Why Success Breeds Success When it Comes to SEO

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If you’re an SEO, or have done a bit of optimization yourself, the chances are you have come across older, possibly outdated sites, which despite your best optimization efforts just will not budge from the top spot.

This is not unusual, older site are often seen as more trustworthy and authoritative by the search engines and tend to perform better in the search engine results. There are a number of reasons this happens and all of these help to reinforce the importance of getting a head start when it comes to search engine optimization.

The age of links

The links you require will tend to become more powerful as time goes on due to a number of reasons. Links that have stayed in place for a long time tend to be from more trusted, as they will often be more natural as opposed to say, paid links, which can stop and start and change from site to site.

As a link ages, the chances are that the page the link is on will acquire links in turn, helping to make the link to your website more powerful.

The age of the link is also a factor that is impossible to beat. Even if your competitors gain the exact same back link profile as you, your links will be older and more trusted, which helps to explain why some of the older sites tend to be so hard to knock off the top spot.

People will reference you

Another example of the advantage of getting ahead early on is the benefit that can come by being number one for your target keywords. Not only will you be driving a lot of highly targeted traffic, but you will also be putting yourself in front of anyone who is creating a piece of work where you could potentially acquire a reference link.

An example of this would be if you ran a website that ranked first for the term “interior decorating”, and someone was putting together a list of the top ten interior design websites. The chances are they will be doing their research via a search engine and by being number one you have put yourself right in front of them, gaining a link that you most likely wouldn’t have got by being on page 2 or 3.

Increase trust in your brand

Ranking on first page of the search engine results has been shown to help increase users trust in your business, which can add an authoritative stance to any content you create for online promotion. This can be used to leverage the value of that post and help it to gain references from other websites. By having the ability to create content that maturely attracts links you have a major advantage over your competitors, and likely most other websites.

So without even going into all of the other advantages that can come from an effectively implemented search engine optimization campaign, you can see the importance of getting ahead early on and why reaching the top early on, can help keep you there.

This is a post by Ben Hook from Navaro, a search marketing company based in the UK specialising in SEO and social media marketing

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