12 months without SEO
More than a year ago I came to the conclusion that search engine optimization (SEO) was, or would soon become, a waste of time. Already, 6 months before, I said goodbye to spending an hour a day working to get reciprocal links.
What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very hasty movements? After all, reciprocal linking was still being exposed, by one and all, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and software tools were still actively marketed. Search engine optimization software was still widely marketed and still is today; Keyword density was a buzzword that was used as an essential science to be practiced by all good SEO conscious webmasters.
What I did was go back to the basics of marketing. I had received my marketing training in the 1980s and had hands-on marketing experience with my own business since the mid-1990s. I was not born into Internet marketing alone, so I could still see beyond blinders and the hype.
A very basic but important aspect of marketing is knowing your market. When it comes to search engine rankings, it is clear that an important part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the undisputed leader then and a year later today. .
I started to think 18 months ago that when it came to reciprocal linking, it was becoming a spammer zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google really didn’t want to rank a website high just because the webmaster had the tools and time to search for reciprocal links. It just didn’t make sense. And the same goes for buying links. Why should a website rank high because they have been wasted on buying links?
What Google and the others really wanted was to rank the best websites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they detected and extinguished abuses like blatantly artificial link building, blog spam, scraping and extreme SEO’ing.
A year ago, I started two new websites without really thinking about SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try and provide what the search engines wanted – original content about what people were looking for. While I provided title and description tags, everything else was written on the fly based on the flow. The keyword phrase on any page would come out in natural flow. You could just type whatever you wanted without using any keyword density checking tool.
The first of those new websites 13 months ago was in the self-improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I expected to be “Sandboxed” by Google because of that, and it turned out. But I kept connecting, sticking to my no SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside of Google know for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a time to wait before a new site is fully pushed into the ranking crucible.
In the case of self-improvement, the latest Google update brought my site out of the sandbox after about 12 months. So at last, I was able to see if my non-SEO approach was going to produce any positive results. Fortunately, some high rankings were immediately apparent, including some # 1 positions. In one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to # 1, while the site was # 2 (now 1) on MSN.
Now these are the early days for that particular site, and there’s a lot to do to get higher rankings. However, I’m sure SEO is infinitely simpler than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.
Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is converting all of my websites to CSS. Providing a content-rich site that is easy for search engine bots to crawl is the most important aspect of the new, streamlined SEO. In fact, following Google’s advice for webmasters is all you need to do, and that’s free.
Of course, those with software products to sell will argue that you could do even better with your software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulation tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I’ll let the others chase shadows with rating software and enjoy writing content. After all, that’s what basic marketing told me to do.