With years and years of SEO experience, I can confidently say, SEO is the same today as it was in the early days, with one minor difference. You’d think there would be dramatic changes in such a dynamic and money centric industry, and while it would appear there has been extreme shifts and swings, the real story is…you build an SEO ship to survive any search engine storms.
What’s the same? I like that you are starting with the best question. If you build a great site, with great content, and your visitors and other sites like it, over time, you will rank well, and for the long term. Yes, it is that simple. A great site useful content, plenty of back links, clean code, traffic, activity, and time.
What else? You can still trick the search engines. Yes you can, and in a number of different ways. Fake links, fake content, fake traffic, fake rankings. You know it’s true, you’ve seen the ridiculous sites that make it to the first page and waste your time with google ad pages and other revenue based selfish pages. It happens.
The big difference, you can’t game the search engines for long. Used to be sites would run a linking scheme or keyword stuffing and it would be months or more before that site was bumped from the top results. These days, you might just get banned, or at least sent to purgatory or the depths of search engine results. So the risks are greater when people try to to game the SE’s, and so the number of garbage sites is shrinking.
The bonus: a great site that beats it’s competition follows a few simple rules. More pages, more links, cleaner code, more love. Analyze the other sites and dominate their keyword pages. Promote your site everyday, and just keep an eye on the web and a deaf ear to any negativity.
Years of SEO Experience
With years and years of SEO experience, I can confidently say, SEO is the same today as it was in the early days, with one minor difference. You’d think there would be dramatic changes in such a dynamic and money centric industry, and while it would appear there has been extreme shifts and swings, the real story is…you build an SEO ship to survive any search engine storms.
What’s the same? I like that you are starting with the best question. If you build a great site, with great content, and your visitors and other sites like it, over time, you will rank well, and for the long term. Yes, it is that simple. A great site useful content, plenty of back links, clean code, traffic, activity, and time.
What else? You can still trick the search engines. Yes you can, and in a number of different ways. Fake links, fake content, fake traffic, fake rankings. You know it’s true, you’ve seen the ridiculous sites that make it to the first page and waste your time with google ad pages and other revenue based selfish pages. It happens.
The big difference, you can’t game the search engines for long. Used to be sites would run a linking scheme or keyword stuffing and it would be months or more before that site was bumped from the top results. These days, you might just get banned, or at least sent to purgatory or the depths of search engine results. So the risks are greater when people try to to game the SE’s, and so the number of garbage sites is shrinking.
The bonus: a great site that beats it’s competition follows a few simple rules. More pages, more links, cleaner code, more love. Analyze the other sites and dominate their keyword pages. Promote your site everyday, and just keep an eye on the web and a deaf ear to any negativity.