more effort to get than 10 years ago, there are a lot of reasons for Google’s algorithm constant aspects that do deep filtering of the information contained in websites, Google’s SEM looks to be their priority but SEO still play an important role and there are some resources we can still use as leverage.
Content Strategy
There is no magic formula or shortcut, there is no secret that quality content makes a difference, the closest example I can think of is e-Commerce, in the early 2000’s the marked was ruled by the company that innovated their product catalogue, the company with the latest products in their niche market could almost dominate and had the luxury to sell expensive products. As time changed, competitors learned to play that game and eventually product manufacturers sold to anyone since freedom of business would make them more money than being faithful to single company, that led to the era of aggregated values to get after sell business.
e-Commerce
How does content strategy can boost or kill an e-Commerce website?
e-Commerce websites that focus on bulking up their catalogue without thinking about aggregated values is most likely to lose business to the competitor that besides refreshing their product lines constantly, create the type content that would create a sense of trust by getting for example an extended guaranty for on laptop computer just for buying with them, even if other companies offer the same exact laptop computer ad the same or even cheaper price, welcome to the era of services and experiences.
This looks like On Page Optimization? It is but one of the reasons to create quality content around products is to get noticed and make other website link to our website, now we understand that good content leads to link building, free, white hat, takes a lot of work but id definitely pays off at the end, and it just does not end, once up there, we must strive to stay visible.
The don’ts of SEO off site optimization
With the need of back links we must be very careful, there are companies that offer link building services for a price. Do they work? to be honest, they work and don’t work, what do I mean, we must very careful because this can be classified as gray or black hat, we may eventually get results but we will get notorious. Now I will explain how.
There are even high ranked companies in Google SERP that offer link building services and still sell black/gray hat based services to the open public. How is that so? Once working as IT team leader, company headquarter decided to hire a well reputed SEO agency, I did not rejected the idea because back then I was focused on programming controllers, models and some other cool for a PHP Code Igniter based e-commerce website, the rest of the team was doing some big re-make to move to newer technologies. The company failed badly to let the creative team do its job so they decided to source this need outside, I did not find out until I noticed on Google Search Console, and Analytics some rare behaviors, the site was getting unusual traffic from countries that had no service coverage by the company, I did not want to make much of a deal because I first thought the site was getting DOS attack from, India, Pakistan, and Indochina. My natural next procedure was to block incoming traffic from specific countries and their respective IP ranges. The following week I was ordered to participate in a meeting with management and the SEO company, management noticed traffic dropped drastically and asked the SEO company about sudden decline of traffic graphics, the SEO company blamed first that a Google Algorithm update affected our numbers and their mistake was to also blame a server configuration (of course, my IP blocks in the .htaccess file) and that is how their entire scam came to light. Long story short what this company did was to hire or probably owned a SEO farm India that was capable of generate and re-route traffic between India, Pakistan and Vietnam, the company I was working for spend/lost $3000 in three months, and Google’s retaliation came a few months later, so you can imagine me fixing all that mess.
