SEO is, by its very nature, one of those cutting-edge fields where everyone is always trying to be the latest and greatest at what they do — and because of that, SEO people embrace new, flashy tech and hardcore analysis of minutia with wild abandon. There’s just one problem with that notion: Google, while it remains one of the ‘coolest’ companies in the world, is still a corporation, with the one attribute that will always set a corporation at odds with the cutting edge: it’s slow.
Not because it doesn’t have the ability to keep up, mind you — it’s slow because it needs to be slow, because it has a customer base that consists, at this point, of “absolutely freaking everyone, even those people who are die-hard anti-Googleists.” Google can’t afford to be at the bleeding edge, because a lot of people don’t understand the bleeding edge and are intensely afraid that it will cut them.
What Does This Have to Do With SEO, Jared?
My bad. The point is this: there’s a huge gulf between what SEO clients (and web developers) want to use and what SEO’s clients (also known as “those people doing the searching”) want us to use, and Google is stuck in the middle. Surfers don’t care if we’ve upgraded to CSS 12.4 or if we have the latest schema.org metadata thoroughly suffusing every aspect of our content. Google barely cares about those things.
That’s because Google needs to be able to get the results on Lefsa to your Norwegian grandmother who is using a 386 with Windows 3.11 and Internet Exploder 1.1, just like it needs to get the results on the latest round of synthetic collateralized debt obligation regulations to the alpha-test Amazon Kindle Phone that Mike Ross uses before he gets into the courtroom to argue with Lewis Litt.
Still Waiting On That Point.
Right. The gulf between what the creators of web content want to use and what Google actually cares about (or even can meaningfully interact with) is leading to the creation of a whole boatload of websites that use tech that Google won’t be able to care about for years. They’re doing it in order to improve their SEO, and the truth is that their SEO couldn’t give a warm Klondike bar about their froody code.
If you want your SEO to work for you, you need to KISS it off. As in, Keep It Simple, SEO-guy.
Real SEO Hasn’t Changed in Years
The core concept of SEO is exactly the same now as it was in 2009. Create awesome content, intelligently pepper it with keywords used naturally and relevantly, and earn some backlinks from some authority sites. If you’re doing anything more complicated than that — and definitely if you’re paying someone money to implement some “secret,” “shortcut,” “cheat,” or “backdoor,” you’re doing it wrong, plain and simple.
There is simply no jazzy tool that will give you better search engine results than doing the groundwork, getting your ducks in a row, and putting out content people want to read, with just the most graceful effort on getting some eyes on that content quickly. Game over, man. Game over!
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