Is SEO the Dark Arts?

 There are some out there who would have you believe that SEO is a magical, mythical creature that is full of dark, black magic using tricks and sorcery to get you to their website. If someone is telling you that, it’s probably because they don’t understand it or can’t do it.

In years gone by, some dubious web businesses were definitely using unethical tricks – such as hidden text stuffed full of keywords, or having thousands of URLs – to gain higher rankings that were not necessarily relevant to your search. However several Google algorithm changes later and a general clean-up of those who were using such black hat techniques have seen SEO become and effective and indeed necessary marketing tool.

The goal for search engines is to mimic human behaviour. As such, to be highly visible in search engines, your website needs to be user-friendly which, in turn, will make it accessible to search engines. Effective SEO programs work on making websites as user-friendly as possible, ensuring the right content can be found from people’s search queries.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) have changed over time and focusing solely on where you rank for a, b or c keyword is no longer viable. SEO concerns itself with not only the state of your website and it’s accessibility for users and crawlers, but also external factors such as social media, business listings, business profiles – anything external that’s online that may affect your business’ visibility on the web.

SEO is a solid business tool that can indeed drive visitors and customers to your website.

Search Engine Optimisation is most effective when partnered with content marketing programs that feed fresh and relevant information to Google frequently. This ensures that your site is constantly being crawled, indexed and ranked by Google and of course other search engines.

When you create solid content focused around topics and areas of interest, you almost always receive far more (and oftentimes better) traffic from this content than keyword stuffed articles which often have a high bounce rate as they are nonsense.

The above image shows a client website when SEO and content marketing we’re set up and managed effectively by the Icon Digital Marketing team.

Icon Visual Marketing can deliver these same types of results for your web traffic with a combined SEO and content marketing program. Contact the Icon’s Digital Marketing team today to discuss increasing your website’s presence on the web.