Further to my last post The Trouble With SEO, I wanted to use this chance to explain why WordPress SEO is a task best given to a WordPress Specialist. The reasons are highly technical, but I’m going to wrap up the main gist here, entirely in ley terms. Also I’m going to try and kick this, “#1 in Google At All Costs” ball, into the long grass once and for all.
Lets begin with Some Basics
WordPress is a CMS – that stands for content management system. In this context CMS’s are software programs that manage all the content of a website, images, texts, videos files etc. It manages tasks like the linking of pages and content and writes all the code that makes things happen. CMS’s have revolutionised website management. We think they’re great because on them we can build easily manageable websites that our clients are able to keep up to date for themselves. Indeed this is why the vast majority of commercial websites are now built on some type of CMS framework.
OK so what does this have to do with SEO?
The problem stems from the way that the optimisation software that’s used to SEO a website actually works.
Gathering Data
There’s lots of different programme but they all work in fairly similar way. The process starts by comparing your web page with the 10 web pages that currently occupy the top 10 spots in your chosen search engine.
Breaking Pages Down
Each page is broken down into its elements – titles, videos, image files, paragraphs, pages linking in, and out, the list is very extensive and there are about 160 different element classe.
Keyword Density
The keyword density (that’s number of times that words from the search phase feature within the element) is noted and an average value of the top 10 ranking pages is determined.
The strategy here is simple, if we alter our new page so that it hits this average value exactly, for each of the 160 element classes, we will displace one of the current top 10 ranking pages.
Seriously? Manageable websites, 1st page on Google, where’s the problem?
By now, even if you’re not really sure what it all means, you’ve probably heard of Google’s Panda update. You might have seen adverts for panda-friendly SEO and so on. Panda represented a major change not to the way that Google ranks pages, but how it penalises “over-optimised” pages. The penalties can be stiff, pages, indeed entire websites have been dropped from the index altogether as a result of over-optimisation and too high a keyword density.
So now, assuming we’re aiming for position 1, getting that keyword balance bang on is critical. It’s akin to a metaphorical game of Chicken, where lots of people challenge them self to move incrementally closer to the edge of a cliff. Over do it by just a little bit, and you plunge to oblivion.
Even so, we’re professionals and we can get it right, do so in fact and there you are – Position 1, so once again where’s the problem?
There isn’t one, until… that easily manageable content get altered by some well meaning individual promoting a 3 DAY KEYWORD sale, or launch of a KEYWORD product. All of a sudden your page is now over budget and tumbles in the rankings, in extreme cases, hundreds of places. It can be devastating to the business.
WordPress SEO is a unique field that needs specialist touch. Because we know WordPress so well, we’re able to make modifications to the core files of WordPress and the way it manages your website that will deliver a unique SEO edge. You see there are many factors that effect a website’s rank and not all of them are related to Keywords. From the host server performance and environment right through to the raw code and the way the pages are scripted. Significant gains can be made in all sorts of areas and so to focus on keywords elements only is simply lazy and at times even reckless. By optimising other factors alongside KW elements we can make allowances for the variables of that ever changing page content.