I'm an SEO professional. I spend every morning reading a few newsletters, checking out some hand-picked sites and reading through a sampling of threads at my favorite forums. Then I forget everything I've read and get to work. The fact is, everyone is this industry panics when anything changes as if they'll wake up one morning and find that Google has banned half of it's index. Instead, the SEO's that will last are the ones that embrace Google's algorithm improvements. Besides, is anyone going to miss the tedious outgoing SEO techniques?
If you take the X's and Y's out of Google's algorithm, and look purely at their motivation, it is not hard to see what they are trying to do. They are sick of websites that do not offer the most relevant information for a given query being manipulated to the top of the search engines through "man-made" links. They are continually trying to differentiate between "natural" links and "man-made" ones. Naturally, the masses of SEO's read this and run for their computers, trying to imitate a natural pattern of links. However, the algorithm will continue to improve and make this harder to imitate. All the while there is a much easier way to rank well under Google's ever improving algorithm.
I have to profess that there is one webpage I read every morning that I don't forget, and that is Rand Fishkin's Blog at SEOmoz.org. He made an excellent point when discussing his questioning of prospective clients. One of the first things Rand asks his potential client is why they feel they "deserve" to be at the top of the search rankings. This is definitely the single most overlooked question in the history of internet marketing, and unfortunately most internet marketing professionals always fail to look at our industry at different angles like this.
Us SEO's, were a technical group. We love theories and algorithms. We love to speculate and converse based on countless hours of internet manipulation. Sometimes we need to leave those avenues behind and think in a different way. If you forget about all this stuff, you will quickly realize Google wants the best information at the top of their results! THAT'S IT! So instead of trying to imitate the backlink patterns of highly regarded websites, why don't we simply make a highly regarded website? Of course we will have to tell people about the site. We will have to look at all of the site's on-page factors. But if this website truly deserves to be at the top of the search rankings, it eventually will be. If it isn't today or tomorrow, you can rest assured that Google is working on it.
Scan back up through this article. Do you notice a link in there anywhere? Yup, there's a link to Rand Fishkin's Blog. I don't know Rand at all. He didn't ask me for a link to his blog, I simply find it very useful and used one of his ideas in my article. You know what? If you go there I'll bet you'll find it very useful too. You will most likely visit his website more than once. If you have a website or a blog or participate in forums, I'm fairly certain you will end up making a reference ("linking" in today's internet world) to something on his site. Now do you see the benefit of creating a website that deserves to be at the top of the search rankings?
About The Author
Bobby Heard is a Managing Director of Abalone Designs, Inc., a search engine optimization company based in Vancouver, Canada. You can see their site at: http://www.abalone.ca/searchengineoptimization.html.
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