About 12 years ago Google launched their search engine which would change the world of search radically. The basic principle was simple – instead of just relying on the data contained within a given web page, a formula called PageRank was used to determine how important the page was according to other websites. Although the actual algorithm has evolved a great deal since this time, the basic principle of incorporating other data from the web to assess the relative importance of a web page has only, if anything, increased.

Despite this, there are still many who will treat or describe SEO as a purely on-page technical exercise. Essentially they’re saying that high amounts of traffic can be recieved simply by tweaking various tags and attributes and strategically using keywords on one’s website. Whilst this can certainly help, and, in the case of some very niche keywords, raise rankings, this is sort of activity will not enable a website to compete on phrases where large amounts of traffic are available.

This situation partly explains why it’s possibly to get 10 radically different solutions for an SEO strategy with equally radical price differentials – many of the very cheap solutions are only optimising the on-page technical factors, which, according to industry experts are only around 15% of the algoirthm.

The explanation for this is very simple – there’s simply too much competition on the web. To demonstrate my point I’ll show you exactly how much competition there is for a big phrase. Here is a search on Google for the phrase “Car Insurance” :

Yes, that’s right – 35 million web pages seemingly competing on that result . Ok, so you’re probably thinking that most of those pages aren’t relevant at all, and this is where the clever SEO comes in. Not so.

If we use Google commands to search for the same phrase with that phrase in both the title and page URL (a very strong indicator that the web page is actively optimising for that phrase) we see that there are still a staggering 439,000 web pages in Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how advanced your software is, or how technically adept somebody may be, there’s simply no way you can do anything on-page that puts you head and shoulders over half a million results, because there isn’t a logical way for Google to determine which is the most relevant.

It would be rather like trying to pick 10 people to hire from 439,000 applicants based purely on the contents of their CV – they can *say* whatever they want on their CV – but it ain’t necessarily so – you’d definitely want to meet them, collect references and so on before hiring, right?

There is the also argument that on-page is fine if you’re not targeting super competitive phrases, but even for some less competitive terms you’ll need to do a lot more than tweak a few elements on-page.

There are many people who prop up the ‘tweak it and they’ll come’ theory – these include designers of wordpress plugins; £199 website optimisation ‘tools’;  lazy SEOs and those who simply don’t know any better. The sad thing is that it not only does it not work, but it could cost the business owner thousands of pounds of lost sales.

So, if you’re in the market for some SEO consultancy make sure you take a long hard look at those proposals. Ideally the activity proposed should comprise of:

1. Technical & on-page
2. Content creation (NB you may be able to save yourself some pennies if you’re willing (and able) to create the content yourself)
3. Link building

Oh, and bear in mind that great old adage – “pay peanuts… get monkeys”.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 3:43 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.