SEO Strategy

The emphasis placed on links by Google over the last few years seems to have led many people to assume that you can “buy” ranking by acquiring inbound links without having properly focused content on the actual web pages being ranked.

Once you’ve done SEO for a while you realize how unrealistic it is to expect Google to give a high ranking to pages that don’t contain any useful information - links or no links - and especially when the keywords in question are fairly competitive.

I was reminded of this over the last week or so by two websites I was asked to evaluate. One was produced by a very credible business involved in relatively high end online activities. Their site was made completely in Flash and had virtually no identifying text, headlines, titles or other useful metadata. From the search engine point of view there was no way to tell what it was about. Consequently they did not even rank for their own domain name - which was also their primary keyword.

The other was similar, except in this case the site had no serious content, and much of it was “under construction.” A site like that is basically useless and doesn’t deserve to get ranking.

My advice in both cases: create some readable content, follow two or three of the most basic SEO rules and your problems will be solved. We’ll see if they take the advice.

Here’s another post by Loren Baker along the same lines: Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO.