SEO Blog

The work of an SEO is never over. Not only does a site require continual development in order to stay competitive, but the techniques and best practices update with equally frequent regularity.

It isn’t something that you need to be nervous of, but awareness is certainly a benefit. Search engine optimisation isn’t a linear story. Whilst there is a beginning, the middle and end are elusive. This is why it is so important to keep your SEO fresh.

By fresh, I mean you can’t get stuck in a groove. Yes, you might have been doing some great SEO work that has always gotten you results in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have the same good fortune going forwards.

Search engines and their algorithms are changing, which in turn influences how we optimise them. Most adjustments are only very slight and won’t make a jot of difference to how you perform SEO. However occasionally these small alterations build up and create something more substantial. This is where keeping an eye on industry commentary can be a real benefit.
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If you’ve been reading an old SEO manual, it’s probably best to discard much of what you’ve read. This is an evolutionary industry. It is also very much in its infancy. Therefore what worked a decade ago, might well be surplus to requirements today.

Fundamentals like a strong linking structure and good quality keyword optimised content will always endure. They are the foundations on which almost everything else is built. But the algorithms don’t stand still. What was once accepted is now frowned upon.
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With the revelation that Google is likely to adopt page load time as a ranking factor, it begs the question: what else are they measuring on your site? Search engine algorithms are a closely guarded secret and very few are privy to the most intimate of details, especially not the ranking factors, of which there are reputed to be hundreds.

For anybody looking to optimise a website, a basic understanding of ranking factors is essential. What is known of these algorithmic determiners has been discovered through various messages from the search engines or decoded through extensive research and shared amongst the SEO community. So what do we know?
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Results in search engine optimisation are rarely immediate. If you want instant results, you should probably consider Pay per Click (PPC) advertising instead. However, despite this lack of immediacy, SEO is still very much the forerunner when it comes to Internet marketing.

If you are just setting out on your voyage of SEO discovery, then you have to be prepared for the trials and tribulations that lie ahead. There will be times where nothing seems to be working, but you have to learn to ride these out. SEO, despite what you may hear elsewhere, isn’t an exact science. It is made up of a series of educated guesses based on the successes and failures of the wider community’s efforts over the years.
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Perhaps your rankings have plunged or maybe your site isn’t attracting the same amount of traffic as it did in previous months; what can you do? Well, as always, it’s best not to do anything too rash.

Even if you have an SEO consultant working on optimising it, negative results aren’t always indicative of poor workmanship. That may sound a little farfetched, but the Internet is a very different marketplace to the real world; anomalies to occur, natural dips can be unavoidable and people may just not want what you offer – at least not at the moment.
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The simple answer to this is that a website’s ranking is determined by the search engine’s individual algorithm. Unfortunately that probably doesn’t quite do it the full justice.

The search engine algorithm is an extraordinarily technical piece of mathematics. It is fundamentally based around ranking sites through their many strands of links and keywords. The search engine algorithm will assign a weighting, in the case of Google this is often conveyed as PageRank, which will determine how high you feature in general.

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