Every few weeks someone will ask me what my ‘secret’ is for SEO success. My response is usually: fly low under the radar and create randomness on purpose.
When we first started kicking around the idea of writing a newsletter, a friend of mine expressed concern that we would be giving all our SEO secrets away. While I will be the first to admit that there is an art to SEO that develops once you have done this for as long as we have, there really isn’t any secret to what we do. After all, there are thousands and thousands of articles on how to optimize sites for the search engines. There are several conferences each year filled with people who do nothing but travel around and tell other people how to do what we do.
So why then can’t everyone do it? One word – Patience.
Most people are not patient by nature. Most of us would love to put our sites online one week and retire on our earnings by the third week.
Some people may try techniques that are ‘guaranteed’ to bring them higher placements. They hire a company – or they do it themselves. They join a links program where they link to thousands of sites and in return those sites all link back to them – with the exact same anchor text. No pattern there! They select 150 keywords, and use a program that will create 150 ‘optimized’ pages for this content and they add it to their site. No pattern there! They add text at the bottom of each page of their site that practically yells – “these are the keywords we are trying to be found for” – in one big ugly block. No pattern there!
Perhaps they have some initial success with these efforts. They get some improved traffic and some increased placements. So they do more… and more… and more because they want those placements faster and faster and higher and higher. And, then one day, 6 months later, their placements are gone. Thousands of dollars…hundreds of hours of work… all destroyed in the same length of time it takes a baby to learn to sit up.
Meanwhile, over at Mannix Marketing, we’ve been coaching our clients’ sites along, helping them clean up their site architecture, structuring quality content, developing quality links, enjoying improved placements, tweaking something here, adding something there, and basically ‘creating randomness on purpose’.
At six months, our clients’ sites are sitting on top of some pretty good placements as well. But, at 10 months our clients’ sites are standing up tall, sometimes wobbling, but quickly pulling them selves back up when they fall. At 12 months, they are toddling right along, reaping the rewards of patient hard work and planning.
If you need someone to help you fly low under the radar until you can spread your wings and soar, give Mannix Marketing a call! I’ll not only share my SEO secrets, but I have an excellent chocolate chip cookie recipe from my great-grandmother Nessie Lee La Tolle that’s also a closely guarded secret!
