Not entirely true, but you have to do it really well, blindly posting crap on forums, blogs etc. is a total waste of time.
Of course SEO is worth doing, it exists much the same as it always has, it’s just gradually becoming impossible to cheat it. I have two sites performing poorly either on extremely competitive keywords (like “web design” which is a ball breaker) or because one is Flash based but the vast majority I SEO are in a totally happy place relying as they always have done on good on-page optimisation and high quality backlinks built up over many years, I have some very small companies in great positions alongside major corporations, and I’m not some MIT level analyser of data with hundreds of software packages spewing numbers at me, or permanently attached to Reddit or Twitter. SEO works just fine if you get the basics right and keep at it, some keywords need a little more, some don’t.
There are some weird results out there but it’s simmering down and overall SERPS have been cleared of a lot of duplicate junk and poor websites that relied entirely on a nice domain name or spamming article submission all over the web, this is progress, it just means SEO will be a more expensive service from pros or something you need to dedicate more quality time to for DIYers, we’ve already seen the massive degradation of quality forums, blogs, article sites, directory sites etc. caused by making it easy, I assume everyone has come across plenty of duff results of terrible websites which just had a great EMD and article spinning software, the change is in the right direction and will continue refining, it’s a good thing.
However, this one tip has landed me free products and more web traffic than I have been able to get in any other way. Take the time to pick the right long tail keywords…
I wrote a review a few days ago for an obscure product.
It ended up being the most shared post on my own personal blog and the marketing team for that company contacted me personally to send me a free gift and that my friends is awesome…
It’s interesting to me because for the past decade the same types of posts are on different sites, but on the whole SEO is still the same thing: content and links. While the engines are much more sophisticated now in detecting spam and identifying bad neighborhoods, it’s still the same game. The only thing Panda and Penguin did was purge a ton of crap from the system and make it more difficult to easily rank for high competition keywords.
Keep a focus on content and keep thinking about how to get links relevant to your industry. The end.
That’s what I keep telling my clients but nope. They think that hiring an SEO Wizard is going to magically make their one day old business startup into the most popular Facebook or Twitter clone on the planet. Haha.
I want to facepalm every time on a meeting like that.
Ha, I feel your pain! I generally always pitch SEM as the 100M dash while SEO is a marathon. If you want immediate gratification, do some CPC in tandem with SEO. As far as rankings go I always, always, always tell clients that they’re looking at 3-6 months to see any movement and 1-2 years to see top rankings (assuming they’re decent volume and high competition).
I think for a lot of clients SEO is something new. I mean, I know it’s not new to us.
But they just heard about it yesterday. It sounds awesome and magical and delicious and they want to eat their lucky charms right now. I wish they would talk to guys like you more often.
I swear, some of these SEO Wizards they hire are doing nothing but selling them snake oil. Yet, I as the copywriter, am the one that gets looked at suspiciously as though I am going to somehow hypnotize people into doing something they don’t want to do.
It’s a funny world we live in but all in all I can’t complain.
Yeah, it’s sad how much misinformation is out there about what SEO is. I remember after filing a new LLC (I moved to a different state) getting bombarded with calls and e-mails from people scraping the Secretary of State websites regarding SEO. All of it was bunk - “$99 for GUARANTEED 1st page rankings” type stuff. The funniest thing still is people who talk about “free” traffic from SEO when the reality is it’s pretty damn expensive.