There are four key points that I really try to hammer
home and keep coming back to throughout the day. These four things aren’t
technically action items but more of a mentality a new site owner needs to have
when they are ready to start their own SEO campaign.
1.
SEO is Long Term
If you need to drive 1,000 visitors to your site right
now, then you are going to be sorely disappointed in SEO. SEO is a long term
process that builds on itself and gains momentum with time—and time isn’t
something you can force along, no matter how much on or offsite SEO work you
do.
What you do today might not have a real tangible impact
on your website for a few months, but chances are if you did it right you’ll be
benefiting from that SEO action item for years down the road.
For instance, part of any good SEO campaign is content
marketing and blogging. I’ve been writing in my company blog for over a year,
along with a variety of other SEO sites including Search Engine Journal. My
company blog publishes at least two posts a day Monday to Friday—that’s a lot
of content!
Plenty of these posts get some social love, while others
barely make a blip, but each one of those posts contributes to the overall
impact of my SEO campaign. Just recently, I noticed that one of those blogs had
been cited in a New York Times article; talk about a great link! I know that a
year ago I never would have been found by a New York Times blogger, but because
I embraced the fact that SEO is long term and that it requires patience,
consistency, and dedication, my efforts paid off!
I know that most new site owners don’t want to wait six
months or a year to see the value of their SEO campaign, but if you want to do
SEO right, it’s going to take time.
2.
Always Put Your Visitors before the Search Engines
I feel like a lot fewer sites would get in trouble with
search engine algorithm updates if they stopped worrying so much about the
search engine algorithm. I realize that sounds kind of backwards, but in my experience,
as long as you put your human visitors first in everything that you do for SEO,
chances are it’s the kind of things the search engines are looking for.
Is that piece of content designed to actually inform and
educate your readers or are you just looking to rank? Will this link send a few
targeted visitors your way or just add one more link to your backlink
portfolio? Stop chasing the algorithm and focus on doing things that will help
you connect with your target audience!
When you put the search engines before your visitors
that’s usually when sites start investing in techniques that are more likely to
get them in trouble down the road.
3.
There is No Secret to SEO Success
You want to know what the secret to SEO success is? Just
doing it and making sure you do it right. There is no “trick” to catapult your
website to the top (and actually stay there long term), and any SEO firm or
consultant that tries to sell you otherwise is not the kind of SEO firm you
want to trust your website to.
A few months ago several of my SEO clients got the same
email from another SEO consultant named “Bob” that looked something like this:
“Did
you know your website isn’t ranking in the top ten for any of your keywords?
And you only have 72 back links? With my help I can get your website to the
front page of Google in only 2 months time! I’ve worked out the secret to SEO
success and want to help your site.”
First off, how does “Bob” know what keywords my clients
are targeting as part of their SEO? (And plenty of them were in the top 10 for
the record!) And secondly, where is Bob pulling is data about my client’s link
profile? I’m fairly sure he doesn’t have access to their Google Webmaster Tools
Account which tells me my clients actually have closer to 7,000 backlinks … but
many new site owners that doesn’t understand or don’t know this information
about their own site might fall for such a line simply because they don’t know.
4.
Link Building is forever
New site owners often ask me question like “Well, how
long should I do link building?” or “How many links will I take to get where I
want my SEO to be?”. There is no definite answer to either of those questions.
Link building is forever. You might hit a certain benchmark that you set to
measure your own SEO success but that doesn’t mean you get to ride off into the
sunset on the back of your previous activities.
Every day you don’t bother with link building is another
day your competition does and they get one step closer to unseating you. There
are hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites competing for the top spot in the
SERPs—just because you reach it that doesn’t mean it’s yours forever. I’ve seen
too many sites pull way back on their link building when they thought they had
a ranking on lock down and their site just dropped through the SERPs over time.
Like I mentioned before, these aren’t really action items
that you can take and implement today—but they are four critical ways of
looking at and thinking about SEO that I feel more new site owners need to
understand. If you can better wrap your head around what SEO really is, what it
really
Source: SEJ
