Every SEO Must Read This!

[hypernovadesign]

@molona

Not sure if I agree 100% with this. I mean the kind of person that goes for the fair play. If with dark black you’re referring to a black hat techniques… well, then I do not agree with that for two reasons:

a) It goes against my way of thinking. There’s no fair play in black hat techniques
b) It is risky and at the end of the day it can get your site penalised.

The one who doesn’t risk won’t achieve anything… but I agree with you, Google has had improved a lot in fighting black hat SEO tactics which is good. Improved organic searching is what we need when using any search engine.

[SavvycomSoftware]

@Kronomia

I am not so sure what kind of SEO firm you are running, but we are killing it BIG time on here!
SEO is becoming easier than ever as the number of people who knows what’s working are kinda decreasing with that mass of false information that is floating around the web. Many people calls themselves experts while they are struggling to rank their own sites. In my definition, an expert is the one who can rank a site in a competitive environment. Your results speak of your level not your years of experience or amount of theory. All that must encourage you to move forward if marketing is what you truly like.

In few words, if you are finding the process of ranking your site an impossible mission then it is the right time to start checking your overall techniques again. Obviously doing what 1,000+ other SEO specialists are doing won’t get you anywhere other than an episode of star wars.
Alright i get it, what should i do then?

Start with the following:

1. Write down the top 20-to-30 experts in SEO and start reading their blogs and webinars.
2. Be open minded to experiment all techniques from white hat to gray to dark black.
3. Keep experimenting and never give up unless you started feeling that this whole major is not for you. When you stop enjoying it, you won’t be able to get innovative in it.
   If SEO was just for hobby rather than profits, would you like it? if not, then it is better to find something which you are more passionate about. The ones who like optimizing, they do adore experimenting, researching and analyzing algorithms.
4. Google is taking the right steps that serves its interests. All companies does that! Don’t always think against Google… Step a bit back and think with it, try for a second to see if you can move with google rather than against it. As optimizers, Google is in charge of portion of our profits, thus we do care about the quality content as much as it does. Focus on your quality content and audience and see how it would feel that Google’s polices are moving with your motion rather than against it.
   5. SEO is not the only thing you should be doing anyway. We call it Internet Marketing which includes SEO, SEM and SMM. Invest your time in social media networks and leave Google alone for a second. Google is just a search engine, don’t confuse it with the whole web.

I hope that gives you some insight.

“SEO is a endless world of experiments with a stylish art of innovation” - R

All the Best!

Very well said, Kronomia ! This makes me recognize somethings new that I never pay attention before. Now I’m gonna change my mind on focusing on the blog content and improving quality of articles rather than building back links and maximize SEO keywords.

[guyswinburne]

I read all of your comments and thanks for it. Anyway, Google is now updating that enable users to use “conversational” search queries. Building back links and maximize keywords is no good. And I am agree with Savvy that for now focusing on content and make good quality of articles. And yet, I am still experimenting on what strategy will work and never give up that’s the important.

[Stomme_poes]

An interesting ramble on semantics here: http://infrequently.org/2013/11/long-term-web-semantics/

Has this little section

Search Engines

The role of crawlers and engines is misunderstood by most everyone I talk to. Webdevs spend a lot of time thinking about “semantics” and “SEO” without any real conception of the goals and motives behind search pipeline. There are deep questions here — what should a search engine return when I ask it a question? what is my relationship to it? — but we can ignore them for now. My view is that the best answer a search engine can give you is the one you would have picked for yourself hand you been able to read a corpus of billions of documents. And the explicit goal of the crawl engineers I have talked to is make that dream come true.

As a practical matter, what does that mean for semantics? Well, you wouldn’t pick a document that hid half the content from you, would you? And you surely wouldn’t have picked it for that content. Indeed, documents that present a different view to the crawler than to users are likely spammy. Looking at what Matt Cutts presents, you get a pretty clear picture: the index is trying to see the web the way you see it…and of course, then help you pick an answer. But that’s all predicated on some sort of “understanding”…and the platonic ideal of “understanding” content isn’t something to do with sub rosa embedded data, it’s about the thing the page was trying to communicate to the user in the first place in the way the user would have understood it.

I can’t stress this enough: when we as web developers get tied in knots about “semantics” and web crawlers, we’re mostly worrying about absolutely the wrong thing. Sure, go figure out what works and what not to do, but the thing to always keep in the back of your mind is that all of this is temporary. The goal of search engines it to understand pages the way you do. To the extent they don’t, that’s a bug to be fixed — and it will be.

If the goal of a search engine is to understand the page the way the user does, then the semantics we care about are the ones that are meaningful to users. The idea that we should create some other layer of meaning above/below/to-the-side of content is…a non-sequiter.
[… more about semantics further on]

[lalit7552]

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation …

So optimise your or clients websites according to the search engine.

Provide quality content and have good strategy … you will win in long term.

Try SMO (Social Media Optimisation) as your next career.

[lalit7552]

Thank god OP is not from alta vista search engine era … where simple stuffing meta tags can rank you well …

[hypernovadesign]

@lalit7552

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation …
Try SMO (Social Media Optimisation) as your next career.

Sorry, but I couldn’t stand that sentence… Being a SE Optimiser must be a very tedious and boring career. Don’t you agree?

[lalit7552]

@hypernovadesign

Sorry, but I couldn’t stand that sentence… Being a SE Optimiser must be a very tedious and boring career. Don’t you agree?

If you are doing everything by yourself, like building backlinks and all than this can be tedious. In that case you should hire someone to do those task which you do not like to do.

Otherwise SEO is quite interesting and leave how google work.

I do not know about you, but I am loving it

[aksaini]

@rajatcverma

I don’t understand why Google is behaving like a enemy to SEO??

Sure Google is enemy of SEO. But you should know that it is a search engine and working in people and its own betterment. You can not like anything which can not provide you results. Same in case of other people. So Google provide them best result so that they like and use it. And to do so it used to generates new algorithms. You only need to change your work process according to algorithms updates.

@rajatcverma

I am a Team Leader in my company 8 SEO’s are working under me so should I say to my team that Google will not provide us Keyword Ranking therefore you all are unemployed now our company can’t afford you and for myself I am working as an SEO from last 5 years it’s very difficult for me to start a new career now.

It seems that you are too much emotional and expecting too much from Google. You forgot what Google target is? Google is not just to provide people job. Be professional at this point.

@rajatcverma

I Hope Google will think about it and our career will be secure.

Please do not mind but you are expecting which can never be done. It is not Google’s goal.

Also I would like to add that SEO can never die. Only the process can change. At this time you can not be SEO expert if you don’t know programming skills. To attract traffic On-Page SEO is must. And you will require programming skills for w3c validation, url rewrite, compressing code size, maintaining HTML/Text ratio and for many other process.

[ArticleOwl]

This is what brought me to Sitepoint. It seems Google’s search relevance mission has crippled a lot of people. This includes people who are using Adsense. How could advertisers not be offended. Male enhancement products and such are usually advertised on sites that would be hit hard by all of this. It just seems they are shooting their advertisers ion the foot.

[mattylad]

Google dont hate on SEO - they just prefer paid advertising instead! Lets face it - they make no money from SEO at all. Why we think they are against SEO, is because it feels like they are making it harder and harder to get ranked - well they’re NOT - they are simply trying to improve the user experience to maintain their world dominance. If their result relevance starts to drop, then so will the users… Its as simple as that. Buck your SEO strategy up and you’ll be fine!

[steveharris945]

Did you guys notice that in Google Analytics they provide less keywords now than before? Most of it are now set to “not provided”.

[moralezhub]

This is a very big challenge for all of us. It’s not that easy, unlike before, that we can rank a website by just using an automated softwares and tools. Today, we need to manually do the backlinking process. Google made the playing field equal to both gurus and newbies.

[TechnoBear]

The issues seem to have been discussed pretty thoroughly, and the OP has never returned, so I think it’s time to close the thread before it becomes repetitive.

Thanks to all who contributed.