The Dirty Truth About SEO
Posted by John Jones on 08 Sep 2007 at 02:02 am | Tagged as: SEO
Someone told me tonight, “It’s really a dark zone where nothing is official and everything is based on assumptions / trial & error” This came right after he said, “There is a lot of contradictory information out there about SEO”
Personally I think SEO will always be a ‘dark zone’ unless search engines start to provide us with a little black book of secrets and never change again. SEO will, in my opinion always be an imperfect science that is always expanding, evolving and straight irritating those who have to try and figure out or predict every move the search engines make.
Things that are facts right now won’t be facts in the future. I remember when the meta keyword tag was a great way to practically guarantee that the search engines will at least rank you for all the keywords you specifically put into that field. Now today I think the keyword tag is hardly used if at all across the big three; Google, Yahoo & MSN (G.Y.M.)
I’ve been working within the real estate industry for two years now; prior to that I spent three years in the vacation rental industry. During my time in real estate I’ve seen a massive change in the way both Google and Yahoo look at certain types of reciprocal links.
What does the unknown future hold for SEO’s who are trying to make a living by ranking client websites or their own within the SERP’s? Personally I think the next big shake up is going to be the whole paid directory issue that has been a fairly hot debate lately.
A prediction I have is that in a year or two, paid directories will be useless to website owners who are looking to buy a one way link. I think Google will devalue in bound links much like they devalue reciprocal links. Directory owners or on line advertising based websites will have to prove that they can drive buying customers or targeted leads to their sponsor or else they will dry up and fade away.
Past, Present or Future; the Dirty truth about SEO is that we will never know everything there is to know about what the search engines specifically look for. SEO will always be based off of assumptions / trial & error.
Note: I am talking about the science of SEO. This does not include other Internet Marketing practices like SEM. There are some practices that are controllable (little black book) to an extent and then there is SEO which will always have different results every single time you want the same thing you did to another site to work on new sites over and over again.
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Why is this truth dirty?
We make mistakes and understad more.
Hello Forex Trader,
“We make mistakes and understand more.”
I fully agree. We make mistakes, learn from them and then understand a small sliver of what may or may not be kept from us by the search engines we rely heavily on.
I chose the topic based on the two quotes. Most of my clients like to think it is as easy as following Google Guidelines but how do we get from point a to z? Well trial and error and taking risks sometimes.
I think a lot of people fail to realize that websites are mostly analyzed by programs (algorithm’s, spiders and other programs) and not human reviewed for the most part.
Personally sometimes I think it’ll be easier to impress humans than computers.
My $0.02
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