Well, today was one of those days for me – one when I know why I’m in this business and what I enjoy about it.
I have a client who has struggled to achieve SEO success with past agencies and consultants for whom I have been working for a few months and now we’re seeing good, if not fantastic, results – bear with me, that’s obviously not the interesting part…

This particular client happened to have a whole range of satellite sites for various niche offshoots to their main business that were sitting around unchanged since the day they were created and with links from those sites to the main business site with no value at all because the satellite sites had no page authority/rank.

So, naturally I saw the satellite sites as a great opportunity to add value to the main site by building up their content and hence gaining some page authority. So the home page is now changed regularly and I have started blogs for those sites. Sadly I’m not Superwoman so I only targeted 3 of the sites. Because the aim of this process was to increase the value of existing links and hence the organic ranking of the main site I was only cursorily monitoring what was happening to the satellite sites but now one of them, having never ranked before in the organic listings, is appearing half way down page 2.

I was reading a good article about how small companies can compete with big brands this morning on BusinessHub and it suggested that……

Now I also know from experience that sites often seem to appear from nowhere to quite reasonable rankings and then can spend some time behaving erratically until the rankings settle down but, remember, this particular site is not even being specifically targeted with SEO – it has less than 10 links – none particularly high quality and poor on-site SEO. What it does have is good site structure, a keyword-based domain name and has been established for well over a year. Even so, it didn’t rank at all until, most importantly of all, lots of good, fresh content was added regularly.

This particular site is a great example of the power of fresh, regular content alone and rarely have I had the opportunity to monitor a site’s ranking without some active SEO taking place. This sites is offering users exactly what Google wants a site to offer –a good experience with plenty of useful, new content – and is being rewarded for it. Now I want to see what a few links will do for this non-SEO’d site.

Has anyone else had a similar experience of a site ranking well with no optimisation? By the way, since I expect someone will ask, it is ranking for a moderately competitive two-word keyword.

Maybe 2012 will be the year when Google finally do penalise sites with masses of poor-quality links but I’m not holding my breath…

Instead I’m just doing what I always do – steadily and consistently building high-quality links for my clients – putting in the effort to write really good and useful content and seeking out opportunities for guest writing. I firmly believe that this is the best long-term strategy and with some additional focus this year on a variety of content type: videos, podcasts and more images (of course, with their alt tags properly optimised) and focussing on partial keyword matches in my anchor text I expect to continue the great ranking improvements we have all seen over the past year.

I even plan to start doing some of my own videos and getting my own website up to scratch, but don’t hold your breath for that…

By Michelle Symonds