Woke up and checked my rankings in SEO Elite, and to my delight found that my site had vaulted out of the gurgler for three of my main key phrases.  I attribute this, hopefully not fleeting, improvement to my adjusting anchor text on some of the incoming links and to adding some content to the site… although not as much as I had originally planned.  (Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way…)

If this circumstance maintains, I will be happy and more importantly MAY be able to conclude that incoming links from nasty pages aren’t necessarily that bad and that the main reason my site dropped in the rankings was my taking my eye off the ball and modifying anchor text and on page optimization for a juicier keyword prior to achieving a consistent position 1 performance with my original keyword.  On the other hand, the Googster might just be f**king with me because they are evil and have a hate on for SEO practitioners and therefore my site will be back in the sewer in a week’s time.

Time will tell fearless readers, stay tuned…

Oh yeah, on the Goog is evil theme… I ran across a plumbing site up here that has 4 pages of minimalistic content, a small number of low page rank links with non optimized anchor text and is outranking sites with 10 x the content and links. When asked to explain the mystery I theorized that the Gnomes at Google might artificially bump the rankings of random sites to throw off the algo propeller heads and keep SEOs guessing about whether what they think works is actually the best way of optimizing. It’s certainly got me thinking…..

I call this approach “Enduring SEO” since I feel following these principles will get my client’s sites on to the first page of the Google SERPs and keep them there through any algorithm adjustments, etc.

The first principle is to establish a link building program, using keyword focused anchor text, that delivers inbound links to specific pages at a consistent rate, for as long as the client wants to achieve high rankings for those pages.

The second principle is to ensure each page targeted for a high SERP result, has well written, value added content related to the keyword (or words if low competition keywords). I don’t subscribe to the keyword density school of thought, I use the keywords were they make sense and read well.

I have found that following these principles consistently leads to success over the long term.

As an SEO expert, I use strategies that are intended to deliver long term results to my clients.  None of the stuff I do is rocket science or SEO magic, it is simply applying common sense based on a large amount of research and on experience I’ve acquired in figuring out what helps and what doesn’t when it comes to search engine results.  It can be boiled down to giving Google what it wants, which is value added, readable, keyword focused content on a page. Google wants this because it wants searchers to find what they are searching for without wading through a ton of crap pages. If the searcher is happy, Google is happy and the pages that make the searcher happy move up in the SERPs.

So if it’s all common sense, why do SEO experts exist?  For the same reason a lawyer, an engineer, a car mechanic or an IT technician exists. Not every web site owner or web developer has the time or wants to learn the techniques required to move their pages onto the top of the SERPs. They’d rather focus on their core business and pay someone else to handle it.

If they pay someone and get the long term results they are looking for, who’s going to claim that they got a bad deal?  Sure it might have cost them some money, but think of the time and aggravation they saved by not having to reinvent the wheel…

As an ethical SEO practitioner, I make sure my clients understand what volume of traffic their chosen keywords can generate for their site, as well as how competitive their niche is and how long it will take to achieve their goals. I do this as part of a free site review that is the first step in any client engagement I undertake. If they decide they want to work with me, they know what they are paying for.