Return Of A Dinosaur
Although I have been making a living on line since 2009, I have not had much to do with SEO in a very long time. My journey into SEO began when I was director of marketing at a software firm on the south coast of England. A new search engine had just appeared. When we began to use it we were shocked. Why? Because it showed us exactly what we were looking for the very first time.
It Was Different Then
You must understand that we were accustomed to crafting our searches with boolean operators and parentheses to weed out anything we didn’t want. With this new search engine that technique was no longer needed. We were intrigued however, so we began to do some research. Apparently this new search engine counted the number of links pointing at a site to determine its rank instead of strictly using on-page factors.
We reacted accordingly and began to solicit links from other sites. You could do that back then. We had very high quality content and people actually thanked us for letting them know it was there.We got thousands of links. Hey, we even got back links from Microsoft and the BBC. Before long we had page one rankings for some extremely competitive keywords like“DSL” and “firewall”. We had yet to learn about commercial vs information keywords and the long tail.
The year was 1999 and I am sure you have guessed by now that the search engine was Google.
How Times Have Changed
I have generally tended toward guerilla marketing over the last decade or so, shying away from white hat SEO because I was convinced that a) somebody else would always be better at it than me and b) as soon as I got to the top Google would change something and my site would disappear.
Since I joined WA I regained confidence however. My aha moment was the 21 minute ranking video by Jay. When I saw him get a page one ranking immediately after posting I had to pick myself up off the floor!
I am challenged however, by the seeming pre-eminence of on-page factors and domain authority and the diminishing importance of back links as ranking factors. After all if it is no longer a race to get the most links how am I ever going to rank? For years Google told usjust make quality content and in the end you will win. And for yearsI watched sites post quality content and never rank. Ever. Hence my scepticism.
What’s Next
It would appear though, that if I had followed Google’s advice many moons ago I would have some good content by now on some high authority sites. But sticking with it for years with no results would have required more faith than I had. Well, there’s no time like the present.
I fully intend to implement everything I learn here on WA. Hey, I’m writing this post. I didn’t really want to. Waste of time something inside me said. Then something else inside me said no, do what the man says. So here I am.
My objective is to get paid within 3 months. Maybe one dollar, but get paid. By this time next year I fully expect to have a steady passive income.
Affiliate marketing rocks!
Recent Comments
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Welcome back!
Thanks!