The Dodo, T-Rex, and Aggressive Search Engine Optimization – Gone Forever. Here’s What You Can Do Now…
You can really take a lot of flak from people who don’t read and listen carefully to what you say.
Note to reader: Never declare the death of something even if it is a foregone conclusion and 100% true unless you are ready for some grief from the peanut gallery.
Such was the case when we started telling people on webinars and teleconferences that SEO was dead.
SEO? DEAD? My goodness you could hear the cans of whoopass opening up from all the 90-pound geekling search engine optimization firms around the world.
The pocket protector (a geek’s gauntlet) had been thrown down.
Context has a lot to do with any bold statement and declaring SEO dead was in a context that explains perfectly what I meant by it.
The web has changed drastically this year. Call it web 2.0 or whatever you wish, but the webscape is a mighty different place than it was a year ago.
Everything has changed from search engines to social networking to publishing platforms (what you actually run your content on).
I guess I should qualify that by saying the web has changed, but most marketers have yet to wake up and smell the coffee.
Back to SEO being dead. The context in which this declaration was made was when we were recently discussing the new results we’d gotten from heavy testing and the fact that what used to work for us no longer worked.
One might think “bummer, man!” Actually it is a blessing in disguise. With the right system for publishing, the right technology, tools and tactics, the web is easier to market on than it ever has been before.
Website owners no longer have to pour through endless forum threads and documentation, expensive courses and training seminars to learn heavy-duty search engine optimization.
It is no longer necessary to do anything more than post and rank, once you have the right tools working for you.
One big reason is that Google and the other engines are switching to become more dynamic and fluid in their rankings. This is evidenced by our own testing and what you’ve probably seen yourself.
There has been a fluidity to search engine rankings in the last few months unbecoming the slow, lumbering state the engines used to operate in when trying to stay up to date and relevant.
Google is actually living up to its promise to reward webmasters who develop relevant, topical, visitor-useable content. [TAG]Visitor Optimization[/TAG], they call it.
It was a leap of faith, but we started publishing solely to please our markets without aggressively optimizing. Just like Google asked us to do. No hardcore late night sessions doing endless keyword research or inflating our keyword densities to cheat the system.
(We’ve concluded that trying cheat a multi-billion dollar mega corporation with thousands of geeks programming and watching our every move was a dumb idea.)
Simply putting out content that the market wants and appreciates is all we do now.
Guess what? My sites now enjoy a plethora of top 10 rankings in Google for scores of keyword phrases. Keywords people are actually using to find my site, not just “vanity” keywords no one searches on.
We are doing this with no aggressive or even moderately aggressive search engine optimization.
We are using a blog platform that performs better than anything else we’ve used (based on Wordpress). We are using high tech RSS tools to syndicate content. We are using social networking to get links. We are tagging and pinging and using autodiscovery in a new way.
Aside from using common sense SEO strategies like carefully naming our posts, linking within our sites with keyword phrases (as long as it makes sense to do so) and naturally writing about relevant topics, there is nothing remotely like the old SEO we had to do on the old web.
Once people take the same leap of faith we have and start using publishing tools that engines eat up along with posting regular, ORIGINAL, relevant content, they will start to see the same results.
What you need to see this happen for you:
- You must be blogging on a high-tech platform (At least Wordpress out of the box – nothing does better in the engines.)
- Create multiple tagged RSS feeds based on your top keywords and use autodiscovery in your template to shove content in the face of spiders.
- Tag, Tag, Tag! And Ping! Ping! Ping!
- Supplement your original content with relevant syndicated content.
- Post every single day, even more than once a day, on real topics of interest to your market.
Make these changes and watch the fun begin. Post, rank, and watch those aggressive, sleepless, stressful search engine optimization days fade away in your rearview mirror forever!
Want to simply USE the tools and not have to program them yourself? Click Here!
{ 4 trackbacks }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Today I am getting a blietzkreig of emails for stompernet.com. It is the future of natural search and full of top secret test results that I should be salivating for. OK, because I have high regard for Brad and Andy (plus Keith B., Jack H. and John R.) as internet experts I would believe they are telling the truth.
However I have come to respect contentdesk.com as innovators in natural search and believe they also have an inside tested advantage.
So, the question would be, who to go with?
Seems Jack and Brad and Andy are friends and probably belong to each others group. If so, I wonder then if the information is eventually exchanged and then incorporated within each others programs. If so, then CD and Stompernet are very similar.
Jack…how about a thought or two. Are there some major similarities?…. and do you guys learn and exchange with each other?
Just curious.
Yes, we talk but not as often as we’d like. Running our respective “shops” is a lot of work!
The answer to your question is yes and no. Brad and Andy do very similar things and some different things.
You will notice we both talk a lot about natural search, blogging, good content, white hat search, etc.
Those guys made their names with shopping sites – and in a BIG way as you probably saw in the videos.
The biggest difference I can see is we focus on revenue models that don’t require physical stock – content is our stock and affiliate revenue, PPC, e-products and services are our monetization.
Not that Brad and Andy’s methods won’t work across the board for any kind of site – they do.
What it comes down to and what I am so proud of is that the people who are “getting” the new internet and how marketing, content, linking, and SEO work TODAY are in a very small group.
Not many people in our circles know the first thing about how to prosper and market with the methods we talk about which means lots and lots (most) people don’t know what’s about to hit them.
The other difference between us is I think they are closed to new members now, which almost makes this a moot point, but still a very good question a lot of peole have been asking this week.
So thanks!
Jack
To hell with SEO! Aren’t you sick of the “latest” SEO software, page builder, etc!
Optimize for visitors & build incoming links (power linking strategies), in that way, your natural search engine rankings will go up.
Conclusion – if you wanna be ranked well in the natural search engines, focus on visitor optimization & linking strategies.
We want traffic, subscribers, sales, profits, etc, rather than getting ranked high without getting enough sales.