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How SEO Used to be Done
| When Google first came out, it was EXTREMELY easy to rank a website for certain keywords. This was based on both onsite optimization and offsite optimization. Old School Onsite Optimization It used to be that all you had to do was stuff your site full of the keywords you were targeting, and you'd get traffic. For example, let's say you were targeting the keywords "how to lose weight." If you typed that into Google, it was fairly common to come across sites that looked like this (no, I'm NOT kidding): How to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight how to lose weight ....pretty ridiculous, right? Well it didn't take Google too long to figure out that a VERY high keyword density doesn't deliver quality content to the reader. So they lowered what is considered the "optimal" keyword density to 1% to 3% (depending on who you talked to- everyone recommended something different). As for internal linking- that just wasn't very important. You could link to stuff on your own site to keep the visitor there longer, but it wasn't required by any means. Your website didn't need to be clean. You could have images all over the place, ugly colors, high bounce rates (meaning visitors didn't stay long), tons of extra code, and a lot of other nasty stuff. Hopefully you get the point- onsite stuff used to be easy. Over the years some of it got cleaned up, but only in the last few years has it really started making a difference. Now let's talk about backlinks. Old School Backlinking It used to be that all backlinks were treated the same. The website with the most backlinks would win- despite what the website's onsite optimization was like. It didn't matter if your backlinks came from forums, article directories, authority blogs, .edu sites, or anything else. Even though this seemed fair at first, it got abused. Automated software made it VERY easy to spam backlinks all over the internet. Today you can purchase thousands and thousands of backlinks to your website every day for less than $100 a month. And that stuff used to work PERFECTLY. There were stories of marketers who would launch a site, throw thousands of backlinks to it all over the place, and have it ranking #1 in just days- if not hours. Over time though, Google realized that this wasn't delivering quality content to its readers. People would stop using Google because the results would sometimes be extremely spammy- not good. So what happened next? Google decided to fight back with pandas and penguins. Source: Panda Penguin SEO Secrets | |
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