Co-relation vs Causation

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.