Four Right Things Turned Wrong Because of Your Infatuation with SEO

Four Right Things Turned Wrong Because of Your Infatuation with SEO:

If there’s one website that we can give credit for the enormous growth of Internet, it’ll be none other than the Google (AKA the big G). Whether the Internet had grown to such proportions without a service like Google is a tough call to make. But if it wasn’t Google, it’d have been another search engine, all things considered; Internet would have never served the users so good without having a powerful search engine like Google.

The reason for this monologue is that some might blame Google for the “right things turning into wrong” that I am going to discuss in this article. But the fact is, Google did what a search engine was supposed to do, and it was actually the webmasters infatuation with higher rankings and a little bit of desperation that resulted in this situation.

Let’s take a look at how this infatuation with SEO has turned some healthy practices into hysterical pursuits, making people take a totally different approach towards stuff that was quite right.

1. Content:

Let’s start from the all important “content” that happens to be the meat and potatoes of a website. For a website, content can range from text based information to images, videos, or any other thing that you’ve placed on your website for the users. But right now, I am talking particularly about the text based content, that’s the most common form of content on World Wide Web. Now, providing fresh and meaningful content was meant to be the right thing, in fact that was what Internet was meant for.

What actually happened after website owners got infatuated with Search Engine Optimization, the actual purpose of content was sidelined and everybody started focusing on the content that will help them rank higher for more and more keywords. That resulted in an influx of useless content generating ideas, adding heaps of spam to the cyber world. Even after Google Panda update, people are trying to find ways to dodge the search engine and find some new, cheap, and easy way to generate loads of content.

What’s the right thing to do?

Just think of the users, and aim for creating some content that will be helpful for your targeted users in one way or another. Rest assured, good, helpful content will find its own keywords to rank for.

2. Back Links:

Looking at how SEO professionals keep striving for back links, you might have mistaken link backs to be a thing introduced by Google. In actual fact, back links would’ve been an equally valuable asset, had Google or any other search engines have not considered it an important factor.

In fact, it’d have been better had it not been a ranking factor, because the rat race of getting back links has resulted in so many black hat practices, from creating link farms to selling links, and people spend the biggest portions of their budget to acquire back links that should be spent on improving their websites and services. Entire teams are reserved with a daily quota of acquiring a fixed number of links (and the quality of these links is anybody’s guess).

What’s the right thing to do?

Imagine for a second that link backs are suddenly discarded as a ranking factor, would you stop going out for links? I am sure you’ll reply in a resounding “No”, however your approach towards back links will change drastically. Now, you’ll focus entirely on getting back links from the websites where your targeted users reside and that’s precisely what you should be doing at the moment.

3. Social Networking:

Business networking has always been important and when search engines say that social signals can make an impact on ranking, they are actually highlighting the importance of making relations with real people coming from your industry.

But again, the infatuation with Search Engine Optimization results in a frame of mind that focuses entirely on increasing “likes” or “followers”. People use these powerful platforms to spam, and prefer getting “likes” from ten random people over forming one good relationship with some of your clients, partners, or customers. How weird is that?

What’s the right thing to do?

Establish relationships, as simple as that. Don’t underestimate the power of a good relation, from link backs to referrals; a good relationship can give a lot more than a random guy “liking” your page.

4. Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging is probably the most respectable way of getting back links from different websites. Thankfully, the method doesn’t allow for too much spam or fishy tactics, but still, we are starting to see some desperate guys trying to abuse this method.

For example, some webmasters have converted random domains into blogs and they are publishing low quality, “paid content” as guest blog posts. On the other hand, we have some guys who fail to comprehend the concept of guest blogging and keep spamming blog owners with posts which are nothing more than blatant advertising.

What’s the right thing to do?

When some blog owners roll out the red carpet for you, as a guest author, take it as a mark of respect and do justice to the privilege by putting your best foot forward. A guest post at a well reputed blog can give you a lot more than a mere back link, and you should aim for making the most of this opportunity, instead of ruining it with an ordinary write-up.