12 months without SEO
Over a year ago I came to the conclusion that search engine optimization (SEO) was, or would soon become, a waste of time. I had already said goodbye, 6 months before that, to spending an hour a day working on getting reciprocal links.
What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal links were still exposed, by one and all, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were still being actively marketed. Search engine optimization software was still heavily marketed and still is; keyword density was a buzzword that was branded as if it were an essential science to be practiced by all good SEO conscious webmasters.
What I did was go back to the basics of marketing. I received my marketing training in the 1980s and had hands-on marketing experience with my own business since the mid-1990s. I wasn’t born into internet marketing alone, so I could still see past the blinders and exaggeration.
A very basic but important aspect of marketing is knowing your market. When it comes to search engine rankings, clearly a significant 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 thinking 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking goes, it was becoming a spam 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 look for reciprocal links? It just didn’t make sense. And the same thing happened with buying links. Why should a website rank high because they have been spent 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 sniffed out and extinguished abuses like blatantly artificial link building, blog spamming, scraping and extreme SEO.
A year ago, I started two new websites without really thinking about SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to 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 based on the flow. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. You could write whatever you wanted without using any tools to check keyword density.
The first of those new websites 13 months ago was in the highly competitive self-improvement niche. I was hoping that Google would “isolate” me for it, and it did. But I kept trying, sticking to my principle of no SEO. Of course, none of us outside of Google know for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is certainly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking crucible.
In the case of personal improvement, Google’s latest update took my site out of sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able to see if my non-SEO approach was going to produce positive results. Fortunately, some high rankings were immediately apparent, including some No. 1 positions. In one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the No. 1 position, while the site was No. 2 (now No. 1) on MSN.
Now, these are early days for that particular site, and there is a lot to be done to get higher rankings. However, I’m sure SEO is infinitely simpler than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to lead you to believe.
Since starting that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is to convert 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 SEO made simple. In fact, all you need to do is follow Google’s advice for webmasters, and it’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, all my hard work could go up in smoke. So I’ll let the others chase the shadows with the ranking software and just enjoy writing content. After all, that’s what basic marketing told me to do.