I haven’t been doing SEO too long, but I’ve heard stories from older SEOs about the “good old days.” They talked about how meta tags could be spammed to get rankings. They told me that submitting your site to the search engines actually helped. In fact, you could get indexed in one day by submitting your site. They told me that keyword stuffing use to be an effective method.
Then, they told me how Google’s arrival changed the game. Suddenly, links were everything in SEO. SEOs started link farms. Webmasters began to create directories to trade links with other webmasters even their sites were unrelated. There were real estate sites with directories that included sports sites, jewelry sites, and gaming sites!
But Google cut down the effectiveness of reciprocal links. In fact, many of those real estate sites got penalized. And linking to link farms got your site penalized, too.
Now we’re in 2007. What are the new rules of the SEO landscape?
I believe the necessary SEO skillset to survive has increased because Google has had years to improve their algorithm. Google is not perfect by any means. But when I hear of an experienced black hat SEO moving into white hat because his auto-generated sites dropped 90% in earnings, you know Google has made drastic changes.
I thought of two skills that have become increasingly important to SEOs: writing and networking.
Writing
I think of writing in three different ways.
First, there’s writing to give information. The key to information-based writing is being clear and following basic writing principles. Every site needs good, informative content written in a clear manner. But not only that, some of the best links come from this type of content. For example, the best article directories like Ezine Articles require informative articles. They won’t accept promotional, press release type articles. Also, they won’t publish low quality content. Another place for this type of writing is guest blogging. Bloggers won’t publish your content unless you write well and give useful information.
Some SEOs are in charge of raising conversion rates. If you have this responsibility, you need the skills of a copywriter. Copywriting is different from information-based writing. Copywriting is the art of getting the reader to do a certain action, whether it’s buy a product, opt in to a email newsletter, or subscribe to an RSS feed.
Finally, there’s creative (or unique) writing. I like to call this type of content, linkbait. This is interesting and/or useful content that is unique to your site. Most content can be found elsewhere. Look at two sites in a same niche. You’ll find that much of the content between the two sites is basically the same. Linkbait is concerned with creating content that no one else has created. This could be content organized in a unique way, or content that covers a niche with a unique angle. This writing will become more important with the growing popularity of social media sites like Digg and Netscape. To fully leverage these sites, you need unique content that social media users will find interesting and vote for.
Networking
Networking is growing in importance because the online users that can get you quality links value friendship. Two of the biggest places to network are in the social media community and the blogosphere.
Social media works by users voting on webpages. The more votes for a webpage, the more traffic it will receive. We already talked about linkbait. Linkbait is exactly what SEOs need to promote to the social media community. And you can increase the promotion of your linkbait by building friendships with social media users. These relationships lead to votes, which lead to traffic and links. In fact, I believe promoting linkbait on social media sites is the best link building method. Even Matt Cutts, Google’s head spam killer, recommends linkbait.
The blogosphere is important in today’s internet marketing world because bloggers link out much more than other webmasters. Also, Google loves blogs. Many blogs have great rankings and high PR and traffic. Just remember that blogging itself is built on relationships. By networking with bloggers in your niche, you’ll have a group of webmasters that can give you quality, contextual, permanent links.
5 Comments to "The Evolution Of SEO: Increased Skillset (Writing And Networking)"
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You forgot to say this is web 2.0 now
. Social sites and community are in charge. Google loves blogs – you are right, some auto generated blogs get traffic only because of fresh content, not of links. This is a new world for SEOs.
Oops. Thanks for clearing that up. Web 2.0 has definitely influenced SEO.
[...] I talked about the increasing skillset of search marketers. I wrote about the importance of writing and networking. These two tasks [...]
Well you are talking about good old day. The question is how will SEO like in the future and reality of web 2.0 ? In fact the game will not become easier.
Martin
..but the algorythm chances every singel day. When I write this, google thinks about chances. The last half year web 2.0 and all the social stuff was hot. No delicious is with no follow – ….
local spots getting more and more interesting!
And watch out – content will be king, as it was in the good old days!