Search engine optimization has changed over the past few years, and our view on how to work with it has changed as well. An important factor is that the focus on specific pages and keywords must decrease in order to be able to rank with them.
In the past, SEO was much more straightforward: you built a landing page on your site. You made sure it was optimized and then ensured it received links. After a while, you started to appear for the words you had in the headline and title. It’s not quite that simple today.
Google has repeatedly re-evaluated how it views links. Anchor text and PageRank used to be the most important factors—point them towards the page that should rank and it would climb. Today, you need a much broader perspective to succeed well. Links that focus heavily on a specific page often cause more problems than they help. They do help as well, but the algorithm and filters sometimes clash—they don’t agree on many of the existing links. Many still work according to the somewhat outdated model with plenty of anchor text links to selected landing pages; sure, it has some effect, but far from the maximum effect.
Above all, you need to consider how a site naturally receives links. For example, a webshop rarely gets many links to a category page, even if it might be the best fit in search results. If someone searches for nuts, they naturally want to see several nuts to choose from rather than a specific nut, but that doesn’t mean people often link to these pages.
Our recommendations
The very best approach, which we always recommend today, is to build a site that is strong in itself. A site with good authority that has links to many different pages, in a natural way. Then you build the site so that it distributes its strength internally in the best possible way (unfortunately, this is something that most SEO professionals in Sweden today might not fully master). Instead of pointing links to a single page, build authority and let the strength flow well through the site—this way, you can achieve rankings.
It will take a bit longer and it will be harder to predict exactly how it will go, but it will happen and it will deliver much more than just pushing for a single keyword. You must accept that you now have less control over how the work progresses; Google has taken a firmer grip on its own search results. Also, it can become more complex for the inexperienced SEO specialist.
Of course, you should not stop measuring positions or forget keyword analysis; it’s just that you shouldn’t be so aggressive with links or keep stuffing too many keywords into the text.
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.