Search Engine Optimisation Is Longer Term Than You Can Plan For
I’ve written about keyword research recently.
I’ve written about SEO for writers a long time before that.
Yet here I am, writing about something again when I’ve told you that it doesn’t really matter.
Why?
Long Term Search Engine Optimisation
The title gives the topic away. Long term search engine optimisation is “the” key to getting to grips with Search Engine optimisation.
In the short term, you might want to rank for a keyword. We’ll call it “Product X.” If you have established competing websites like Amazon and the brand’s own website, there is no guru alive that can get you to rocket to the first page of Google.
…Scratch that. There are plenty of gurus who can do that. Most of them are going to have severe long term consequences for your business though. Gaming the search engines ends poorly, because eventually they update their algorithms to get around the “hacks” that marketers find.
I’m not just talking about blackhat marketers who spam. I’m talking about people who game using blog comments. I’m talking about the guest posters and the people who spam their infographics on Imgur and Reddit.
So, search engine optimisation is about doing things long term.
“But Jamie! Surely long term search engine optimisation is still gaming the system?”
Not really. I don’t want to re-iterate the first post I made on this subject, so I’ll go into details about the elephant in the room when it comes to SEO.
Long Term Search Engine Optimisation: The Elephant In The Room (And The Secret An SEO Guru Won’t Tell You)
Google and other online giants tell you exactly what they want from you.
“Build a quality website. Let the traffic come organically and naturally.”
You might be thinking that Google is just saying that. After all, there are rubbish websites out there that rank well for search terms.
Tell me what happens when you search for something and find a terrible website.
I bet you any money that you don’t write down the URL and go back in six months to a year to see how well it’s still performing.
What can we learn from this fact?
Let’s just assume I’m right here, because I’m writing this article quickly.
We can’t divulge much about Google’s secret evil corporate policies, and we can’t tell anything about the algorithm.
What we can tell about the “build quality sites mantra” is that YOUR SITE is more important than THE PAGE. YOUR SITE is more important than ANY PARTICULAR KEYWORD.
The Elephant in the Room is that whatever trick or technique you use – it doesn’t matter!
Or, it’s not going to matter as much as the overall power of your site.
Again, I’ve got no magic crystal ball insight here, but here are things we can gather from that deduction:
- Your site age matters.
- The amount of time you’ve put into keeping your site updated, accurate and regular counts.
- The amount of high quality pages counts. (So you can’t have one super-optimised page and a load of terrible ones.)
- Everything about SEO is cumulative – work hard today, you’ve planted a seed. Over time, all your seeds grow until you’ve got a garden.
Long Term Search Engine Optimisation Strategies Rely On Commitment More Than Anything Technical
We can take that deduction a little further before I wrap this article up.
If you continually plant seeds, like I’ve suggested above, you’ll find that your site tends to rank for terms better over time; even if you do absolutely nothing to those pages.
For instance, in the first month of this site, I reviewed a couple of products. They use the various headline formulas I’ve created. They have exact matches in the titles.
Yet when I posted them, even though those pages were indexed, I didn’t get on the first page. Sometimes, I didn’t get on the first page even though “technically” my pages were better.
I haven’t touched those reviews since I started. They now rank a lot higher.
Why?
- Because the age of my site has gone up.
- The amount of pages on my site has gone up.
- The amount of visitors has gone up.
- The amount of internal links and other signs of an updated site are there.
- (Hopefully) the quality of my writing is improving as well.
My technical prowess hasn’t really gone up – I haven’t started keyword stuffing. I haven’t changed the layout of the site. I haven’t added in any plugins or bells and whistles.
What I have done is kept planting seeds.
If you’re confused about SEO, that’s probably where you should start too!