12 Months Without SEO
Author: Roy Thomsitt

It is more than a year now since I concluded that Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) was, or was soon going to become, a waste of
time. I had already, 6 months before then, said farewell to
spending an hour a day working on getting reciprocal links.

What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very
rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being
expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good
ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed
still. Search engine positioning software was still being
heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz
term being branded around as if it were an essential science to
be practised by all good SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received
my marketing training back in the 1980's and had practical
marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990's.
I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still
see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your
market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then
clearly a major part of that market was the major search
engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear
leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal
linking went, it was becoming a spammers' zone. Surely, I
argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web
site highly just because the web master had the tools and the
time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not
make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a
web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying
links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best
web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a
matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the
abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam,
scraping and extreme SEO'ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real
thought of SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what
search engines wanted: original content on what people were
searching for. While I did provide title and description tags,
everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis.
The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural
flow. I could just write to my heart's content without using
any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self
improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting
to be "Sandboxed" by Google because of that, and so it proved.
But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-SEO principle.
Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is
such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting
time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting
pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my
site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at
last, I was able see whether my no SEO approach was to yield
any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were
immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of
those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1
position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is
much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident
that SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts,
especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you
believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one
major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS.
Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search
engine robots is the most important aspect of the new,
simplified SEO. In fact, following Google's advice to
webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue
that I could do even better with their software. But if Google
decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then
all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to
chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing
content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.


About The Author: Learn and earn your way to success at
http://www.routes-to-self-improvement.com/Su.php