Over the past 12 years, I’ve watched SEO (search engine optimization) evolve.
People often ask me to do an updated video on SEO to talk about what I do differently now. (My last SEO video was published in 2008.)
I hate to disappoint you, but my SEO strategy really hasn’t changed much over the years — mainly because it hasn’t had to. So I’m not sure I’d have anything new to tell you.
I don’t use numerous SEO plug-ins on my blog. I don’t fuss much over dofollow vs nofollow, nor do I sit and count page keywords, count backlinks, submit to article and regular directories or stress over meta tags. So why does my search engine traffic keep increasing?
The first reason is my site is mature and has a lot of backlinks. That gives me a clear advantage. The second reason is that I continue to earn more voluntary backlinks from people who generously link to my site.
So the engines look at the big picture when deciding how “relevant” a site is for a particular keyword phrase. So it’s not just about content or just about backlinks. It’s a mixed bag of criteria.
SEO in 2010 and Beyond
The present and future of SEO is all about authentic popularity. What do I mean by authentic? I mean getting voluntary links from relevant sites that are credible and popular in the eyes of the search engines.
If your site is about home decor and a popular home decor site decides to feature or link to you in a blog post, that’s the kind of authentic backlink you want. Or perhaps you write a guest post on a popular blog in your niche. Now that’s what I call an authentic, quality backlink.
Too many people are still trying to fake their popularity by haphazardly submitting to worthless sites/directories or going on link exchange hunts. The search engines have caught on to the tricks and ignore many of the backlink schemes people use to falsely inflate their popularity.
There have been many SEO tricks and tactics used over the years. Sooner or later people find a way to exploit and abuse them, so the engines have to adjust their algorithms.
My Pet Peeve
What really irks me is all the bad information out here that confuses and misleads.
One problem is there are too many marketing blogs that talk about SEO, but they are authored by people who don’t have the traffic to back up their information and tutorials. They are just paraphrasing information from other wrong/misleading sites, but have no proof that these tips actually work.
So you have a bunch of people with no SE traffic writing about how to get SE traffic because they read about tips on other blogs that also have no SE traffic. Ugh!!
New webmasters and bloggers read this information, adopt these same strategies, write about them on their blogs and the cycle of bad information continues to infect the Web.
How many blog posts have you seen touting the best SEO plugins that supposedly boost your traffic when the publishing blog has little or no traffic? Hmmm…
For the record, I have nothing against SEO plug-ins. In fact, I use one myself. I’m just not convinced that using 15 SEO plug-ins is any better than using one or two. I think they can be helpful when it comes to getting your pages indexed, but I have absolutely no proof they improve your rankings. And until I have some, you won’t see me writing much about the effectiveness of such plug-ins — at least not from a traffic standpoint.
The Engines Keep Getting Smarter
Any SEO tactic/strategy that involves deceiving the engines in regards to your popularity will have little or no effect on your rankings. For example, anyone can create a bunch of backlinks by going out and submitting to a gazillion directories. The same goes for link exchanges.
So it’s natural for Google to put less emphasis on these links when they calculate a site’s rank. In fact, they even removed the directory submission tip from their SEO guidelines as explained in the video below.
Matt Cutts is very clear that if there is no discretion involved with the sites offering the links (meaning anyone can get listed if they pay/submit) then Google immediately devalues the backlink. That’s important SEO information that too many people ignore.
SEO for the Long Run
If you want to make an impact with SEO, spend time coming up with ways to stand out so people will feature/link to you voluntarily. You’ll be amazed at how many generous people will be when it comes to featuring you on their sites, etc.
Write guest posts for as many relevant, popular blogs as you can. Use social media to network with people in your niche. Be bold and get creative. Dare to be different from your competition. Read up on “pillar content” and make sure your site has plenty of it.
When you become authentically popular, you won’t have to stress over the next PageRank update, meta tags, finding dofollow sites or how high your keyword density is on a page.
They’ll be no need to jump every time the engines make major adjustments. Your rankings will likely remain stable (or even increase) because you’ll have authentic votes (quality backlinks) for your site instead of fake popularity through numerous directory submissions, link exchanges, etc.
I’m not saying you should ignore basic SEO techniques like keyword-rich page names, using major keywords in your domain, keyword-focused content, etc.
Of course you should still create your pages to target certain phrases, interlink your pages with relevant anchor text, create a sitemap, etc.
However, I think it’s a waste of time to spend your days hunting for backlinks and link exchanges. A few relevant exchanges and directory submissions are fine, but no need to get excessive with it.
I’m convinced that if people spend half as much time coming up with creative ways to present their information as they do hunting for worthless backlinks, it would make a world of difference in their SE traffic.
When you focus on quality and are unique with your delivery and presentation, your followers will do a lot of the marketing for you and the search engines will reward you accordingly.
But Wait…
I know what you’re thinking. Sure, Lisa. You’ve been out here forever so you have a mature site that has benefited from good rankings for a long time.
That is certainly true, but how do you explain the people who have gained good rankings for fairly competitive terms in the past few years? Notice that they never credit directory submissions or link exchanges as a top strategy for building traffic to their sites?
I’ve yet to read a book or article from a successful website owner where they credit link exchanges or directory submissions as their primary traffic building strategy. I honestly never have.
Usually they give credit to guest posting, social media strategies, or they are excellent communicators and draw in an audience with their awesome writing skills.
Sure they use and understand basic SEO strategies like using a sitemap, creating keyword-focused pages, etc. but the emphasis is never on chasing a bunch of dofollow links from various sites.
I apologize if this post is too harsh or critical. As I said earlier, I’ve been out here a while so I am looking at this from a different perspective.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore the numerous emails, forum posts, and FB fan page questions about gaining backlinks quickly in order to get traffic. It just reminds me of how much misleading information there is on SEO.
I’m getting a little tired of all the poor, irresponsible tips that leave people spinning their wheels when they could be using that time to do more productive things that will truly impact their SEO in a positive manner.
Your Thoughts?
I’d especially love to hear from those of you who got started within the last few years. If you have decent search engine rankings for competitive terms, what techniques and strategies do you credit for those rankings?
And if you truly believe in using 50 SEO plugins or submitting to countless directories, what proof do you have this truly has helped your rankings?
I’d really love to squash a lot of the SEO myths and hype out here for the newbies who read this blog. Let’s discuss!
Few days ago I subscribed for a newsletter, from SEO company. After their “many thanks for your subscription” please follow the link to activate your subscription. I received an email from them as their welcome email, with some best some techniques of link building and then I got that they are referring to use a link building software in order to build link for a website. I agreed with you that its hard to trust on any company, because many of them are spreading some false information over the internet. Be aware of them
As a frustrated SEO, I agree with the majority of what you are saying. However, it is extremely difficult to get clients to make blog posts on a regular basis or update their content. I like the teaching aspect and believe I will go that way with my own site. Thanks for the useful information…
Orlando
Great Article! excelent SEO Advice im actually watching all your video in you tube and i learned a lot 🙂
Great post for a newbie .. I just stared my blog and not really worried about SEO yet .. but here I am learning about it so that I’ll have some background knowledge to apply to my blog in the future.
Monica.
Authentic Popularity, that’s the first time I heard that term. I like it.
Do you mind if I borrow it (and link back to your site, of course) in one of my blog posts.
Tons of people in the Industry, spreads information about getting backlinks and gaming the system.
There are also people who are have “Fake popularity”.
It’s quite easy to buy fb likes, fans, and followers.
But what you can’t fake is engagement and that is gold.
Thanks for this post Lisa. Loved it!
You sure can, Ryan. Be my guest. 🙂
Great post!
As SEO gets more and more complex the actual facts are becoming extinct…
It’s all theories now, which makes everyone an “expert”… Draby’s right, quality content breeds ranking boosts..
Lisa, no advice from me as I am new to blogging and website development. I am just passionate about sharing my love of travel through my blog. What I do want to do however, is thank you for the valuable info that I certainly needed!
I personally think the reason your website draws so much traffic is because you provide high quality content and it’s interesting to read. That’s what people want! I’ve been browsing a few of your pages so far, before leaving this comment and I personally, am ecstatic over the information you provide here, so Thank You!
In terms of SEO I think it’s important but it is definitely hard to sort out the ‘hype’ from the ‘reality’ in terms of how to best utilize SEO.
Wow thanks Darby!
Interesting article. I have recently started up a film blog but I didn’t realise how much SEO work is required. It is quite perplexing. Good advice.
It’s good to hear a breakdown of what really works from someone who’s been there. Also shows that it’s still about doing the work, posting relevant content for your audience and reaching out through social media channels to connect. Then the traffic comes to you.
Thanks for the insight, Lisa!
Very interesting article ! There is so much misleading SEO info out there!
I have seen lots of webmaster speaks about seo tricks, but seriously ver few people follow them. I dont think seo plugins work, instead we can work on optimizing website manually. thanks for your thoghts.
Working hard on real estate websites, Real estate brokers dubai
ya, i’ve really learned much here today. Am new in all this web developing stuffs, all my dream was to get millions of traffic in one day bt now i’ve just found out the secret. thank everybody and lisa..
I like visiting blogs because the posts discusses in detail on the topics but sometimes browsing my favorite blogs also gets a bit boring because all my favorite bloggers writes only on SEO. Learning about SEO is very important but there are just too many SEO gurus out there and we have to find the genuine ones.
Hello,
I really enjoy your honesty in this post.
During my time in this business I’ve heard a lot about SEO and the complications that go along with it. They way I now perceive it is to simply write excellent content and your pages will rank.
Wow – this just totally made my day *or actually night as it is midnight!* and motivated me , once again, to add content to my site rather than stress over backlinks. 🙂
This is a great post!
I hope you don’t mind… Then again why would you… I’m sending this links to all of my SEO subscribers..
Thanks,
JOE – SEO INFO
Good post Lisa. Several of your readers have pointed it out, but I think as long as you focus on making a quality site and doing some basic publicity for it, the rest will take care of itself. That’s still the easiest way to get quality links – make something worth linking to!
Amen!! This whole SEO Get Rich quick idea needs to stop. I literally had to stop hanging around my webmaster friends because all they talk about is SEO, New secret, Google Algorithms and Back links. Back links to a site that sucks won’t do you any good. i focus my time on Strategy, Content, and Copy that sells. I will let Google do what it does, and build traffic the old fashion way “hard work, not SEO tricks”. I’m not religious but a good quote from the bible says it all. “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I CAN, And “WISDOM” to know the difference!!!”. Great Post.
Sometimes, I get confused on which info to take and which not to take. Even the so called gurus feed us with a lot of misinformation.
Link building can be one of the most difficult parts of SEO, and unfortunately, it’s practically half of what SEO is about. There are many different techniques to building good, quality links. The trick to getting links from sites that will provide your site with some good, succulent, link juice, is to simply find the right site.
Hi Lisa
An intelligent post. I agree that there is a huge amount of misleading SEO information out there. Like most in our industry, I am self taught, and over the years I have struggled to separate ‘the wheat from the chaff’ with SEO advice.
The problem as I see it is that publishing SEO advice is a great SEO strategy, as it attracts traffic, sometimes backlinks, and helps with a site’s keyword density for useful words like ‘SEO’ 🙂
My advice is just to find one really good SEO blog you trust and stick with it. I always use http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/ (I am not associated with them), their advice has never failed me over the years.
Best
Joan
Excellent SEO advice. If you want to have your website rank high in the search engines it is very important that you write original content. The content should also be free, useful, and something that is searched for by many people.
When you provide content that helps people learn more about a subject some of those people will help you by linking to your website. This will build up backlinks. Backlinks help build up your search engine rankings.
Building up quality backlinks takes time. It won’t happen overnight. Stay away from link farms, the search engines don’t like them.
Also don’t try to trick the search engines because if you do they will catch you and when they do they will penalize your website.
Lisa, I think your advice in these columns is worth every second of time spent reading them. I’m still in the researching how-to-do-it-right stage, with many ideas popping into my head to get in front of people. Glad I found your site, and it was in the process of figuring out how to get my own work online and marketed, without making a mess of the process. This is great stuff.
HI Lisa.
Love you post- as always- How do you feel about blogs that have mostly guest blogs? I have noticed a lot of the the top bloggers seem to have constant guest bloggers these days, and they hardly post on their own blog. Could these sites end up being viewed as content farms like article sites?
I agree about all the misinformation out there, very confusing to newbies like me.
I’ve just started studying SEO and I think that link exchange programs can be really useful (I’ll see soon enough) if done correctly. First off, in a link exchange it should be a one way link. So I link your site from my blog and you link my site from your site, for example. And the links being exchanged should be relevant. I’ve read a lot on this and this page has certainly been helpful. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing these greats tips. Really. Many thanks.
Thanks Lisa,
That video you posted with Matt Cutts is brilliant. I recommend everyone check his channel out on Youtube for more stuff like that.
The problem is that most people don’t know or are incapable of creating a genuinely popular blog. Professional SEO companies for instance thrive on businesses that want high SERPS but don’t know how to get them organically. In fact I really think though that people should be less concerned with traffic, and simply enjoy the blogging process. If it ain’t fun it ain’t worthwhile after all.
Pete
I think the ‘authentic popularity’ concept is great but still I see a lot of people are doing great without it. I think they find success in short-term but they fail in long term.
🙂
I am a major newbie here and I am confuse as ever I wish someone can walk me through on how to make my page better 🙁 like web design and content and tricks to get a better traffic.
I am a bit confused on this idea Lisa, or really everyone that commented. I am newbie, well 4 months or so. In 4 months I learned CSS, HTML, built a website about dogs (still ongoing but a good 50 pages in.) So in a nutshell I am addicted! I love it.
However, you won’t get links ever if no one can find you. Right? And you need back links to get in the engines, well anywhere near the first 20 pages.
So…I want to keep building content. I want to record my stories, make things different, but even if I do that SE won’t find me. So I need the back links. Right?
Hi Danielle
Nothing wrong with QUALITY backlinks. For example, you write a guest post on a related blog and the owner of the blog links back to you. Or you find a really good directory related to your niche that uses discretion (doesn’t accept everyone). I don’t think Google gives much weight to most directories, but it doesn’t hurt to get listed in a couple of quality ones that are related. These are two examples of good, quality backlinks.
Once you start promoting your site in social media and networking with others, people will discover you and often feature your site, etc. That’s the right way to grow your backlinks over time. It’s a slow process but it works.
The point I was making is that people are just trying to post links any and everywhere they can without focusing on quality. Relevant, backlinks from quality sites are always good, but people spend too much time obsessing over links that aren’t as important (link exchanges, too many directories, etc.) If you start promoting your site on YouTube, social media, guest posting, and learn SEO people will find you.
Hi Danielle, congrats on your quick learning of CSS and HTML, AND getting a 50 page site up within 4 months… pretty impressive!
Lisa pretty much covered the backlinking, but there’s some things you can do with your content on-page that will greatly effect your search engine placement. I took a look at your site, and I suggest you take a look at your page titles, heading tags, your img tag alt text to make sure you are optimizing those with your keywords.
For instance your home page title begins with “Readers information about…” . That should be removed altogether. You want your title for each page to have your most important keywords for that page as close as possible to the beginning. Your h1 heading does contain “dog breeds” which is good, but then your h2 is “Site updates for our readers”… not good. Perhaps something like “Dog Breed Forum Updates – More info on A-Z Dog Breeds”.
Your off to a great start, with a lot of great content. Tweak your on-page SEO, get a few quality backlinks as Lisa said, and your well on your way!
Thanks Lisa and Tom!
I read this blog last night and got my motivation back (before I saw your replies.) You both have websites that just…easy. You just write. It sounds natural. That’s the fun part.
This is a great message, because people DO focus too much time on getting back links. I find that very tedious and become disengaged. Quality back links like Lisa mentioned are the key are more interesting (like joining a dog forum in my case.)
Thanks for taking the time to write and point me in the right direction. Greatly appreciated!
Firstly, though i’m not planning now for having a web-site to get money or becoming an affiliate, i like you
really, i just like your method of providing info
very effective and impressive
your style is amazing and moreover attractive
Now as your web-site has grown up, and it built a quiet good
credibility;
How much (you think ) your web-site may be estimated if you are going to sell ?
i have no intent for myself to buy, but just wondering.
You are absolutely correct that for most people, SEO looks more like alchemy, (the imaginary art of turning ordinary objects into gold). I wished for a long time that there was a simple plugin for WordPress that could SEO my posts for me, using good optimization principles. Well, I finally found it. (Note: I am not an affiliate for this product, so there is no self-promotion here). I wonder if any of your readers have discovered it. I can only say that it works beautifully for me. It is called Scribe. Anyone have any experience with it out there?
I really needed to read this post. I have recently created a website and I love all aspects of it except SEO! I have been researching like crazy only to end up more confused than I was in the first place. I am hoping to get the hang of it eventually. Until I get better with SEO, I will stick with creating quality content.
You’ve made some great points here.I only use one seo plugin to help with adding and customizing titles, descriptions, etc for various pages and I think this type of articles have to benefits every website SEO person.
People just want the good and correct applicable seo technique.. but sometimes we don’t know exact place to learn it instead from misleading SEO.
YOu had done a great job by posting a great matter regarding SEO coz it will help me as well us others too. 🙂
Lisa, I’m a newbie. I made a website a year ago. I thought it was a build it and they will come kind of thing. A year later my website wasn’t ranking. About 3-4 months ago I became more serious about seo. My website is ranking alot better now, but no where near where I want it to be. But it keeps getting better.