Effective Search Engine Optimization Today

More than a decade has passed since search engine optimization was first used as an online marketing tool, and it’s still as powerful as ever. Even in today’s rapidly evolving digital market, SEO can deliver exponential growth and a remarkable ROI for online businesses in any industry. But while the effectiveness of SEO remains the same, what makes it effective has changed.

Back when Yahoo! reigned king and Google was nobody, a site could rank well by stuffing its pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords, and using various black hat techniques. This led search engines to adjust their algorithms to deliver more accurate results to end-users. Effective search engine optimization soon became synonymous with white hat methods.

Websites atop the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) shared several common characteristics:

• Well-chosen and well-placed keywords relevant to the site’s content and industry.

• Oodles of relevant, high quality, keyword-optimized content.

• Links to and from related, authoritative (read: high PageRank) sites.

• Uniquely optimized meta data and HTML code for every page.

A quick check would reveal that top-ranked websites still have all of the above. But today? Having it all is not enough.

Search engines continually tweak their algorithms in a never-ending struggle to serve end-users, and as more businesses move online and ranking turns more competitive, it has become necessary for them to have more sophisticated criteria.

That’s why today, innovation is what separates page one sites from the rest. Effective search engine optimization can’t be achieved using an outdated, cookie-cutter approach. The only way for websites to rank consistently is to capitalize on pioneering optimization techniques, and customize each according to unique specifications. These techniques include:

• Thematic Optimization: This ensures that a central theme runs through the entire site, making it easy for search engines to identify parent and child directories, and reinforce the site’s relevance to the theme and its associated keywords. The method involves a meticulous selection of keywords based on content relevance and semantic viability, a careful distribution of those keywords to enforce the site’s central theme and sub-themes for individual pages, and the strategic optimization of the site’s content and source code.

• Information Architecture Optimization: This method leverages the website’s structure to get its existing pages completely and consistently indexed by search engines. The site’s pages are all organized in a clean, clearly defined hierarchy to aid search spiders and end-users in finding information from parent and child directories. Also, text links are optimized with targeted keywords and linked to pages within the site related to those terms, in order to increase relevance for high-priority keywords.

• Complex Event SEO Processing: This boon to search engine optimization involves the real-time analysis of search engine and social media event data, which allows for the generation of quick insight and immediate responses to changing conditions. By processing various semantic events and identifying those that can impact a site’s ranking for targeted keywords, it becomes possible to detect threads and trends in real-time, and respond accordingly to maintain site ranking and niche relevance.

These techniques, when used properly and in combination with other proven SEO methods, can catapult a site to the top of the SERPs. They redefine effective search engine optimization, and allow anyone to be competitive online – not just today, but tomorrow as well.