Appearing Natural in the Eyes of the Search Engines

posted by Ted on August 13, 2011

The search engine optimization game is constantly evolving, and to keep on top of it you need to maintain consistent link building efforts while also keeping an eye on the developments and buzz around the online community. Some of the most valuable information available comes from blogs and industry publications, and keeping up to date with it is essential to being able to effectively optimize your website.

As almost any source of SEO information will tell you, there is a real emphasis on appearing ‘natural’. What is meant by ‘natural’ is to structure your link building in such as way as to make it appear completely unforced – to make it look to search engines like your site has merited links from a diverse range of sources, using diverse anchor text and linking to a range of internal pages. This is harder than it seems, and the sophistication of Google in particular makes it even harder to pull off. So what info do you need to optimize your site in a way that won’t quickly flag the attention of the search engine algorithms?

In a perfect world, websites would link only to those sites with interesting or useful content. The way in which these links would be formed would vary from site to site, but a simply tally of number of links (multiplied by the relevant weight of each link) would produce a nice, straightforward ranking system. Delivered objectively, the most useful content would show up under a given keyword term. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, but trying to recreate the conditions of natural link building as far as possible will see you on the right track to better rankings.

Appearing natural also means avoiding spammy-type links, in any shape or form. Links that anyone can get are likely to be of little value because they are more open to manipulation, whereas links that are harder to come by (e.g. those that come from more trusted sites) are likely to be more valuable. Similarly, links that all have the same anchor text and all point to the same page don’t look like they would have arisen naturally as a result of the quality of your content.

Appearing natural also means addressing the content and coding on your website itself. Any stuffed keywords or over-optimization will seriously harm your rankings. Any good source of SEO info will tell you that being natural means almost forgetting about search optimization, and treating the quality of content and the diversity and trust of your links as the most important factors for modern SEO.  Instead of only worrying about how to list a site on the Google search engine or how to check Google page ranking, it’s better to focus on providing each visitor with the information they’re looking for.  If this is done right, the listing and the ranking will likely take care of itself.

Creativity is key when it comes to natural SEO. Remember – the overall goal should be to figure out exactly how to get website on google search and then do what it takes to improve it’s ranking.  This means you should be creative in your placement of keywords and focus on the quality of your content – anything that reads like it’s written for a search engine spider will likely get the boot from Google. Focus on the user-friendliness of your website, and think of creative ideas to garner natural links from other sources, rather than investing time in the spammy, easy link-building techniques that have been around for years. If you focus your energies on doing a more high-level SEO effort than your competitors, it should be reflected in the results, and should leave your site with a better ranking for the long term under your key search phrases.

Related Post:  Using Effective Anchor Text

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