No matter what business are you in, if you exist online, You need to adopt a good SEO strategy. In this article i will discuss 4 Basic Rules of SEO to make sure you start off on the right foot. Whether, you are a digital marketer or just a tech savvy business owner, these rules will help you in your SEO journey.
- Patience
- Flexibility
- Consistency
- Quality over Quantity
Patience and SEO
Patience is the key. Depending upon your niche and industry, it can take 4 to 7 months for you to rank well. Although for Pakistan, this time lesser than any of the competitive regions. But it primarily depends upon your industry. Often times, we see that all of the basic SEO tasks are complete, but there is no change in ranking. Your basic SEO checklist is all green but Google crawlers are too busy to visit your website. Just make sure that your website is crawl-able by bots and you have a proper website structure (with sitemap submitted to Google). At this point, all you need to do is relax and let Google do its job.
*Also check ⇒ How effective is SEO to rank your website in Pakistan
In addition to industry, it also depends upon what is your SEO strategy, and your digital marketing partner. Under any conditions do not go for Black hat SEO or any other shortcuts. It will not only get you penalized by Google, chances are that you’ll probably never be able to rank your same favorite brand name ever again.
As one of the moz article-heading reads “Patience is an SEO virtue”. Its an article written by Kate Morris back in 2010. You can also go ahead and read it later.
Flexibility and Search Engine Optimization
Flexibility is an important factor while executing any plan or strategy in general. Same is the case with SEO. You ought to understand that your initial plan might not work for any reason. For example, you are putting all the focus on a few ranking factors and Google launches a new Algorithm and those factors become less effective now. Or your previous SEO consultant told you that forum posting is the most important for your business but, as of today, forum posting technique has become outdated. SEO is a continuous process and not only off-page, even On-page SEO strategy needs re-evaluation from time to time.
Therefore, you need to be flexible to tweak the existing plan in response to new trends and updates by Google or other search engines. A good SEO expert always stays up to date on new Google updates.
Consistency and SEO
As i often say, above Search engine optimization is a continuous process. Its essential to re-access your strategy from time to time. Although SEO has long term effects but nothing is permanent. As they say, “Top is always empty”. if you don’t keep on improving your SEO on a regular basis, someone else will definitely reverse engineer your strategy and will take your spot in SERPs. Keep optimizing and discover new link building opportunities all the time.
Quality over Quantity for Good SEO
This one is primarily about off page SEO, and particularly about back links. However it also stands true for On page SEO as well. A general rule of thumb for Modern SEO is aim for Quality instead of quantity. Over optimizing for search engines will not do any good. Today’s search engines are smarter and can identify the difference between natural and bot-like behavior.
In SEO, being natural is important. Although you are optimizing for search engines, but your content is for humans not bots. Better user experience should be your prime focus. Similarly, for off page SEO, back-links although essential, but it is useless if you have hundreds of low authority links. Rather if you have just a few quality backlinks, that would weigh more than number of low authority spamy links.
