How people find all the time to post as much as they do on their blogs I will never know. I have been really busy lately working on my sites, and wanted to mention a few things that has been going on lately.
Recently I have working with a freinds site, he has done some SEO with the site but didn’t have the rankings he was hoping for and wanted some help. He began working on the site 8 months ago and was pretty clueless as too what to do to obtain rankings in Google. For a long period of time he didn’t know who to listen to for SEO advice. So by default he listened to whoever was speaking in the forums, be it white hat, grey hat or even black hat. He soon found that a lot of the stuff was useless information being either out dated, or just plain didn’t work.
To make a long story short, after some time working with the site we obtained #1 ranking for the main keyphrase and was on the first page for all the main keywords that we were targeting. It didn’t last for long though, in obtaining the #1 position in Google it was almost as if their were a big spotlight on the site and our every move was being watched by both Google and the top competitors. Not long after, the site had lost all of the major rankings.
After digging in a little deeper to find out what had happened, there wasn’t anything major black hat being done on the site, just some old strategies that my freind had started nearly 8 months earlier, which might have been more in the grey hat area. These strategies were not the result of the rankings, but were definately the reason the rankings were lost.
I can only give some major cautions, in listening to the advice of so many of the so called “SEO Experts” (for this reason I don’t claim to be an “SEO Expert” as I still have many things to learn)…it can come back to bite you in the butt. Here is my list of things to think about before doing anything on your site:
- Does it comply with the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- In 5 years will the strategy still work with Google?
- Does it provide value to the end users?
- Does it take effort on your part, or just some automated tool?
I have all my own preferences as well, but I have learned that if I can answer at least these 4 questions than I believe that the website/business will be around for the years to come, and it will be a real business.
