Part of a Successful SEO Strategy Is Just Being Natural
Google and other search engines factor in that many sites online today are produced and published by people who don’t have all that much experience with the Internet, optimizing for search engines, HTML and things of that nature. Over the years, technology has made it possible for anyone with any skill level to create a web page, web site or even a blog. Quite honestly, things are much easier today for people who want to have a web site compared to say 5 to 10 years ago.
While there are quite a few people who are indeed SEO gurus, it seems also that there are sites created by very entry level Internet publishers. With the entry level publishers I have actually seen many times that their pages and posts rank very well in the search engines but also go completely against the grain of what most all experienced SEOs would advice or even put into their own practice.
Some times a great SEO strategy is to just do nothing. This might sound silly, but really, search engines have no choice but to compensate for mistakes in HTML and other forms of coding. Furthermore, search engines have to compensate for spelling and other forms of grammar errors. What I mean to say by doing nothing, is really more less in your site building. While I’ll admit, it indeed is important to have a search engine friendly web site or blog, I often question how effective it is for an individual publisher to invest tons of time and money into making sure that every single element in SEO strategy is performed.
If search engines such as Google were to hold to true to the common SEO techniques that many of the more experienced professionals use, then the result be that these search engines would have a very low volume of listings in their index. Search engines have to assume that there is a large percentage of publishers who are not expert coders and programmers. Otherwise, their index of data would be very very low.
What does that mean for you? Granted, if you are reading this, it is very likely that you are pretty keen on search engines or at a minimum have at least a basic understanding of search engines, how they work and possibly how to get listed in them. SEO professionals really tend to complicate things. This always puzzles me as I can see time and time again situations where non-SEO’ed sites get ranked very well in the search engines.
Amazingly, the sites that I see that do very well are sites that are authored or owned by people who don’t even know what the term search engine optimization means. These level of publishers just focus on what is important to them and their visit visitors and that is the content.
If you are conscious of your SEO and how well your web site and individual pages rank in the search engines, I would suggest that you focus more on your writing. The content within a page has the highest potential to be SEO’ed rather than the actual coding of the page. Google is very forgiven on design and coding efforts. Google is in it for the content and their bots do a pretty decent job at finding content. If it was any other way, then Google and other search engines would have a very difficult time archiving informaiton for their database.
So really, in my opinion, one of the best SEO strategies starts with the content you write. From there you can or should worry about proper coding, HTML, tagging and things like that. The foundation of everything you do online starts with the content. If you don’t have good content on your pages to work from, then you have really no hope with a successful organic search engine ranking campaign.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Hi Gary, I would have to agree with you in some cases.I know people who don’t do any SEO to their website-they just add pages and pages of content to their website, write articles for the back links.
This is all they do and they get some huge traffic passing through their site each month.So it seems that all you have to do is to constantly create, fresh engaging relevant content and your off to a great start.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:06 am
I share the same opinion on the content issue. Take two blogs, after one month, one posts 1 article a week and focuses on SEO and the other 5 well written quality articles. The site with more content has a broader base of keywords and more terms to be included for, more long tails and generally a better chance of getting ranked for more keywords. I read in Google’s optimization guide that they like fresh content to crawl, you’re right some times the best strategy is no strategy at all…
July 17th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
I suppose your post Garry reflects the term that is thrown around the internet a lot – ‘Content is King’.
In the short time I have been involved in IM, everything I have read and focussed on has been getting the SEO right and even though I knew content was important, I have spent considerable time and money ensuring all the SEO boxes were ticked first before anything else.
This post Garry has certainly made the process clearer for me and put it into perspective.
Another quality article buddy.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I don’t know why, but even now I following SEO Contest that held by Busby WebSolutions (an Australian IT Company), I’m agree with your post above. The best SEO Technique is no technique at all. Just being natural. Never think too much about dofollow or nofollow link.
But Garry, what’s your opinion if I say that many factor in SEO isn’t so important? that the most important to get better SERP now is only about quantity of quality backlink ?
I’m sorry for asking this, cause I’m just a SEO Newbie from Indonesia and what lesson I get from following Busby SEO Challenge it’s only about get as many as quality backlink. (I’m sorry too if my English not so good).
July 18th, 2008 at 12:17 am
[...] saturate your content with the keyword phrases that you are targeting. The best thing to do is just write naturally and allow your writing talents to kick [...]
August 4th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I concur with the obove opinion. SEO companies will give you the 30 to 70 ratio, which legitimizes their existence and fees. That being 30 percent of good rankings is content and 70 percent is offsite optimization (ex. Backlinks that they have the inside corner on) I am not convinced on their analysis. I think its 60 percent content and 40 percent offsite.
April 25th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
While a content-rich site will undeniably do better than one without content, I have to say that you guys are short-selling SEO techniques. A site with great content only can do well without SEO if there is a small amount of competition.