Neo•Paradigms
If every Americus web page were created with the concept of the internet community in mind, SEO professionals would cease to be needed. Internet connectivity is achieved by employing text, hypertext and hyperlink. It is what the Internet is designed to accomplish; the inter-exchange of information. Combine this model with pages that contain original content and proper meta tags and you have a winning combination on the web.
Search Engine Optimization in Americus - and elsewhere - has, incorrectly, become about building a sort of Cul-de-Sac or pyramidal web model in recent years. The entire structure of paid internet advertising partially depends upon the misuse of Internet connectivity technologies - so called 'black hat tricks.' The pyramid model, in simple diagram, makes use of numerous gateway pages to point inbound linking traffic to a web site. The trouble is that all of this inbound traffic relies upon bombarding the internet search engine spiders with keyword overloaded, often nonsense pages and 'invisible' tricks to redirect the end user to the target page. The spider reads the text, ranks the page (the gateway page, that is) well and the target page receives better placement in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). All of this Sleight of Hand tends to fill the the search engine indexes with garbage and leads to the necessity to make sponsored (paid) linking a way of life.
Another distinct disadvantage to the above model is that the Internet Community does not award the targeted web site with higher page ranking for Americus web sites. Better placement within the universe of internet conncetivity is all about content - text - and connections - hypertext and hyperlinks. If your web pages lack quality, all the tricks known and yet to be discovered are not going to raise its place within the Internet Community.
The better view of the Internet is as a community of informative resources all working together to share knowledge be it academic, technological, or merchandising. To accomplish this you must view your web site as nexus or hub from which your visitors can quickly and easily obtain the information that they came to your site to find, and from which they can gain fuller understanding by following higher contextual links to other sites. Professional site design will be of enormous value but it is this notion of community, of connectivity and extending your web site's information with details contained in other web sites that actually promotes your site's page ranking and, ultimately, your placement within the Internet Community.
If your web site is used for e-commerce it may not make sense to you, at first, to provide links away from your site - even hyperlinking to a competitor site. Your first impulse is to hold all your clients to your site and not risk any of them going to another resource. The problem with this thinking is it perpetuates the pyramid model and, ultimately, will make it more difficult for customers to find - and therefore buy from - your site. Think of it in these terms as well; I believe I am safe to assume that most of us have seen "Miracle on 34th Street," the Christmas movie wherein a Macy's Department Santa recommends that a mother purchase a particular gift at Gimbel's, Macy's closest competitor, to obtain a beter price. The good will performed in that action comes back multifold.
I am not suggesting complete altruism as an internet marketing method. l am pointing out that the Internet is a Community made up of more than just your individual site. Also, it is not a stretch to see that steering a potential customer in the best direction is likely to cause that customer to return. Making the sale at your own site is the responsibility of your content but you need traffic to make the sale.
Another method of extending your web site into the internet community is to hyperlink to sites that provide a greater understanding of topics and concepts your web content introduces. By extending and improving the content of your web pages your site will grow in value and acheive higher Page Rank scoring.
If your site sells Intel Pentium computer systems you make make mention of the Pentium 4's Hyper-Threading Technology and how it improves overal performance (according to the manufacturer. I do not mean to make the claim here and draw the wrath of Apple, Motorola, SGI or any other quality manufacturer.) By way of example, you may follow any of the hyperlinks in the previous sentence and learn quite a bit about each mentioned topic. By sharing this information, THIS page takes the steps necessary to participate in the Internet Community and will be rewarded with traffic - traffic that I have the opportunity to turn into profitable exchange. Whether or not I make the sale, this page has done it's task and helped bring traffic to me.
Not all of your page links will, or even should, point away from your site. Recall that the Internet community is based upon text (content), hyperlinking (content on other sites) but also on hyperlinking: related content within your own site. A properly constructed page will not present more than a single main topic (and be identified with proper meta tag information) so your site will likely contain numerous related topic pages. You should, and will, have numerous hypertext references in your web pages. These links, too, extend the value of your individual pages by providing Internet connectivity to related information in your web page.
Follow this very simple model when designing and creating your web pages and your site will experience the benefit of working within the designs of Internet technologies:
- Original content presented in well formed pages.
- Hypertext links to related content within your site.
- Hyperlinks to extended content located in the Internet Community
It isn't rocket science. It is Internet science - the purpose of all internet technologies is to provide an internetwork of information and connectivity. Work with the tools, not against them.
