SEO marketing has been a mainstay of Internet marketing ever since it made the transition from an IT function to be the domain of marketers. Over the years the main consistency has been that SEO is ever changing. Google and other search engines do their programing and then crafty marketers figure out how to game the system and then Google strikes back and changes the rules starting the game over. Many marketers, myself included, are starting to get the hint Google has been hitting us over the head with time and again and that is: don’t try to cheat the system, publish good content that user will make use of. The questions still remains; “How to Future Proof SEO?”
This past week I attended a webinar put on by Nate Dame, the CEO and Founder of SEOPerks.com, and he addresses the topic of future proofing SEO. It was a good seminar with a lot of great takeaways. I want to share a few of them with you that I found the most interesting.
One of the first things he covered is that SEO is now a full part of a good digital marketing program. All the parts of the machine like Content, Social Media, Demand and all the rest need to work in unison and SEO is part of that machine. I like that concept and know from personal experience that not having all the parts of the machine working together make SEO almost impossible–or at least difficult and takes all the fun out of the work.
One of Nate’s key points was “Don’t Chase What Works”. I know this sounds crazy and I thought so to when he said it. However, he went on to explain that we should not spend time on the new fads or way to game the system, instead stick with what works– publishing good deep content that is of value to users among others. Again he is saying it is not worth it to try to cheat the system. My dad always taught me that “If a job is worth doing, do it right the first time.”
Another point he hit on was “One-Page SEO”. This seems so simple. I cannot understand why people still want to stuff keywords on the backend of a site on every page, even if the page in question is not about all of it. I know I still have clients that want a whole laundry list of keywords on every page and don’t want to listen to the idea of make the SEO for each page specific to that page and not the site in general. It was nice to hear a professional talking about the right way to do things.
One thing that I learned that I did not know before was about Google Rank-Modifying Spam Patent. In a nutshell what this means is Google will randomly rank a website that has undergone SEO changes for a period of time to keep marketers on their toes and to avoid them coming up with new ways to game the system. The big impact that this has for me as a marketer is I need to let website owners what to expect when we start working on a website and making changes so they don’t freak out every day with the ranking changes right up front. (To learn more about it here is a link to a good article by Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea. http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/08/google-rank-modifying-spammers-patent/)
All in all it was a great webinar that I learned a lot from and will be looking for the next one to learn from.
http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/08/google-rank-modifying-spammers-patent/