SEO is No Longer A Party
It is amazing to realize that prior to a couple years ago there was an entire SEO industry operating on the sole premise of gaming the Google algorithm. The methods used to trick Google were so ridiculous that in retrospect the entire time period resembles a bunch of out-of-control kids with a keg of beer, partying like its 1999, like their parents aren’t ever coming home.
SEO Can No Longer Change Reality
SEO and advertising became more related than ever before. In both arenas a client asks an agency to make them appear to the world as the BEST and MOST reputable, regardless of how much this may be untrue, regardless of reality. In advertising, you spin the story and alter this reality by simply spending lots of money on a power campaign. With SEO, you hired a company to spam the internet with links, articles, comments, pages and sites. At the rate of a billion individual pages per day the internet if filled mostly with content that never will be read by a human being. The sole intended audience of this spam is the Google Bot. Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising, would be truly amazed by this development. When it came to advertising and the internet, he might have just predicted the rise of something like web commercials.
SEO is Not For The Lazy
The only SEO that still works requires actual effort by people who can actual speak and write the main language of your website. The old days of out-sourcing to a crew of over-seas laborers are over. These days, there is one over-riding rule. Write the content for real humans to read, and build the website with the best structure that provides the best user experience. Just like the advertising message that get the best results, the website structure and content is built for your user, not you. This single controlling principle is still the most difficult step for owners to follow.
SEO Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
So you are now comfortable with the concept of constant and never-ending improvements to your website, but this work MUST be directed and not random. The most critical step of any SEO campaign is to research the search terms that get the most traffic and have the most and least competition. Once you have this list to work from, you can design the website content to address and center around these terms. This comes from the principle in the previous paragraph. This is subjugating your own story to the story that the clients are looking for. This is letting your marketplace determine what you say and how you say it. This simple act of subjugating your own desires is often too difficult for a business owner. When put to this test, you can often see that they would rather fail than change their story.
The road to online success is not for the faint of heart.