Momentum is a crucial factor when undergoing a PR or content strategy to grow the authority and strength of a domain.
After analysing the competition for non-paid search and understanding the enormity of the task to compete for rankings it is easy to fall in to the trap of pushing too hard too soon to achieve results quickly. This is particularly the case when agencies commit to volume and conversion deliverables or undertake short term contracts that require aggressive and high risk strategies to impress clients.
The search algorithm that determines rankings is becoming more complex and increasingly savvy to the techniques webmasters use to manipulate search results. As a result the golden rule to ‘keep techniques natural’ is becoming ever more golden. It is important to bear in mind however that it is not just the techniques that must be kept natural it is also the speed and consistency at which they are deployed. If a client has no PR strategy and then all of a sudden four heavily optimised press releases are being sent off each week, this is clearly going to trigger question marks in the eyes of Google.
It is common sense to presume that the more optimised content or PR strategies are the more momentum is considered by Google. Twenty people linking to the homepage of a site from the anchor text ‘here’ when the month prior there was no links is perfectly acceptable. However if twenty people deep link with the anchor text ‘cheap red widget’ this is much more likely to raise question marks.
Targets and long term objectives can be defined for SEO campaigns. However it is always important to understand that ongoing offsite strategies are a building process.
