Introduction:
SEO is the heart and soul of online
marketing. It would be practically impossible to do online marketing without
effective use of SEO techniques. SEO is a science as well as an art. It is
science because it works on a particular logic. At the same time, it is an art
because there is a need for effectively maintaining the rankings with some
smart homework.
Reasons for success:
You should analyze the top ranking
sites on the search engine and try to find out the reasons for their success.
You may find a relationship between their success and social media. These are
usually the common features of the top ranking sites. You may find a high
amount of Face Book shares. You may also find an extensive catalogue of inbound
backlinks. However, you should not conclude that this is the reason for their
success. You should try to understand the relationship between co-relation and
causation.
Co-relation vs
Causation:
There may be hundreds of reasons for
the success of any website. The most prominent among those include a good
collection of backlinks, engaging content, optimized title tags, and ethical
marketing techniques. Hence, it would be difficult to conclude which of the
above factors carry the highest impact.
Thus, the distinction between
co-relation and causation gains importance.
It is natural for you to assume that
your efforts to improve SEO are paying dividends when you see an upward surge
in your rankings. At the same time, you start to blame the penalties levied by
the search engines when your ranking starts to plummet downwards.
You should understand that there are
various other factors affecting website rankings, some of which may be out of
our control. Search engines subject their processes to continuous reviews and
changes. They formulate new ways of evaluating websites by introducing new
standards frequently. This entails that what worked for you the previous year
might not produce the same results this time around.
The search engines constantly update
the status of the back links. They may devalue some of the links especially if
they qualify as spam links. This can make your ranking come down. Competitor
activity also has a bearing on how your pages rank on the website. In case your
rival websites employ black-hat techniques, the search engines can penalize
them thereby indirectly improving your ranking.
Thus, you can see that the SEO
rankings consider the correlation factor as more relevant. It would be
impossible for anyone to predict the reasons for success or failure of any SEO
tactic. It depends upon the circumstances.
However, you can take the following
remedial measures to ensure that your ranking does not go down because of
social media factors.
Build up a social
reputation:
By now, you know that search engines
do not give the same importance to all the back links in a similar fashion. At
the same time, they do not view all social accounts in the same manner. Anyone
can open a social media account and start posting malicious back links to bring
down your SEO ranking. This makes it imperative for you to build up a social
reputation. You should participate on relevant social platforms in a real
manner.
Build up your social
shares:
Similarly, participating on social
sharing sites is also essential. In case you do not have Twitter account or a
Face Book fan page, you should go ahead and create one. You can share valuable
content through these channels. This can help you to build up your network and
spread your content. You can get some quality social shares thus paving the way
for an improvement in the SEO rankings.
Conclusion:
You should take adequate steps to
improve your ranking. At the same time, you should not confuse correlation with
causation and start generalizing the issue. You should analyze your performance
and formulate your own strategy to succeed.