Many search engine optimisation (SEO) companies are struggling right now after Google made some drastic changes to the way it ranks websites.
A lot of SEO providers have been relying on cheap link building, done in third world countries. This used to work like gangbusters but I never got involved with it because my gut feeling told me it wouldn’t last – just like all the other SEO tricks and tactics I’ve seen during the 10 years I’ve been in the web business.
Now, here is a really interesting thing. About eight years ago, I built a website for a company that sells steel frame kitset homes. Back in those days, I was doing SEO for clients and I used some basic common sense principles to get this website ranked on the first page of Google for “kitset homes”.
It was a lot easier back then because there were not so many “SEO experts” all trying to game the system.
What I did with this particular website was just the basic on-page SEO such as title tags, alt tags on images, keywords in the content etc. I also created a small number of high quality links. I stress “high quality” because these links were from websites that were actually relevant to kitset homes.
Anyway, out of curiosity today I decided to type “kitset homes” into Google. I was delighted and somewhat amazed to see that my website is still ranking in to top three results (worldwide).
I have done zero SEO work on it in the past eight years! Zilch. Nothing.
So, is there a lesson there? I don’t know for sure… but what it suggests to me is that Google is really going back to the basics. In other words, when it comes to SEO, maybe we over-complicate it too much. Sometimes, less is more.
Quite right!