I went to an SEO conference yesterday.

And although I didn’t learn a huge amount of tactics, it did help me define my SEO strategy

- or perhaps a philosophy -

which I thought you may find useful for me to share.

There seems to be a massive oxymoron in SEO.

On the one hand, Google says that we shouldn’t artificially create links.

On the other hand, gaining links to your website are definitely one of the top 2 factors which will decide on where you are positioned in the search engines.

So, how do we build links, where any linkbuilding is in itself artificial?!

It was very interesting to hear from people outside of our internet marketing commmunity – some of whom are really on the cutting edge of SEO.

These are people who are working in leading international SEO companies who are dealing with extremely high profile clients.

They are running 100s of tests daily to see what is working and what is not working.

IMHO, a far cut above from the internet marketing community whose ‘new’ advice is the next best place where you can get links.

I will definitely share more in a future blog post, but here are some things which came out at the conference and which I believe are true:

1. You can be penalised for incoming links

Many people counteract this arguement by saying that if this were the case, then you could harm your competitor by linking to them from bad neighbourhoods.

Well, um…yeah.

It also seems to be the case, that Google looks at your links as a whole, so if you have 1k bad links and 1k good links, then the good links will be devalued by the bad links.

Think about that when you do your next Xrumer or Scrapebox campaign

2. Social factors are being used more and more to determine search position

I don’t think that anyone would argue with this. However, it seems that it is actually becoming a MAJOR (with a capital M) factor and if you are not using it, then you are missing out.

Although, I hate to blow my own trumpet, this is exactly what my message was about 6 months ago when I came out with Instant Profit Booster which was my course on exactly how I am doing that.

3. Some of your pages can affect the rest of your site

It sounds kind of obvious when I say this, however it is not something which I had thought of before.

But what does this mean in practice?

What it means is, that if you have some low quality pages, then they can give a negative effect to your whole site. So in many cases, it may be better to actually eliminate lower quality pages in order to bring the quality of your whole site up.

Call it trust score.

Call it quality score.

Comes down to the same thing…

4. Google does know…

I think that this is a massively important thing to remember. They know what we are doing on the internet in terms of backlinking.

They have 100s of engineers working on the internet and 1000s of people around the world manually checking sites and feeding back any obvious patterns to the algorithm.

There are some things which you will get away with either in the short term or the long term though.

But you won’t really know that unless you are testing ‘doing it’ and not just ‘doing it’.

There is an easy way to keep Google happy and that really is to pay attention to delivering what visitors want.

5. Different niches should be treated differently. Not only in the force of your linkbuilding, but also in how you should be doing your linkbuilding.

A massively easy way to know what is working for your niche is to look at your competitors.

6. There seems to be some arguement on how powerful long tail keywords are.

As a reminder, 30% of keyword phrases searched are either search for the first time or haven’t been search for in the last 90 days (usually misquoted without the last bit!)

On one hand, if someone is searching for:

large blue widgets

they may be better served by going to a site which is specifically about large blue widgets.

On the other hand, it is also likely that a site about blue widgets will also discuss both large and small blue widgets and therefore will be able to supply the information.

As a sidenote, when creating content for your site, do you think that Google genuinely wants you to have 3 separate pages for:

cheap halloween costumes
low cost halloween costumes
halloween costumes that are cheap

Generally, all three pages will have identical information on them, even if written slightly differently. You may want to try just creating one higher quality page which has all of the information there without duplication.

Another connected point to this, is that different keyword phrases will convert differently for you. Apparently there is evidence to suggest that the main keyword phrase + 2 words will convert the best.

So, for example if your main keyword phrase is “dog training”, then “dog training for labradors” has a higher chance of actually converting than just “dog training”

So, my Google/SEO predictions for the year ahead?

a. I think at some point that exact domain name matching will become less powerful. It just doesn’t seem logical that it should be as powerful as it is. Just because you have a domain with an exact keyword phrase, doesn’t actually mean that you will be the site which delivers to the visitor what they are looking for.

In many (or even most) cases, from an objective point of view this simply will not be the case.
b. Social media will become more and more important for the majority of niches. The fact that you are spending time or money on social media also tells Google that you have some authority in your niche.
c. More and more, we should be giving Google what they want in order to get great positions in the search engines. By putting a larger emphasis on the manual viewing of sites they are showing that if you don’t give them what they want then they will make you suffer.

Either eat it up or lose out…

In conclusion, the vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. In order to continue and even increase that revenue, they need to do two things:

1. Keep advertisers happy
2. Make sure that searchers continue to use Google in such mass

1. They can keep advertisers happy by making sure that they get targeted visitors to their website and make a positive ROI.

They will not be able to do that if ads are placed on spammy or low quality sites as the visitors to those will likely be lower quality prospects and also will start to trust Google/AdSense less.

(Read that paragraph again – it’s really important)

2. In order to keep searchers using their search engine and clicking on their ads they need to make sure that they are delivering the best possible results.

If you are not ranking, it is unlikely to be that they hate you (or even your website) but more likely that based on the profile that they have of you and your website, you are unlikely to present the best content to the person who is searching for your information.

It is important to keep account of the search engine updates when they are occur, but the overriding factor when deciding your website strategy, is to ensure:

a. You build a site with quality and relevant content
b. You put up content that people will actually want to link to and THEN go about getting the links.

I know I’ve said a lot in this post

Do you agree/disagree? Please do leave a comment below.

Especially interested to hear your own predictions on where SEO/Google is moving.

Keeping it real in an unreal world,

Ben Shaffer

PS. Oh yeah…If you could like, share or link to this article that would be great