The Death of SEO As We Know It?

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Speaking with a business acquaintance in the past he was telling me:” I don’t know SEO, and I do not want to know SEO. I do know I have paid thousands of dollars and I have not seen a Return on Investment (ROI).”
I told him how we could save thousands of dollars. Stop buying SEO services. 99% of the services are operating on how Google works, yesterday. They do not understand Google’s Panda rules, and its ongoing tweaks.
The worst of the bunch is still working on stuffing keywords in an article. Those with a bit more clue are working on creating a ranking through links. While that certainly is on the right track, the tweaks to the Panda rules that Google has recently invoked continue to trash the SEO rules of yesterday.
In the latest twist, over optimization is getting a Google slap.

What Google wants to see should come as no surprise. They want a satisfying user experience. Creating ranking with articles that have little or nothing to do with the specialized area of the website under the latest revision of the Panda rules is a surefire way to get penalized. In one analysis I looked at roughly speaking, 50% of the sites that have links coming in from the same niche experienced a 0% penalty.

The in-depth analysis reverse engineers Google’s thinking. In short: anchor text, if not completely dead, is one foot out the door and the other one on a banana peel.

The company that game changed searching is looking to use content relevancy of linked sites as a quality signal. Anchor text has proven far too easy to manipulate the system, devaluing the user experience.

Globally, Google is facing competition. While Microsoft’s Bing! Is not exactly eating their lunch, one only has to look at Microsoft’s own past of becoming arrogant and complacent when it was at the top of the pile. Google is not going to make that mistake.

There is a simple, effective and long-term solution that will work regardless of tweaks to the Panda rules, or anything else that Google will come up with tomorrow.

Create Micro-sites. These are small topic focused sites delivering real quality content that is relative to your niche. These micro-sites look to your primary as the authoritative source in your niche. The micro-site does not have to have a ton of daily content. Nor does it have to have traffic in eye-popping (in reality questionable) numbers. By the very nature of a micro niche site traffic would be on the low side. And it will naturally occur by putting up good quality material.

Let’s do an example. Suppose your mission is digital photography. A microblog or micro-site could do a review of point-and-shoot digital cameras. Another one would focus on interchangeable lenses for D SLR cameras. Another idea would be to create a user forum where the eternal flame wars between lovers of Nikon vs. lovers of Canon could join forces and get upset with the third horse coming into the race, Sony.

I picked this example for a reason. As Bob Dylan sang: “The Times They Are a Changing.” Sony’s Iconic Television: Trinitron, has lost its sacred cow status with the Japanese company. The focus is on the PlayStation, smart phones and yes, digital photography. They are looking to upset the dynamic duo of Nikon and Canon. Looking at the lineup, they are going to be at least reasonably successful in making this a three-way race.

The point here all is, Bob Dylan’s lyrics are more true than ever.

SEO Is Just A Component Of Online Business Optimization

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When it comes to setting up an online business, there is much thought given to optimizing the website in a way that it will be found by the search engines, and thus have the best chance of being discovered by potential customers. That’s a very good idea, but you shouldn’t just rely on the information and design of your site to get folks interested, and you will have to have a working knowledge of how offpage optimization can also help you in the search engine rankings.
Even those who only have the slightest of knowledge of the inner workings of the major search engines are aware of the need to build quality content, establish quality keywords, and have an overall design that is appealing and easy for the engines to crawl. What many people don’t know is that part of the algorithms that allow search engines to do their thing quickly and efficiently involves looking at how many other sites are linking to your pages. The goal is to have a large number of quality links pointing to your site in order to improve your rank on the search engine results page, and that is achieved by backlink building.

Link building is basically a generic term that applies to the different ways that you can get other websites to point visitors towards your page. Perhaps the easiest way to do that is to trade links with websites that are similar to yours, but not in direct competition. This is a “you scratch my back, I’ll scrap yours” strategy that is referred to as reciprocal linking, and while it helps to build those backlinks, it’s not as effective as a one way link pointing to your page. The best way to achieve that is to create original, interesting content that others will be keen to share on their own pages. Doing that has the double effect of optimizing your own website pages, as well as creating those quality backlinks.

I keep speaking of creating quality backlinks, and by that I mean those that come from high traffic sites that are relevant to your business. The best way to identify those sites is by doing some competitive backlink analysis, so that you can figure out where your competitors are getting their quality links. You can use that information to request that those same places start linking to you, or to use it as a jumping off point to try and land some links that they have yet to land. This can be something of a time consuming process, and there are actually a number of tools that you can use to make the job a little easier. They will quickly help you find out where all the backlinks are coming from, as well as helping you to create new ones of your own. Purchasing such a service may not necessarily be cheap, but it’s a move that could pay huge dividends when it comes to helping you climb the search engine ladder.