How to Conquer Your SEO Fears
It’s not SEO that’s ruining the Web. It’s the things people do to their own sites to try to game the system.
The best way to conquer your fears about SEO is to stop thinking about it as an enemy of quality. Instead, think of it as a tool for building trust. If you do things right, SEO consultant Northern Beaches can help you be found more often by people who are looking for you, which means they are more likely to think you are who you say you are and that what you have to say is worth reading.
I’m going tell you how, but first I’m going to try to convince you that this is not a crazy idea.
If you have a website or a blog, you should know a little about SEO. Search engine optimization. It’s a way of trying to get other websites to link to yours.
By going through this article, you will learn one basic principle of SEO. That principle is: if you have something good, other people will link to it without your having to ask.
If you understand the principle, and if you stick with it, you won’t need any other knowledge to get traffic from search engines. You’ll get plenty of links, and the number of links will be an accurate measure of how good your stuff is.
But that means getting over your fears: the fear that what you write won’t be good enough, and the fear that you won’t be able to tell whether it’s good enough until too late.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art of getting your site to appear at or near the top of a Google search for a given keyword. There are entire companies devoted to doing this for clients. If you are in the business of selling something to people who will buy it online, SEO is mandatory, because otherwise no one will ever find you.
Nonetheless, there are many people in every industry who are afraid of SEO. They believe that if they take any action that might be interpreted as optimizing their site’s search results, Google will find out and ban them forever.
But almost everything someone would do to optimize their site’s rank involves things that have nothing to do with Google! These include things like buying ads on Google, building links to your site from other sites, and so on. And yet no one would claim that these activities are against Google’s terms of service. The reason is that no one does anything in the hope of getting caught; everyone wants their site to show up high in search results – it’s just common sense to try to get noticed by customers! And yet it is only SEO, the very thing people are supposedly most afraid of doing, that actually incurs any penalty.
SEO is a fearsome thing. It seems to be a magic bullet that works sometimes and not others, and no one knows why. It’s tempting to believe that if you can understand SEO, you’ll be able to explain it. Then maybe you could explain why some sites rise in the rankings and others don’t.
To explain SEO, you have to explain something else first: how the web works. The web consists of many different elements, from search engines on down. And each element has its own rules about what is important and what isn’t.
This is true of most systems: they consist of multiple interacting parts, and the behavior of any one part depends on the behavior of the other parts. But we usually don’t think about this when we think about the web, because we know how everything fits together: we know how browsers display pages to users, and we know how users interact with those pages, and we know how search engines index those pages; and then we know how advertisers use those indexed pages as places to put ads; and then we know how people follow those ads to get to the advertisers’ sites; and then we know how people who run those sites make money from users. Learn more about how to turn fears into a positive way.