Internet business models are nothing new and have not really changed in the past decade or so, but the techniques used to sell products and services have changed. If you’re just starting a new business then you may be wondering how to get yourself established online and how to ensure you get a nice steady flow (or even flood!) of potential customers.
Business owners are constantly searching for the Holy Grail of marketing, that winning formula that is going to make them rich. The fact is that if you’re trading online, you have one thing standing in your way of world domination – the search engines. Their proprietary algorithms dictate how your website is ranked and in effect how many people get to find your website.
Play the Algorithms and Hit the Marketing Jackpot
The key to beating your competition and exposing your brand is to leverage the way these algorithms operate so that your business benefits. By optimising your website content, using the right keywords and observing search engine optimisation trends, you can start to attract the interest of the search engines and therefore ranking higher in search engine results.
A lot has been written about SEO trends and SEO in general over the years and many SEO experts will tell you that optimising the right way is an art form in itself. SEO is constantly evolving in order to stay one step ahead of websites with poor content and to improve the user experience as a whole. The reason why search engines are so secretive about the way their algorithms work is because there is big money at stake and where there is money there are always those looking to abuse the system and the rules that the search engines put in place.
How to Keep Up With Big SEO Reshuffles
In order to stay ahead of the scammers and tricksters, big name search engines such as Google and Bing are constantly reviewing their search engine functionality and this means regular changes are made to their systems – those familiar with Penguin and Panda will know the implications of these changes.
So, what are the current trends if SEO is constantly evolving? Well for one, keywords are and will no doubt always be essential. However, the spiders that crawl your content are getting better at evaluating the keywords that are used in your content. Use too many of the same keyword and you could find your ranking slipping – this looks ‘spammy’ and suggests poor quality copy. And no longer can you simply copy and paste high ranking keywords at the bottom of your page. The search engines are getting savvier to these kinds of tactics and will penalise you with lower rankings.
What you do need to pay attention to is content and the quality of comments and posts on your website. These are seen as good quality copy when worded in the right way and can go a long way to raising your ranking with the search engines. Other popular SEO trends include the use of social media, Pay Per Click marketing, fresh blog posts and the implementation of quality link building to expose your brand.
The formatting of your pages also need special mention. Many webmasters still tend to display bold and prominent ads at the top of each page. These ad banners used to be highly popular, but are now being replaced with pages that hold more content in prominent positions on the page so that the search engine spiders can crawl the content and meta data easily.
Need Help with SEO? It’s What We Do Best
If you are in the throes of starting a new business, we’d be delighted to tell you more about the most efficient and successful SEO trends and how to implement them for your business. Why not drop us a line and find out more about the work we do and how we have helped many start-ups to get their brand noticed quickly and without huge outlay.
