Your SEO Strategy Must Change
Google has made many changes to their ranking algorithms over the past couple of years. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) must either change or die.
Every company wants to be the first result on Google searches. In the past, SEO tactics amounted largely to gaming the algorithm that search engines use to determine their ranking. SEO people will probably be irate for me saying that, but those are the facts – regardless of whether they are white hat or black hat.
One of the onsite tactics SEOs used to game the system would be to add a laundry list of keywords in a page’s metadata or in its internal link structure. How different pages on a site link to each other and the words in the anchor text would also be manipulated. As sites began to take advantage of all the metrics that Google used in their algorithm, it quickly became a game of cat and mouse. Google would make improvements to their algorithm and SEOs would attempt to figure out what new techniques they could use to exploit their PageRank.
There’s a whole other world of off-site SEO (also called external SEO) that includes going into indexing services/directories, blogs, and other websites and getting them to backlink to their own website. The larger the website that linked to you, the more valuable the link would be. Getting a popular website to link back to yours used to fool Google’s algorithm into determining that your site had valuable content on it.
As a result of these SEO tactics, a few years ago the top Google results would often be useless articles that were irrelevant to the search. A common strategy would be to write articles full of keywords and place them on article farm sites with a link back to your website. Google has since taken measures to ensure that these sites don’t show up in results anymore.
You can still see websites using old and outdated SEO techniques to this day. They may have a links page with nothing but links to other sites. Those sites, in turn, link back to theirs. Google no longer pays attention to this as a valid metric. In fact, sites can even be penalized for using tactics like these. Google has made great strides over the past two to three years to present results with authentic, credible sites that have quality content.
If you really want to gain a top result on Google, the best strategy is to actually write good content about your business and the problems that you solve for your customers. Shortcut Content is the easiest, most efficient way for busy business owners to accomplish that. You will end up using the most natural language that accurately describes your customers’ problems without having to surreptitiously plant useless content.
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