SEO Doesn't Exist — Good Content Does.

With so many things, people want a quick fix. Reaping big benefits without any of the work that goes along with it. When computers get involved people really like cheat and get lazy.

So I guess if you want to refer to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as digital deviousness, then ok I'll agree it does exist. It's just that many times when people discuss SEO tactics they usually involve some sort of violation of Google's TOS or SE (search engine) abuse.

Lets look at a great example of how clever SE's can be.

First of all I do not believe SEO (search engine optimization) exists. Well I guess it depends on what your definition is. I think a better way of describing what my interpretation is would be great content. Anything other thank great content boils down to 'tricks'.

Because people want to find what they are looking for, SE's want to deliver. So utilizing a few tricks is a cat and mouse game. Eventually you will be found out and your efforts will be in vein or you could be penalized, even banned. This is exactly what happened with a client of mine a few years ago. The topic of SEO came up from time to time and I got the feeling my client didn't get the answer he was looking for when I told him we needed to come up with some good content. This meant there was no quick fix or fast way to get top ranking, you'd actually have to earn it, what a bummer. So from time to time this would come up hoping my answer may change.

Then I found out that this client hired an SEO firm. My first reaction was what do they do? If it was all straight shooting then it was money well spent. But I suspected these were just tricks that would cost him in the end. Eventually these tricks will be defended and made ineffective. So rather than develop good, solid content that will never be made worthless, he probably paid thousands for a decent rank that lasted only a few weeks before these tricks were circumvented.

So a few months later not much happened with the ranking of these targeted keywords, BUT other sites began to pop up and had appeared to have stolen my clients content. These site were full of all the photos and text that my client had on his site, with the exception of better keyword density. It was the right idea but the text was non-sense. It was English and you could read it but it made no sense at all. And guess what? This site was linked my clients site (backlinks). My client became very interested to find out who was stealing his site basically. When he tried to contact the owners of these sites, it should have been no surprise that the owners of these mysterious sites were his new buddies the SEO shysters.

We had conversations about who these people were and when he explained what was going on I encouraged him to contact them and close it accounts and insist they close these sites down. I explained that eventually they would be found out and any ranking he may have had will be gone, or worse… banishment. It did take a while but he did break ties and clean up his SEO efforts. It was absolutely no more then two months later that Google placed a ban on this company and ALL OF IT'S CLIENTS. Whoa, I thought, and before I began to feel a little too cocky I called my client and explained to him what I just read. Not just to rub it in, but sometimes people don't believe it unless it happens to them. He was then convinced, and although I never charged him for any SEO work, I told him how to write good content the SE's would easily pick up. He wrote a few of these pages and deployed them. No lie within a year he went from nowhere in the top 1000 to top 10 and 5 years later is still holding that rank!

Ok so this is more of a told-ya-so story than a tip. But it is all very true while also a tip. SEO is really not what you should be practicing. I'd like to introduce a new acronym, WPCO — Web Page Content Optimization. If you have great content you will sustain good raking and never have to worry about begging Google to allow your site back into their index.