The SEO Tip To Judge All SEO Tips By

This may seem ridiculously simplistic but here goes…Be Sure It’s Natural.

By natural I mean it should be done, or at least look like it has been done, by people for people without any regard for search engines.

From my very first experiences with search engine optimization I watched people try to trick their way to the top of the rankings. In the beginning it was things like keyword stuffing. But it didn’t look natural. It was obvious to me even then that if the SEO tactic looked like an SEO tactic it wouldn’t last in the SERPs. The problem with obvious black hat tactics isn’t that they are immoral. Google isn’t handing down stone tablets. The problem is that any tactics that search engines consider black hat are tactics they will be tweaking their algorithms to eliminate or penalize. When you use obviously marginal tactics you are painting a target on your web site. Even if they work initially they are guaranteed to be short lived.

Whether it is internal linking structure, site content generation, external inbound links, social media, or anything else search engines start to value for ranking purposes, it has to look natural.

I will give more specific examples in future posts.

~ by contrarythought on August 15, 2008.