With nearly every prospective or current client, SEO is an inevitable topic of discussion:
“Will we be able to be a top Google result for our keywords?”
“Do you do SEO?”
“Should we hire an SEO company?”
“Will our ranking go up with a new website?”
…and so on. These are great questions to ask, because your search engine results matter! You should certainly expect that your rankings for certain words in search engines won’t go down with a new site, so long as your content is similar (and similarly structured). However, it’s been increasingly important and difficult to explain that the SEO tactics of 5-10 years ago will not only not work well anymore, many such tactics (called Black Hat SEO) can actually get you penalized. Aside from just keeping up with what’s “bad” today, your site also needs to be built with the future of search algorithms in mind by predicting future changes.
Google is Serious
And now, we’re seeing Google promising to penalize what it considers to be “over-optimized” sites. While it seems he’s stepping into semantics quicksand, Matt Cutts from Google’s Spam Team explained the upcoming change as follows:
So all those people who have sort have been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization,” or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.
And so that’s the sort of thing where we try make the GoogleBot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so if people don’t do SEO, we handle that. And we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on a page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.
While there’s really no way to know what this all means specifically, what it’s telling us about future-proofing is vital for developers and clients both to understand. Over at WPMU.org, Joe (humorously) nailed it:
It seems a simple solution may be to basically just create good content, make it easy to find on your site, and then try to get people talking about it via social media.
Hey, wait a minute! That’s what Google has been saying all along!
Bingo!
My Usual Spiel
I always answer the SEO questions by making just a couple of points:
- I can’t promise you specific search rankings, and you should be extremely wary of anyone who says they can.
- Your best best is having thoughtful, regularly-updated content that’s relevant to your niche, within semantically-correct, quick-loading code—and that code part is my job. I can help you with initial content, but you future changes and blog posts will affect things going forward.
- If you’re going to have social media accounts, go for it! But, do it well. Don’t be an ad; create conversation.
The site that ranks highly—and will in the future—is full of useful, non-spammy content within well-written code. But, that’s not all! The site will also belong to a company or organization that’s being discussed on the web, because blog posts and social media conversations are the backlinks of the future. That’s how it should be, because that parallels the world outside the internet, where word-of-mouth is king. So, let’s get to making great content and building great sites.