Many people are starting to wonder if SEO even works anymore, as many of the traditional back link building techniques like article syndication, social bookmarking, blog commenting and forum posting aren’t as effective as they were even a few months ago.
The basic idea is, that Google is no longer placing much emphasis on back links for determining the ranking of a site unless they are authority, relevant, quality links.
Why did Google make this change to their algorithms? It’s simple, their search results were getting clogged up with spam crap that was only made to function as a back link, and so they have punished a lot of content farms, where the majority of content was only written for the purpose of making an SEO back link.
What does this mean for people trying to get on the first page of Google? Well, you have to try a bit harder to make quality back links, or you have to make quality content.
What it also means, is that nobody really knows what it means, and I could give you advice that could be out of date within a few months.
Does SEO Still Work?
Basically, you are better off focusing on on-page optimization, and writing long pages full of relevant, interesting text.
If you make a page that has quality information, such as a list of resources, you may get people linking to it because it’s good.
This is what Google wants to see, but more importantly, they want to see that it looks natural, and doesn’t look like you did it yourself.
I find that one of the most important factors in ranking is the amount you publish on your site, and that’s why I am writing this blog post now.
I get most of my traffic from social promotion on sites like Twitter, so for me, Google is a secondary concern, or I’m not all that worried about it right now, but I figure if I keep writing quality content, and getting on the first page of specific searches, I will gradually build up my traffic from them.
I’m not sure if this is accurate, but my Counterize traffic stats say that SEO is the third highest referring keyword to this site, so I guess that means I’m somewhere in that search, which is not bad, considering I didn’t try very hard to get that.
As I said before, I get thousands upon thousands of hits from Twitter, and if you want to buy some cheap traffic from social promotion, get in contact via the home page, or sign up to the newsletter to get free internet marketing training, so you can do what I do yourself.
I don’t really know how SEO works anymore, if I do, then I just told you as much as I know, which isn’t much. Anyone who says they know more than that, may be pulling your leg.
