With all the changes that have been happening lately in the world of SEO - Google buying YouTube, the Google Caffeine algorithm upgrade and the Bing and Yahoo merger - it is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep up and stay ahead when it comes to optimizing your website.
In this day and age having a website no longer means just having a site designed, built and uploaded and leaving it at that. Internet Marketing has grown exponentially in recent times and in order to take full advantage of this trend and reap the associated benefits, you need to have a fully functional well-built website before you can even think of embarking of any form of optimizing in order to gain rankings and attract the right kind of traffic.
The basics of building websites still counts for something
That said if you have a well-indexed website and it was built correctly from the word go or has been kept up to date in terms of the latest building recommendations, you are in good stead for moving forward with your intended optimization and capturing your market share.
Sites build in frames or framesets, flash and/or tables etc are considered by the web authorities (W3Schools and others) to be outdated and in some instances deprecated indicating that it is no longer supported in XHTML 1.0. These sites are then also not crawled by the Search Engine bots and will be left behind in the race for rankings.
Domain Age is a factor in Search Engine Optimization
Although it may not be a defining factor, domain age is still a factor and for two reasons:
- The age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity which Google gives higher relevancy to. Search engines generally tens to put more trust into those sites that have been around longer.
- Also the older the site, the more time it has had to build links from other sites etc.
Where to from here
There are many things that could be suggested for example you could consider rebuilding your site if its not been built correctly. It might also be a good idea to consider taking over old domains in order to benefit from aging if your current domain is not too well like or if you are just starting out. This is especially true if the domain is relevant and the site is built with high quality content.
What else needs to be considered
Before Google Caffeine kicks into effect take the time to test search keywords and phrases from your site (that you wish to be found under) and see where you are listed on both www.google.co.za and www2.sandbox.google.com. Then look at the results and and make a decision from there.
Web 2.0 sites and those with user generated content is now also considered the way to go and something to keep in mind if you plan on taking full advantage of the upcoming changes and want your website to perform at it optimal best.
Visit the following sites for more information:
Domain Age http://www.a1articles.com/article_1036559_81.html
Google Caffeine http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine
SEO Basics
http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/learn-the-basics-of-seo-before-you-try-anything-fancy/
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