Then, as seems to happen with all online mediums (email, blogging, forums), trickery and "secret tactics" became the way to climb the search engine rankings. The big problem with this is that instead of being rewarded for adding value to the Internet, many SEO practitioners were being rewarded for polluting the Internet with spam sites, ugly gateway pages, keyword spam, etc.
That was about the time I stopped actively participating in SEO. I'm a "content guy" at heart and believe the long term path to success is to add value to the medium you are working in. I had no interest in learning how to "beat the algorithms" and I put my energies elsewhere (community development, word of mouth, email newsletters).
Well, what's old is new again and there's a bit of a renaissance going on right now in SEO. The algorithms have caught up to the SEO spammers and successful SEO now boils down to exactly 3 things:
- Lots of good content, regularly updated (a great reason to blog about your business).
- Inbound links to your content from high quality sites (which happen when you write great articles or posts and actively promote them to other sites).
- Proper site structure, tagging, and coding (another reason to hate Flash-based sites).
Did I mention I'm back on the SEO bandwagon in a BIG way?
P.S. It wasn't until I quickly proofed this article that I saw the combination of today's date and my proclamation of "love" in the title. I guess you can consider this my Valentine's message to the folks behind Google's algorithms.
