SEO is About Strategy Rather Than Tricks - AdMarketing Titan

For more than a decade ago, the SEO landscape for ranking and optimizing was quite different. People would get away with ranking for keywords just by using black hat tactics such as buying links and comment spam.

Moreover, they used to get ranked on the SERPS as the algorithm wasn’t baked in and had many holes that would be misused for increasing traffic and revenue.

But with the launch of the Google Hummingbird, Panda, and more updates to follow, the landscape had started to change. Now, publishers have started to realize creating quality and helpful content that would rank the content on the internet.

It’s important to have an effective strategy to rank in Google and other search engines because there is competition in almost every niche that can be thought of. It’s important to find out the phrases, questions, and topics that the consumers related to the industry are searching for and answering the query completely to at least have some chance to rank on the first page of the search engines.

SEO in Old Landscape: More Tricks and Less Strategy

Commonly known as black hat tactics, where people go against the guidelines of creating good content, by using tricks to trick the search engine that the blog post has relevant content and is useful for the user.

Some of the tactics included

• Buying links
• Hidden links
• Comment spam
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• and more.

This post covers 17 Black Hat Techniques from the Search Engine Journal.

While there are some obvious black tricks that if used can get you penalized and be used to work against you for ranking in the search engines, there are some other tactics that exactly don’t fall under the black hat tactics but need not be overused. Today’s algorithm is smart enough to notice and pick up on these patterns and can be used to derail a website from the SERPs.

One of the prominent grey hat techniques includes buying expired domains and feeding them with content to rank them in the search engines. People would be buying expired domains related to dog food and then creating content and selling products related to health supplements, misleading users and causing potential harm.

While Google is starting to crack down on expired domains with the March update in 2024, it's important to see how the industry still continues to use the expired domains strategy.

Next, let's talk about people getting as many links as possible to try to get the page rank on Google. While links are an important metric to understand the entire context of a webpage and give information to Google that the page is relevant to a bigger topic, it's not the end-all-be-all.

As a publisher, it’s important to differentiate and be selective of the kinds of links that you want to have on your website. You should never pay for links or use automated systems that spit out links as a result.

In the old times, people claimed putting more keywords in content would help you rank in search engines. While Google now recommends using keywords that show the context of the blog post, overuse of the keywords can make it unreadable for the end user.

SEO in the old landscape was more about creating content that was directed at pleasing the gods of search engines, which means over-optimizing search engines at the expense of the readability of the reader. While this worked in the short term and generated results, as Google was able to understand and refine the algorithm, it gave rise to efficient and intelligent algorithms, picking up content that is directed for a good user experience.

SEO in New Landscape: More Strategy and Less Tricks

Does your website yield better results for the user? Does the website give a better user experience than the competitors? Is the website trustworthy to the readers?

These are some of the questions that need to be answered and incorporated to make a good SEO strategy.

Search engines are focused on getting the best results for the user, while to get found by the search engines, it's important to make sure that the algorithm finds the content.

It's important to create content that keeps both the search engine and the end reader in mind.

For the end reader, the content should be helpful, trustworthy with facts, and authoritative enough to satisfy the user.

For the search engine, it's important to find relevant signals to find the page relevant enough to rank it. Some of the signals may include using keywords that are relevant to the topic, relevant backlinks, a clean webpage with a smooth user experience, and so on.

The use of images, videos, and other multimedia is important for both the user (for visual representation and better display of content) and also for the search engine to find multiple areas to rank the website (for images/infographics in Google Image Search and videos for YouTube).

But at the end of the day, Content is King. Google assesses the webpage by the matter present in the webpage and the quality of the texts and other multimedia. The better the quality of the content compared to the competition, the more the chances that the content will rank on the first page of the search engine, and possibly take the first rank in SERP.

Conclusion

It’s important to differentiate the tricks and focus on the strategy that is directed at creating a holistic SEO plan.

With the rise of AI, there is a rise of content that has already been created and regurgitating content again and again. At this time, it has become even more important to create content that gives unique perspectives to different topics and shows reports backed by original research. In the future AI and search engines will work in tandem instead of replacing each other.