subject: A Year Without SEO [print this page] A Year Without SEO A Year Without SEO
It is over a year now since I concluded that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was, or was soon going to become, a waste of time. I had already, 6 months before then, said farewell to spending an hour a day working on getting reciprocal links.
What led, at the time, to what lots of would have said were rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by one & all, as an essential way to get a lovely rating, & the program tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning program was still being heavily marketed & is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all lovely SEO conscious site owners.
What I did was to return to promotion fundamentals. I had received my promotion training back in the 1980's & had practical promotion experience with my own business from the mid 1990's. I was not born in to web promotion alone, so could still see outside the blinkers & the hype.
A basic but important aspect of promotion is to know your marketplace. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo & MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, as well as a year later today.
I began to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers' zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not need to rank a web-site highly because the net master had the tools & the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It did not make sense. & the same was true of buying links. Why ought to a web-site rank highly because they have splashed out on purchasing links?
What Google, & the others, wanted was to rank the best sites for a specific search term, & it appeared only a matter of time before they sniffed out & extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Weblog spam, scraping & extreme SEO'ing.
The first of those new sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be Sandboxed by Google because of that, & so it proved. But I kept plugging away, sticking to my no-SEO principle. Of work, none of us outside Google knows for positive if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is without a doubt a waiting time before a brand spanking new site is thrown fully in to the rating melting pot.
A year ago, I started three new sites without any actual thought of SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were looking for. While I did provide title & description tags, everything else was written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could write to my heart's content without using any tools checking keyword density.
In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.
Now, this is early days for that particular site, & there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that SEO is infinitely more simple than some specialists, those selling rating tools, tend to have you think.
Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, & that is convert all my sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is simple to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified SEO. In fact, following Google's advice to site owners is about all you need to do, & that is free.
Of work, those with program products to hawk will argue that I could do even better with their program. But if Google decides to blacklist that program as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with rating program, & enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic promotion told me to do.
