Why Is SEO A Continuous Process?

As we all know, the internet is a very competitive place. On it are hundreds of millions of websites all vying for traffic. And given that traffic coming from search engines — also known as organic traffic — is free, most websites are doing their best to make search engines take notice and send visitors their way.

This is called search engine optimization (SEO). And for the best results, SEO should be a continuous process. First, your competitors are performing SEO for their websites, and second, search engines are also changing their indexing practices and ranking algorithms.

You Have Many Competitors

There are likely hundreds of thousands of websites that are similar to yours, each targeting the same audience and delivering similar content, services, or products. If you plan to compete with them, it is necessary to do something that makes your website stand out, both to visitors and search engines.

The way to do this requires you to (1) regularly adding new content, and (2) promote your site and seek inbound links from other quality websites.

⇒ For search engines, the methods above show that your website is not neglected and stagnant, and that it is also a site worthy of traffic.

⇒ For potential visitors, these methods instill confidence and give them a reason to visit the site, as well as revisit at a later date.

Of course, many of these other website are also being regularly optimized, so your optimization methods will have to be done continually, and may also need to be adapted from time to time.

Search Engines Change

If it wasn’t already hard enough to compete against the other websites and their SEO practices, you must always be ever conscious of search engines and how they evaluate your website.

While this isn’t done too often, search engines do change the way that they index websites and calculate the relative worth of a web page. Some notable changes that have occurred in the last seven years include:

• devaluing of the meta keywords tag in large search engines
• penalties for certain black hat seo practices
• use of inbound links to determine importance and content
• ability to index content from flash websites
• use of bounce rates to determine relevancy

Clearly, it is very important to keep up with search engine news and make any necessary changes to your website to keep it search-engine-friendly.

As stated, to be most effective SEO needs to be a continuous process. By building your website and optimizing it only once for its launch, you will risk losing out amongst competitors. Search engines will continually devalue your website and relegate it to the depths of its indexes, if in them at all. Instead, create an ongoing plan to regularly add new content and get inbound links.

In this article, we have just covered very basic, yet powerful, SEO tactics. A complete SEO plan also includes the optimization of source code, placement of content, and use of title tags and meta descriptions. See Free SEO: Ways To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking for more information.