Practise safe search…

Digital is the fastest evolution that has ever been seen. Don’t get stuck as a prokaryote, evolve into something cool like a digital bear….

I have an idea. Consider it as an SEO love glove.  Don’t worry about Panda updates, don’t worry about white hat vs black hat SEO, in-fact don’t worry about SEO… well SEO in a traditional sense.

The best way to have a site that is going to perform well is to stop creating mediocre sites.  Unless you play search every single day and you are running testing experiment, lets be honest, simply love it and have it passing through your veins. Stop thinking SEO and start thinking: 'not, what can my traffic do for me but what can I do for my traffic'.

All search engines want to do is get users to keep coming back. When users keep coming back, they inevitably click on paid adverts and search engines make their money.

If you have a site that is worth existing and content that is worth reading, these updates are great for you.  If you don’t, why are you wasting your time with your domain, why are you wasting time being online… you are fighting a losing battle.  If the content on your site is pap and your site has no value and whether it is panda 2.5 or any future update, you will loose out, evolve or give up.

Ok so if Google’s updates are in a truly Darwin fashion making the Internet evolve, how do you make sure that your site is the first to grow legs while your competition still has fins? How do you ensure that your site is first to develop digital opposable thumbs?…

Anyone with an Internet connection can set-up an Ecommerce shop. How are you going to separate your self from your competition?… What can you offer that someone with an open source CMS and an outsourced fulfilment contract cant?

Ok there are 3 parts:

The Container:

Your website and its code are simply a container.  A container that holds your content, in the same way a plastic bag holds your shopping.  Keep reading, this analogy holds up (just).

It is important that your plastic bag does everything it needs to, simply, it gives you a place to put your shopping and also allows you to get your purchase back out.  With a website you need some were to host your content and people need a place to read it.  A good site is no more than a good container that helps people get to the content that they want.

The Content:

I am going to continue with the plastic bag analogy.  Rarely do people carry empty plastic bags, people only care about content.  Content strategy is bigger than I could ever explain, but what content is not about is micro managing the tiny piece of marketing bull that is normally forced onto too many sites.  The most valuable content is not written by your marketing team but by your customer base, your fans and your brand advocates.  Content is not about product descriptions it is about engaging with people.. good and bad…  Content is not only words, think of every possible way you can communicate, this is the content on your site.

The Perception:

This is the other biggy.  Ok, you can still make significant headway with a good link building campaign.  High page rank links still are very important to site visibility.  To do this manually is hard, time consuming and at times, stressful work.  I have not developed a good reputation in what I do by sitting for hours telling people I'm good, I've got on and done great work for some great clients.  Great visibility comes to great websites not by accident, in the same way people don’t get great reputations by accident.  Scalable link building is best achieved through genuinely engaging with your audience.  If your clients perceive you as the best influence on a certain topic, search engines are fundamentally trying to model this algorithmically, so you can only be on to a winner.

So the long and short of it is, work out what your clients want and give it to them.  

Old school SEO has been dead for a while now. Most SEOs have developed into digital business analysts... There are some old school agencies still flapping around like the proverbial dying fish and if they are talking to you about article distribution, keyword stuffing, or other old school SEO they will take you down with them.  Digital is the fastest evolution that has ever been seen. Don’t get stuck as a prokaryotes, evolve into something cool like a digital bear….

So I surmise

Please don’t think how can I SEO a site?.. Think how can I help my users reach the content they want.
Don’t think key phrase density.. think how can I engage people who are reading this?
Don’t waste time telling people you are great… be great and they will find out.

Mediocre is out... Digital bears are in....

Written by Martin McAndrew
Twitter: @MartinMcAndrew