On the one hand, there are those SEO methods that attempt to take advantage of loop holes in the search engine’s ranking systems, or to otherwise try and “trick” the search engines into thinking that a site is more popular and important than it really is. On the other hand, you have methods that tend to be more above-the-board and work with what the search engines intend. Both sets of methods are powerful and effective, but in the long you will probably do better in the latter camp- working with the search engines and not working against them.
Why You Should Work With the Search Engines and Not Against Them
There’s one really reason simple why it’s probably better to work with what the search engines intend- the search engines are going to just keep getting better and better at what they envision their services to be like, and as they do this they will tie off more and more of their loopholes and make many of those more opportunistic methods obsolete. This means that creating content and promoting your site with SEO that aligns with the search engine’s long term goals is going to produce far greater long term success for you than chasing the newest SEO trend or exploit.
If you are going to align yourself with the search engine’s long term goals, than you are going to need to know what these long term goals are. They are simple, really, and fall into a couple different core ideas.
- They want to make it as simple and easy as possible to find high quality, relevant content. They want surfers to be able to use their services easily and without any questions or concerns.
- They want to make sure that they rank the highest quality and most relevant websites and content first. They want this content to be based on informing, and not on selling.
- They want to display sites that are attractive and that work well with all currently popular browsers.
- They want to provide sites that provide direct and thorough answers to their user’s questions.
How the Automated Ranking Works
Now, the search engines obviously can’t hire enough people to manually and personally view each and every new website and new piece of content personally. And even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to ensure that these rankers did their job in a totally objective and scientific manner. So instead of relying on personal impressions of websites to evaluate content according to above criteria, they have to rely on automated systems to rank and evaluate the relevancy and quality of sites.
There are a few aspects of web popularity and quality that the search engines have created systems to measure. One of the biggest of these is the link structure of the web. This is just a fancy way of saying that the search engines derive a lot of their ranking material according to how many sites rank to your site, how high quality those sites are, and whether or not those sites are relevant to the search terms your site can rank for.
Link structure is just one way that the search engines evaluate your site, but it is probably the most powerful. Overall, every system they use is based on very specific metrics that can be recorded and evaluated by a computer, and these systems are always becoming more accurate in identifying the subjective qualities that the search engines are looking for.
SEO Fashions or Principles?
It’s these systems that more faddish SEO attempts to understand and exploit. While this can be effective in the moment, these systems are always being updated and improved, which means that yesterday’s methods may not help you much today. Furthermore, high rankings that are the result of loopholes can become low rankings over night when the technical algorithms change.
Overall, trying to game the search engines in a technical manner is going to be a constant battle to maintain your flash website's rankings . While there are a lot of people out there always looking for new ways to exploit the system, you can all but guarantee that there are more (better funded) people working for the search engines, looking for ways to tighten and improve the system.
You’ll find the solution to this problem in what search engines are ultimately looking for - high quality content that connects with people, content that provides so much value to people that they will spread it and share it on their own in a natural way. While there are plenty of great SEO tricks and tips out there, for now and for the future high quality content shared with like-minded others is the best SEO there is. It doesn’t matter whether you use a free website builder or if you hire an expensive freelancer. It doesn’t matter if you article market like crazy or don’t even bother. Nothing will succeed as well as valuable content.
