Why Most SEO Efforts Fail
Launching any new product requires additional effort, research and planning. If you’ve tried to do your own SEO and failed, you’re in good company. It’s easy once know what you’re doing, but it’s very hard to learn. There’s just so much bad information out there, folks. It’s scary.
Some people will tell you that there’s nothing you can’t learn about SEO just by reading stuff on the web. That’s partly true, if you only knew which stuff you could trust! Not so easy…
Most of what I know could be found somewhere on the web… if you can handle math and read between the lines a bit. Too bad that most of what you will find on the web is wrong, misleading, or so poorly written that it actually makes things worse.
The #1 reason why most people give up on SEO is that they spend far too much time and money without getting the results they need.
Five Not-So-Easy Pieces
SEO is pretty simple, really. It boils down to doing five things right:
- Developing a keyword strategy to target the right searchers
- Building a well-structured web site
- Creating good content and doing basic “on page” optimization
- Promoting your site to get links from the rest of the web
- … and avoiding technical “gotchas”
Even if you find the right information and understand what all of those things really mean, you’re still missing a very critical piece.
You need a step-by-step plan to put it all into practice. If you don’t have a good road map, you get lost. You get frustrated, results aren’t happening fast enough, and you start looking for shortcuts… in short, you probably end up doing something like this:
- You settle for a “thin” keyword strategy with a handful of phrases, or you run in the opposite direction and target so-called “long tail” or “niche” phrases that can never bring you enough traffic.
- You rewrite your content in “keywordspeak” to get more “keyword density” of just writing naturally and placing your search terms in the few key places on the page where they’ll actually help.
- You submit to a few directories, you spend some time trying to trade links, and when that doesn’t get the job done, you try different automated linking schemes, or start buying links, the “link rental” bill never stops growing, and results are hard to find.
- If you’re really unlucky, some kind of simple, easy to fix technical problem gets you. You panic, maybe you’ve been penalized. “Experts” on forums confirm the diagnosis, and you start undoing all the good work you’ve done.
Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, then you know how painful it can be to do this stuff without a good plan. If none of these things has happened to you, you’re probably in great shape… but a good road map can still make you more effective. You must have a plan to know where you intend to end up at.
No matter where you are in your efforts, a planned SEO system will help you find new opportunities, and give you the tools you need to take advantage.
Those who have been following me for a few years already know one thing about me – I rarely recommend any products or services. I hesitate to recommend individual consultants, even my friends… because I feel personally responsible for the outcome.
Others will happily recommend anything that will earn them a few dollars in commissions. Not me.
So, when I recommend something to you, it’s because I really believe it’s worth the price. You don’t have to buy anything based on my recommendation, but by the time we’re through here, I hope you’ll understand that my endorsement is not given lightly. I will be giving a few endorsements later on.
I’ve been doing more or less the same things in SEO for years, and they still work.
Even today, when I start work on a new web site, I expect that we’ll be able to start seeing significant traffic from search engines within the first month or so, and that we’ll start seeing page one rankings for our key search terms within six months with only organic search. There’s nothing quite like Mailbox Money!
Why do I expect that to happen? Because it’s happened for me, over and over, for years and years… and all I did was apply my system. I’ve seen competitors come and go, in many markets – flying high in April, shot down in May, while my many sites have continued to prosper.
Why have I been able to sit back and laugh while so many people have struggled over the years? It’s simple.
I don’t try to fool the search engines.
Optimizing web pages, if you were doing it right, hasn’t really changed in years. A lot of tricks (hidden text, keyword stuffing) have stopped working, but they were never necessary to begin with.
Now, with my proven SEO process as a framework, I don’t expect that this system will ever go out of date. We may add a new wrinkle here, or change a thing or two within a particular step, but for the most part, my system will remain the same.
What will change? New strategies and tactics, new opportunities, and unless I miss my guess, years of watching your risk-taking competitors fall by the wayside as the search engines figure out their games.
Stay Tuned Up,
Dale
