I am out of my depth with SEO

The title comes from a recent post in a forum here. I started to write a reply, but it got so long, I turned it into a hub instead.

What I finally did write back at the forum was just this:

I wouldn't worry too much. Most of it [SEO] is esoteric and of limited effectiveness. Your best action is just to keep writing the best content you can.

If you DO want to learn a bit, I'd start with Google themselves and i would also suggest Peter Hoggans excellent series which starts at "A Free SEO Training Course For Hubbers"

I'll expand on that here.

You probably don't need to fret about it

A lot of SEO advice is outdated, wrong or of very limited effectiveness. Some of it could cause negative reaction from Google et al. This is definitely an area where the information available on the Internet can be very bad.

Many people come to the Internet with the idea that if they simply write great content, that's all they need. Those instincts are not entirely wrong: cream WILL rise and it will rise all by itself.

If you are writing incredibly good content, you don't need to worry about SEO at all because there will be links all over the Internet telling people how good your content is and where to find it. You won't need any SEO because the rest of the world will do it for you. Cream rises.

We are out of cream, sorry

Most of the Internet isn't cream. Most of it is junk, and unfortunately far too much SEO advice concerns itself with fooling search engines into misidentifying junk as cream. Some of that advice may even work at times, but you need to realize that Google has good reason to learn how not to be fooled. I wrote more about that at my backjunk and cream post.

I like milk

I'm going to assume you aren't interested in writing junk. I'm also going to assume that most of what you write is ordinary milk. That is, it's good for the reader, pleasant to consume, but it is competing with a lot of other content of equal or similar value. That's the world I live in. This post itself is probably milk.

Why do I say probably? Because I don't really know. I have written cream - that is, articles that have risen to the top results of the search engines and have stayed there year after year. I have a handful of articles that have done that all by themselves. They got no spin, I didn't churn them with backlinks, pack them with carefully researched keywords or optimize them in any way. I just wrote them and they rose to power and I have no real idea why those rose and others, which I think are just as good, did not.

I don't know why these articles beat out similar articles at other websites, sometimes tromping articles that had tremendous SEO effort behind them. Something caused the spark, but I can't tell you what it was.

Ten Thousand Monkeys

Because I cannot tell, and because I have honestly found SEO to be of limited value (you might want to read my piece on the value of SEO firms after this), I have used the ten thousand monkey approach to Internet success.

I write a lot and have been doing so since 1991. I have thousands upon thousands of website and forum posts. Throw out enough words and you will get a lot of Google love from just the raw volume itself.

Throw out enough words and something you wrote will match the long tail search somebody just typed into Google. Even if the results are only worth pennies, thousands of pennies do add up and when mixed with the dollars from the unexpected cream, it all works out well.

So, just concentrate on writing the best content you can and as much if that as you can. Even if you did nothing else at all, great content can succeed. Obviously it can do better if it has assistance, but the perception of SEO value and the reality are quite a bit apart. The very best SEO isn't going to change your life over night or over any period of time and the worst of it can damage you.

Do you like milk?

Most of what you write will be milk. You can put chocolate in milk, you can keep it at the right temperature and you can encourage others to drink it, but it is just milk. Good SEO can be helpful, but it would be unusual for it to turn milk into cream.

If you do want to learn SEO, start with Google. They publish a lot of accurate and very helpful information in their Adsense pages. That series by Peter Hoggan that I mentioned above is also very good.

When you understand the basics, you can move on to reading the big forums like Webmaster World that specialize in SEO. Junk gets posted there too, but gets debunked or removed fairly quickly.

However, most of SEO is specialized, applying to unusual situations and concerned with squeezing the last percentage of performance away from a competitor. For most of us the basics are simple and obvious and are all we need: good content containing keywords and keyword phrases that real searchers are apt to use combined with with honest, organic backlinks to help Google confirm the value. That's all.

That's the major secret of SEO for most of us.

Proceed slowly

Please, if you are new to this world, don't jump in with both feet following somebody's "get rich" advice. Most of that sort of thing is very, very bad advice and can harm you.

It's not just you. Your actions can affect others, too. For example, spamming links to content has sometimes caused other sites to ban ALL links to HubPages. One person's ignorance and haste can cause problems for others.

So slow down. Read the links below for more information. Don't be hasty.