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How different is SEO today compared to ~15 years ago?
Posted by on May 30, 2020 at 12:49 amAbout 15 years ago, I followed the old Webmaster World “26 steps to 15k per day” to generate affiliate marketing traffic and made some beer money sending people to Amazon and various commission junction sites. I had kids and they take up a bunch of time, something had to give so I gave up affiliate marketing.
My kids are teenagers and cloud computing is dirt cheap compared to what hosting cost years ago, so I’m dipping my toes again.
I have more programming skills today. I made a deep vertical niche website. I figured out how I can get users of my new site to generate a decent amount of keyword-targeting “thin content” on the site. I plant a few seeds and then I let the users do the rest. I tested it with my teenage kids, they seemed to get how to use the site.
I’ve got a few pages of thick content (1000 words plus) to supplement this thin content and act as “landing pages”. I have about 15 more pages of this thick content planned, targeting keywords found with the google keyword tool.
I’ve also got a blog that I use to keep the front page fresh. I try to blog daily, searching news and youtube for fresh content related to my audience. I editorialize a bit on it to get upwards of 150-200 words per blog post. Blog posts don’t target specific keywords, it’s just freshness relating to the target audience. I blog about my thick content as I post it. I also plan to blog about the “thin content seeds” as I plant them.
Those blog posts get sent to my small social media presence. It’s worth a couple clicks per day. I like to think it’s my mom. 🙂
Questions:
1. Is there a replacement for the open directory project? Getting a listing on DMOZ was a license to generate traffic… in 2004.
2. Is content still king? Am I wasting my time writing 1000+ word articles about why you should consider performing X operation vs Y but having this discussion is dumb because Z? Do people use the internet to learn any more? Are users still looking for “their content”?
3. Google Analytics doesn’t seem to track keywords like it used to. How do I determine what keywords are “hitting”? What is this “search console” thing?
4. How much SEO backlink value is there in social media? Is there a good social media subreddit? -
7 Replies
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I will respond to 2 and 3..
2. Content is definitely king. Longer form content with clear subheaders and markup is your key. Long tail (4+) keywords is your best way in. The shorter, thin content won’t likely rank you for anything.
3. You’re right about GA. More and more browsers block cookies so you won’t learn diddly about keywords or source/medium via GA. Search console is the way – it logs your ranking keywords, how many impressions and clicks those keywords get, and what pages are getting organic traffic (among other things). it’s easy to set up and use (at least it should be for someone who knows their way around GA already).
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I first did SEO 13 yrs ago. I wasn’t good, just made enough money as a kid to buy games I wanted whenever. I ranked for lawn care terms with no effort. Just made a webpage.
You could rank any keyword locally by having an H1 tag and basic SEO.
We were taught that SEO was saying the keyword 3 sets of 3 times, bolding it, underlining, italicising them.
What we did was just keyword stuff lol.
International SEO, or SEO that ranks in Asia and Africa is basicly responsive like it was Google in 2000.
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Content is more king than ever.
Thin content will not rank. There is also a chance that your site in general will not get high rankings is you have a lot of thin content.
In many niches “normal” content is now 2,000 – 5,000, sometimes more.
Go to google and do a search for any keyword phrase. Look at the top 10 results. Most sites/blogs on the first page will have vary long articles.
Dmoz is dead. Social media links… well, they won’t hurt but also they don’t really add much. Google now make a very good distinction between comment links, social media links, directory links and so on.
Some people argue that backlinks are no longer relevant while other claim that backlinks are everything.
I looked at many of my competitors, most of us seem to have similar content. Very detailed articles somewhere between 5k and 7k words. Some that rank higher than me might have a lot of dofollow backlinks while others have almost none. So… it’s still a guessing game. I presume that backlinks matter but not as much as they did in 2015. Maybe I’m completely off.
Besides links and content there are other things that seem to influence rankings. Of course site structure, loading speed, mobile responsiveness and other factors.
Google just integrated Lighthouse in the search console and it’s something to definitely pay attention to.
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There’s almost no SEO value from backlinks via social media as the links are no-follow almost always.
To improve your SEO just build backlinks from high-authority websites.
If you have no idea where to start then check out **Rankd_SEO backlink database**. There are step-by-step guides with screenshots on how to build backlinks on hundreds of high-authority websites.
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I made my first website in 2005. Dmoz was corrupt back then and yahoo directory was good. botw.org has been around since 1994 and still is today. I always get a lifetime link there. Google even buys links there as you can see in the “shopping” section.
Content is defo still king. In fact the longer the better as long as you don’t start talking crap in your writing just to get more words in there. Backlinko blog has research that shows longer content usually ranks higher.
Google Search Console will tell you what keywords, or queries as they call it, are getting you visits and impressions.
I don’t think there’s any backlink value in social media but there are rumours that if your content is shared by many different popular accounts, then it may affect your rankings.
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I think what you have to understand that google has made it pretty clear that their main goal with organic search is to give the best result to the user and over the last 15 years they have been pretty good at implementing a system that cannot be gamed like it used to be.
And I think in the longterm this should be the starting point for every site / content. Just try do deliver good content that is helpful/relevant and actually an answer to the search request.
In other words never sacrifice user experience for some cheap ass seo tricks, because even if it might be working right now you are one algo update away from it not working.
A good example of that is people clogging up headlines with keywords, so that they actually become unreadable and someone reading it, thinks it what the fuck.
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