What is SEO?

SEO has, for a long time, consisted of focussing on two things - onsite factors and offsite factors.

The most important onsite factors are concerned with having carefuly chosen keywords, above all in the ‘title’ and in the heading, plus a couple of times in the text - which should also be surrounded with relevant text to emphasise what the page content is about.

Offsite, we have been concerned with links of course. Where possible, these should be links with our keywords as the anchor text, as we all know, plus a decent percentage of variants in the anchor text so we don’t appear to be cheating.

Pretty straightforward stuff, and effective. But times, as they say, are a changing.

There is something that troubles me slightly. I have noticed that parts of sites that have no links with the ‘correct’ anchor text and little in the way of on-page optimising have started to do pretty well in the results.

I have a page that ranks number 2 in google for a moderately competitive term but has NO links containing the term, and the exact word combination does not appear on the page even once.

I have another page that gets over 1000 visitors a day, also with little effort or optimisation. Similarly I have a picture that ranks number 1 in google images - but has no alt tag and no title (and I blush to admit it but the picture was a public domain picture from Wikipedia).

Meanwhile I have pages and phrases I have tried hard to get to rank highly, and when I eventually get to the top of the results…I find there are really not so many people searching for that phrase, despite what the SEO tools had suggested.

So all this leads me to think that google are actually much more advanced than I, and perhaps many SEOs, realised at identifying relevant pages. The harder we try to optimise, the harder we are making it for ourselves.

I am aware that LSI is supposed to mean that they can do this but frankly I have always taken it with a pinch of salt. But no more. I believe they are coming on very fast in getting to the ‘real’ meaning of a page of text.

I have been going through pages for the last few weeks ‘un-optimising’ them, and traffic has continued to increase. I’ve still got a lot of un-optimising to do though!

If your Dad made a website would he put the same keywords in the title, the heading, and every second paragraph of the text? No. It isn’t natural, and you should try to avoid it.

This theory might fall apart for very competitive terms, I’m not sure, but for the time being I suspect the approach is, to pretend you know nothing of SEO. Unlearn what you do know, and really truly just make a quality site that people want to visit, on a subject that interests you. It’s a whole lot more fun as well.

One proviso? A new site needs some active link building to get it found in the first place. i have a site with about 200 pages of useful content that I have been slowly working on for a few months without any site promotion at all, and it gets more or less no visitors. You do need to ‘kickstart’ your site to get it off the ground in the first place.

How? I suspect free directories, a few link exchanges, and if possible some links from your other sites, really are still the most effective route, despite the dire warnings you will hear about the pitfalls of all three of these methods. I wouldn’t even dare suggest you might buy a couple of temporary links, for fear that the sky might fall on my head, but that choice is also available.