Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is full of challenges and getting top-ranked is not easy. Understanding of these challenges allows you to plan your SEO strategy much better because you will get a realistic picture of what to expect. Getting through the challenges are well worth the effort once you realize your website is at the top of the search engine result pages (SERP). What are some of the ways SEO specialists deal with these challenges? Let’s look at a few.
The number of competitors can often be astronomical. Many studies have been done in order to determine the number of top-level domains on the internet today. You can rest assured that you are not unique in your niche and you will be competing with countless others for the same top ranking on a SERP. The best way to deal with so many competitive sites is to make sure yours is up-to-date and well-maintained.
It is a challenge if not impossible to keep up-to-date with the various ranking algorithms among the major search engines. Search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing are constantly reviewing their ranking algorithms and initiating new approaches within them. This need for constant review stems from the numerous black hat SEO specialists who try to circumvent the current algorithms in attempt to get a site ranked faster. One of the objectives of the major search engines is to remain fair and impartial thus they must combat the black hat SEO threat. You may consider yourself and expert in them today but it won’t take long before that expertise becomes antiquated.
Overcoming impatience is a challenge when waiting for results. Impatience can be troublesome when you consider the time it takes to have content written, get backlinks, contribute to forums, and do all the other tasks required in order to achieve truly organic SEO results. Probably what makes a person impatient is the fact that the search engines do not provide you any feedback as to what you are doing right or wrong when it comes to optimizing your site. No matter what, resist the urge to use black hat SEO tactics because you run the risk of getting your site penalized which means you will have to wait longer for ranking results.
If your SEO project is a group effort, consensus can be challenging. A large company will probably use a group to implement their internet marketing campaign. More than likely, this group will have representatives from the various departments. Depending on the size of the company, the group could increase in size meaning that there will undoubtedly be different opinions as to what will work in their SEO efforts. In a large group, there are various levels of understanding about SEO among its members. Some members with limited SEO understanding will have to be “educated” in order to contribute to the bigger picture. The best way to ensure a successful group campaign is to have a plan and hold team members accountable for their area of responsibility before embarking deep into the project.
Another challenge is finding the right websites to provide you with inbound links. Search engines favor inbound links that originate from reputable and relevant websites. But link building is always an uphill struggle. Consider that each quality inbound link is like a vote of confidence for your website so you want to get as many as possible in the shortest amount of time. However the other challenge is that you don’t want to get a high number of inbound links too quickly because a search engine might think you are trying to spam it.
Content is very important for ranking a website and their issues must be consistently dealt with. Duplicate content is one common issue that must be quickly eliminated or your website could get penalized by the search engines. Large businesses oftentimes have duplicate gateway pages among their affiliate websites so webmasters must make sure that the robots.txt file for their sites are configured with links for indexing bots to avoid (the duplicate content links).
