Hi everybody! My name is Ruth Burr and I’m the new Lead SEO here at
SEOmoz. I’m super excited to be here! I’ll be posting on SEO here
regularly going forward, but for my first post I wanted to tell you guys
that when it comes to SEO, this is how I roll:
I know a woman who’s recently lost about 30 pounds. She looks great,
but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone compliment her on
her new look and then ask, “What’s your secret?” “Just eating right and
exercising,” she replies – and their faces invariably fall. Eating
right and exercising? BO-RING! Sounds hard!
The
truth is, we’re all looking for shortcuts to help us get the results we
want without putting in the work we need to do to achieve them (think
about the “1 Weird Old Trick” ads you see everywhere). We step on the
scale, think about the hard low-cal high-cardio road ahead, and think,
“Surely there’s a better/faster/easier way to do this.”
SEOs do this all the time. We want that magic bullet to get
our sites to the top of the SERPs, the one “secret trick” to get the
edge on our competitors. And just like fad diets, a lot of secret/sneaky
SEO tricks do work for a while. When I started doing SEO in 2006, one
of my tasks was to go into our older blog posts and bold or un-bold
various keywords, so the content would update and be seen as “fresh.”
And you know what? It worked for a while. Remember Page Rank sculpting?
TOTALLY worked for a while. Remember directory submissions and blog
comment spamming for links? Of course you do, because they are still
going on.
Weaning Ourselves Off of Short-Term Gains
Look,
I get it, guys. It’s so easy to adopt SEO tricks, and when they
actually WORK it can be incredibly hard to turn them down. If all of
your competitors are outranking you thanks to their huge volume of
paid/spammy links, the moral high ground’s not gonna put food on the
table, amirite? So I feel ya. The “if it works I’m doing it, regardless
of whether or not it follows the guidelines or is a good user
experience” approach has gotten some serious short-term gains for some
people (to my continuing chagrin – for more on this topic, see Wil
Reynolds’ post How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO).
Regardless of my personal feelings on whether or not they’re good for
the Internet, I’m not going to say tricks don’t ever work.
The problem with SEO tricks is that they’re about getting a site to the
top of the SERPs regardless of whether it deserves to be there. That’s
the kind of trick that search engines have a vested interest in
continuing to combat, which leads to algorithmic updates like Penguin.
Over-reliance on SEO tricks is what causes your rankings and traffic to
be completely wiped out overnight by these updates. Without a foundation
of quality SEO in place, you’re going to spend a lot of your time
fixing stuff and doing stuff over every time the search engines catch on
to your latest trick.
SEO is Hard
The difficulty with weaning ourselves off of SEO tricks is that doing
SEO without doing tricks is hard freaking work. It is way harder to
build great content and fix crummy code and build linking relationships
and get people to share and link to your content and then do all that
again, over and over, than it is to submit to a bunch of directories and
hire a freelancer to spin some content to syndicate on article sites
and to comment spam neglected blogs and then buy a bunch of links.
However, it’s a lot easier to build great content and fix crummy code
and build linking relationships and get people to share and link to your
content and then do all that again, over and over, and have it NEVER
STOP WORKING, than it is to completely change everything you do every
year or so because your websites keep getting algorithmic slaps. And
it’s a lot less stressful, in the long run, not to have to explain to
your clients why their sites are totally hosed now.
SEO Tactics that Never Stop Working
We talk a lot about how SEO changes all the time, but in the 6 years
I’ve been doing this, here are some things that have never stopped
working for me:
- Find the terms that people are using to search for your products, and then talk about your products on-site using those terms, without using them so much you sound crazy.
- Make sure a search engine can find every page on your site, read the content and figure out what the page is about (i.e. what keywords it should rank for).
- Fix the broken stuff on your site, remove duplicate content and make the whole site faster.
- Create interesting, relevant, fresh content that is designed to engage users and encourage them to share it.
- Build links to your site from other high-authority sites with which you share a topic or audience – better yet, build relationships with those sites that can earn you links again and again.
- Make sure you’ve got a good experience for users once they get to the site: the content they see is the content they wanted. That’s what search engines want to happen, and that’s how users give you money.
The ways in which we do these things have changed a lot over the years,
and we’ve been given a lot of new tools (social media, schema.org, the
canonical tag) to do them with, but despite the fact that a lot has
changed, a lot hasn’t.
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