While it is generally agreed that metrics are a critical part of search engine optimization (SEO), experts disagree about their application, according to Search Engine Watch’s Eric Enge.
Enge, in a recent column, says that there are still issues with the measurement of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign’s success. Some clients become overly fixated on website rankings, demanding that the SEO campaign catapult their site to the top of the list for key terms. Enge, however, says that not only do the tools used to compute website rankings frequently violate search engines’ terms of service, the data that they retrieve can be deceptive and harmful to the performance of SEO efforts.
Enge also writes that a simple count of inbound links to a given website is not particularly useful in and of itself, since some links can be worth “100,000 times” the value of others.
Search engine optimization (SEO) metrics may change in the future, however, as innovations like real-time search and improved mobile device capacity change the way people use search engines.
My view on this news story is the only metrics that matter with SEO are conversions period. If a client wants to be at the top of the rankings for their “token phrase” then the SEO they are employing is not advising their client in his or her best interest. A site with hundreds of visitors that don’t convert into an action is as useful as a site that gets no traffic at all.
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