Sometimes I like to be devil’s advocate and stir the pot. Since releasing MLBO, I have been getting amazing feedback, success stories and a lot of interest. I haven’t made a penny from it, yet I find myself immersing myself in my greatest passion, learning and teaching. I’m about to teach one of my philosophies that I’ve danced around with. I know many will agree with me, however many will disagree with me and I’m hoping to create controversy. I will add that I am not the first by any stretch of the imagination to write about this controversial topic.
Local SEO will not exist in a few years
OK, local SEO, is Local Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer. I no longer call myself an SEOer. I’m an Internet Marketer. I do not ‘optimize’ a site for the search engines. I market a website using the Internet.
Is White Hat SEO just sugar coated Black Hat?
Alright, so the question of black hat and white hat rise. My clients hire me to get their site to #1. Some don’t care how I do it. Others buy my philosophies. I study black hat techniques and I can in fact play a game like Howie Schwartz. These techniques are used to dupe the search engines and simply won’t last for a sustainable business. Mom taught me, if you’re going to do something, do it right. Black Hat works, just won’t forever.
So what is black hat? Keyword stuffing, duh. What about optimizing a keyword into the H1 Tag? Enhancing the Title tag? Keyword Density? Keyword Proximity? Internal Linking with proper anchor text? I can argue that each, and every one of the above mentioned concepts is black hat, if you are using them for search engine purposes and NOT for an enhanced user experience.
On-The-Page SEO shouldn’t have a list, just quality Design and Marketing
What about validating your code? Using CSS over tables? Optimal use of flash and java? We know the search engines like certain standards, so we employ them. What about a dedicated IP, shared hosting, slow sites? Large pages? No alt tags on images? Large image sizes? These are among many factors that need to be considered when an SEOer gets to work. And this stuff only represents about 30% of your rankings weight, I haven’t touched on outside factors yet!
Point is, if you are top of your game for designing, and coding, you’ll know or will know enough to hire a quality developer who goes by the book. Your site should validate! You should reduce the size of your images! Tables are sloppy way of programming! Flash was designed to be a movie, NOT a entire website! It’s obvious to me, the search engines want a well built website using the technology the way is was meant to be used. As far as keywords, page design, content, it also makes sense. For example, you would not want to come back to this blog if new content never came in. So, the more fresh content I have, the more I’m favored by Google. Sure, you need to know what keywords people are using to find your site and put those keywords on your pages, but this isn’t optimizing a page for the search engines, this is marketing and understanding your audience, speaking their jargon. It so happens the search engines understand this and place value on those pages, and in turn we SEOers have reversed engineered the Search Engines and rarely have I found educations that says…UHM, lets just focus on proper marketing.
Don’t look for links, that’s not what SEO is about
So what about off the page stuff, that other 70%? It’s all about links, right? Of course it is. So I’m taught to analyse competitors links, in fact I teach strategies. I value links, spend efforts on the links that favor the most PR. I have people posting on forums, blogs, directories, writting articles, doing video. How shameful of me. Wait, sure, if we reversed engineers that this works, then deploy it, but in fact, I’m creating transparency and exposure in the most democratic medium we’ve ever seen. It’s no different than my local business by handing out flyers, business cards, attending trade shows and chamber meetings. Speaking at local events and getting involved with the school and churches. Transparency and Exposure. Sure, I also focus my time on the exposure that yields the highest traffic, like in the days selling cellular phones, it was the mall, not the park. If I wanted to meet womyn, it was the bar and to create trust and authority to pick up the woman, I brought my ‘player’ friends, not the geeks that I enjoyed spending time with chewing the fat on about computers.
The point is I learned sales and marketing at a young age and I’ve now realised that absolutly everything I do on the Internet can be related to my old school world. Links are merely endorsements and relationships. Like marketing my businesses in the old school world, it took time and hard work. I walked the pavement, knocked on doors, picked up the phone and made sure I played in places I needed to be, it wasn’t the park accross the street. It was those crazy early breakfast meetings at the chamber of commerce accross town, but it brought business.
SEO is Merely Quality Marketing
Alright, so I threw either water or fuel on the fire here. I’m saying that everything you do on the Internet to promote your business, local or online, if you’re going to long term growth, forget about 99% of the SEO noise you read about. Don’t worry about this or that. Close your eyes and ask yourself if what you are doing enhances either
- The visitor of your site
- The democratic value of the Internet
If you can answer yes to one of those truthfully, then chances are it’s something the search engines have already recongnized and have built into their algo.
If the answer is no, then chances are it’s black hat and don’t do it. It might work today and I challenge anyone on the Internet to this philosophy. There is nothing you can do to your website that doesn’t answer Yes to any of those and is a sustainable strategy to SEO.
Don’t hire your carpenter to sell your house
If feel sorry for all those web developers looking for work, studying SEO and calling themselves experts. They better learn marketing, or they’ll be out of business soon. I AM an Internet Marketer, not SEO guru.
Disclaimer: Notice the link at the top, Internet Marketing Guru? That’s a internal link on this post to help the search engine follow a link to my homepage, which is a keyword I begun optimizing for. So I’m contradicting myself. Of course I am. Read this post again and you’ll notice I’m not. That link sends people to a page about and Internet marketing. I live by a self fullfilling prophecy, act as if. There is no trickery here, just marketing. Keep your head focused on proper marketing and rankings will follow.
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