The days of the lazy SEO guy are over.
There was a time when it was easy to manipulate search rankings. It wasn’t hard to learn the tricks to be effective in SEO back then and therefore there was a large influx of low level amateur SEO providers. They discovered that there was great ROI in the service and that mostly all they had to do was use overseas link builders to generate links cheaply. There were also simple code tricks that could be used to fool Google.
Content was also very bad back in the day. A lot of articles were written that mainly included key words that were mentioned repetitively in the same article. This read like spam. Also the information was largely duplicate, meaning very little unique info was being shared. Here is an article that will teach you how to write great content that Google will love. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-hummingbird-friendly-content-marketing-tips/79111/
Links were cheaply built using software programs that automatically left comments on various blogs and directories. Also tens of thousands of directories were created solely for the purpose of leaving behind a link.
Another technique was to purchase domain names that included the key word and then using the keyword in the permalinks in a spam like manner. This was similar to keyword stuffing in which multiple keywords were used in the meta tags as well as the content section of the page.
A lot of a seo providers back in the day would use a third party link building service to generate a ton of links all at once. This use to work when google would simply count the number of links and use that as an easy way to improve your grade in search page ranking. Google was not gonna hurt you for doing this because it was thought that people could hurt other sites by using this technique as well. Now google has created the links disavow tool which allows you to disavow bad links. But this also means that bad links can hurt you now.
Reciprocal links use to help but now Google sees it as more of a neutral even connection with neither side benefiting from the trade. Link rings and triangle linking used to be thought of as advanced ways of reciprocal linking. But in the overall scheme of things you are still trading one link for another. All that Google truly cares about is that high quality valuable authoritative websites are giving you a link vote.
You can’t cheat at SEO anymore and definitely not in the future. Google doesn’t want you to build a website. Google wants you to build an artificial intelligence entity. http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-wants-to-build-the-ultimate-personal-assistant/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb
This means that your website can listen, understand, respond and interact with the visitor. This is the future of web sites. In fact the term “website” may change as well. Think of your Google+ profile becoming your “avatar”. And your website becoming your “digital base of operations.” the world is becoming digital. Its all binary now. So prepare to think of everything as data and how you can use this data to best serve your needs. Either adapt to the change in your landscape and have an edge in business or be a late adopter and find out the truth after you have lost major ground to your competition. The choice and the chance you take is up to you.
– author: Steven Kim
– published 12/26/2013
