31 Oct A Bear is Chasing You Through the Woods!
Our clients share numerous SEO related articles from around the web with us. It is greatly appreciated, and we sometimes get useful actionable information from the articles. Unfortunately, most of the pieces touch gently on one specific component of search engine optimization and fail to provide enough supporting content to be useful. Some of the information is totally misleading and other info is downright wrong.
There are two distinct classes of SEO professionals; the fringe guys who tend to write a lot and know just enough about SEO to be dangerous, and the hard-core guys who only speak privately and share nothing publicly because they view the entire world as competition for their clients.
Most articles suggest that you need to find ways to beat Google. That is the wrong approach, you do not need to beat Google, you just need to beat your competition! This is analogous to a bear chasing you through the woods. You do not need to outrun the bear (Google), you just need to outrun the guy next to you! For the most part, the penalties imposed by Google are put in place to punish bad behavior by your competitors. Google is not the enemy, in fact they are your ally.
If you write new unique and/or exciting content and properly share it with your audience and your peers, you will be successful. If your content is better than your competitors, you will win.
Many of our non-media clients limit their fresh content to only one post (or less) per week. They write very high quality material with the sole intention of sharing it with industry professionals and getting back-links. Combine that with a highly optimized internal linking strategy, aggressive title strategy, and you have the optimal footprint for gathering links. That is the modern definition of search engine optimization.
Write the best content, optimize it properly, don’t try to cheat Google, and be sure to share it with your audience. That is it. There is nothing else you really need to know.