Long before I even knew what internet marketing was, I was playing around with websites. I built hobby websites, and built websites for friends. When I was building these websites, frames were still considered “cool” and animated .gifs were “the bomb.” The web was still young, and while I didn’t know what internet marketing was, I knew the importance of getting traffic to my sites (even if I was using on-page counters to track that traffic).
So, what is a kid playing around with websites to do? It’s not like I had a marketing budget. So, I did the logical thing: I found other websites that catered to similar audiences, and I e-mailed them and asked them for links. Then, I found directories that catered to my audience, and submitted my sites to these directories. Fast forward quite a few years, and after an aborted legal career, I found myself learning about and working in internet marketing. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the exact things that I had been doing 10+ years ago, simply because they were the only way I knew how to get traffic, were now called SEO, and firms were charging lots of money for those services.
When I was link building, it wasn’t for the purposes of optimizing for search engines. Hell, Google didn’t even exist at the time, and Yahoo was more of a directory than a search engine. I was just building links to get the value that was intrinsic to those links.
I think that’s the reason why I’ve always had such a hard time wrapping my head around the SEO industry. On the one hand, it’s all common sense. On the other hand, the way firms go about doing SEO and link-building makes no sense.
The goal behind link-building in SEO is primarily, and in some cases exclusively, to increase search engine ranking. What happened to the days when I got those links for my websites, and all I was looking for was the traffic that those links provided. Here’s the thing that seems to get lost in a lot of the SEO shuffle: link building has value in and of itself.
As an example, Leo Babauta, author of the Zen Habits blog, one of the most popular blogs in the world, and one that has turned Leo into a published author has publicly said on numerous occasions that he doesn’t believe in SEO. He had his site built with proper architecture, but beyond that, he never did any SEO on Zen Habits. So, how is it that one of the most popular blogs in the world didn’t do any SEO? Well, here’s the thing, it did – just not for the sake of doing SEO.
Leo, did plenty of link building, but he never called it link building. He went into the blogosphere and commented on hundreds (thousands?) of blogs. He wrote one guest post a week for a while. He wrote article after article after article, and got them published on other websites, and all had a link back to his own site. He also published tons of really great content on his own site, which encouraged others to link to it on their own.
Is any of this sounding familiar? That’s right, it’s SEO. Except it’s not. Leo didn’t go out with the intent to do SEO. He went out with the intent to spread the world about his blog, to make connections and to build authority. He got tons of traffic from this process that did not come from Google. It came from other sites. It just so happened, that this process of building connections and authority is exactly what search engines like Google are looking for in their rankings, and as such, Zen Habits got a lot of SEO juice out of the practice.
What Leo did was not rocket science, in fact, it’s the same thing that I did over a decade ago as a kid just discovering the web (only on a bigger scale with better content).
Your website can benefit from this same link building and inadvertent SEO practice. All you have to do is follow a relatively simple recipe.
- Create content that other people will want to link to
- Create content on other sites that links to your site, such as guest blog posts, ezine article submissions and social media stations
- Connect with the connectors and the mavens in your industry, and get them to spread the word about your site
- Get featured in a mainstream publication if you can
- Feature others on your site – they will at the very least mention the fact that they appeared on your site to their audiences
All of these steps will produce traffic in and of themselves, with the added benefit of also improving your search engine rankings. What not to do is what a lot of SEO firms have been doing:
- Submit links to a directory no one actually visits
- Write articles and submit them to sites no one actually reads
Link-building purely for the sake of SEO is like using twenty dollar bills to insulate your walls. You may end up achieving your goal, but there are more efficient ways to go about it.
Last week, I was talking with a colleague who was telling me some of the challenges she was facing with clients new to the online world.
“They have a really hard time understanding a lot of this search engine stuff. To them, SEO is Voodoo.”
First, I laughed. Then, I got angry. It annoys me when one group of people uses knowledge to confuse or mislead another group rather than to educate. This is what business owners are experiencing with internet marketing in general, and SEO specifically. Certain people and companies that know more about SEO than the business owners have led them to believe that SEO is a complex dark art that can only be learned by a select few with years of experience, and who have made livestock sacrifices at the feet of Stan the T-Rex at Google’s campus. Both parts of that statement are equally false.
So who’s responsible for spreading this confusion around SEO?
There are two main culprits in the misapprehension of SEO. The first is the major search engines, and yes, I’m going to single out Google.
Google has spent years convincing us all that they’re Not Evil. I’ve used their products. I’ve given them a lot of my personal info. I’ve visited their campus. I’m fairly convinced that they are Not Evil. Despite this, whether purposely or not, Google has mysticized their search algorithm.
I am not blind. I understand the reasons for not publishing their algorithms, but the secrecy and mystique goes beyond that. I attended a seminar at Google earlier this year where one of the speakers could not make the event, and so someone from their product team came on as a substitute. The sub was obviously not as prepared as the speaker would have been. That’s not to say he couldn’t speak intelligently to the topic. He could. What he wasn’t prepared for was what he could and could not reveal. During that speech, a fellow Googler was sitting in the front row with an open laptop and giving thumbs up or down to pieces of information that could and could not be shared with the room. The end effect of this was to leave everyone in that room feeling like Google is sitting on info so valuable, that it could alter the course of history itself. It must be magic!
The other culprit, and this one is bigger than even Google, is Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs). SEOs pitch customers by telling them that the process of optimizing a site for search is so complex and requires so much expertise that the client couldn’t possibly do it herself. That pisses me off, because quite frankly, it’s bullshit.
Demonstrating expertise in an area is a common way to sell services. If that expertise is scarce, and you’re one of the few people who possesses it, you can charge a premium. This is why professionals with highly specialized skill sets get paid a lot of money. Need open heart surgery? You need a cardio-thoracic surgeon. Being sued for millions of dollars? You need a lawyer. Did the machinery that runs your factory make a loud bang noise and is now spewing black smoke? You need an engineer. Do you want to optimize your website for search? You need an SEO firm… or a few books and a willingness to learn.
SEO isn’t Voodoo. SEO is a skill like any other. In fact, it’s a skill you can pick up fairly quickly.
If SEO isn’t Voodoo, how does it work?
At their most basic level, all major search engines work the same way. They match a user’s search query to the content of a website. How they determine which website is going to be displayed first depends on how well a site answers two questions. First, how closely does the content match the query? Second, how important is the website?
The way to nail the first question should be obvious. Create content that includes the queries that people are searching for. If you want people to find your site when they search for “dog grooming” make sure your site has dog grooming content on it.
The second question seems like it’s more complex, but really, it isn’t. To determine how important a site is, Google and everyone else looks at two things above all else: 1) how many other sites link to it? 2) are those other sites important? So, to nail that portion of the analysis, you need to get other important sites to link to you.
Am I over-simplifying? Of course, but honestly, if you know this, you’re way ahead of the curve. This information is freely available all over the web. The problem is it’s buried under a ton of less important stuff. There are a host of other factors that play into ranking, but their impact is minimal as compared to what I just outlined. SEO follows the 80-20 rule. 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. All of the rest of the effort gives you incremental gains at best.
Does that mean I shouldn’t hire someone to SEO my site?
I didn’t say that. I do believe that some sites don’t need to be SEO’d at all. For instance, if you run a blog, aside from running a SEO-friendly blog theme, I don’t think you should waste time on SEO. Instead, focus on creating great content that people will want to link to. SEO will take care of itself.
In other instances, SEO can be very beneficial. If you’re a local business with a niche product, SEO can be an excellent source of traffic.
At this point, you need to decide if you want to learn how to SEO yourself or if you want to hire someone. The advantage to hiring someone is that you don’t need to take the time to learn a new skill and suffer through the pitfalls that come with learning. This should also be your gauge of who to hire. Hire the SEO firm that offers you a proven track record of results, and promises to save you time and headaches, while providing a quality service. Do not hire the SEO firm that tells you that you need to hire them because SEO is just too complicated to be done by anyone other than them.
Whether you decide to SEO yourself, or whether you decide to hire someone to do it for you, all I ask is that you not be scared of search engines. SEO is not Voodoo. It’s just misunderstood.
What’s your take? Have I over-simplified things? Do you think SEO should be performed by a professional at all costs? Are you a practitioner of Voodoo and are offended that I compared your religion to SEO?
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