Best Bet for SEO?

Anyone that guarantees a ranked position on the SERPs is a liar.

Any freelance site that allows sellers to BS traffic (guaranteed SERPs) is just as desperate for money as the seller.

Real SEO is pretty basic, followed links + text, that's the basics, everything revolves around those two things.

SEO isn't about trickery, it's about optimization, the same as any other type of advertising on or offline. If you want something (ex: SEO) then optimize, If you don't want it, don't do it.

The SEO industry exists for one simple reason - NONE of the search engines are good enough to be able to sort through more than a billion websites and determine which ones are the very best for any given search query. That may be their goal but they aren't even close to achieving it.

Because of that, each search engine has published their own set of SEO best practices in order to aid webmasters in making their sites easier to understand, index and rank. The very fact that they need to publish these guidelines is an admission that their search engines do not work as well as they would like them to.

So, an SEO's real job is to tweak their website so that it can rank better. Backlinks - a very manipulative signal - was introduced by Google and took the ability to rank well off of your pages and placed a large amount of influence on other websites.

I advise people to never hire an outside agency until they have learned to do the job correctly, themselves. Without that knowledge, you will never know if the company you have hired is doing the job correctly.

You wrote that like the two oppose each other but MANY SEOs are involved in creating great value and letting the world know about it

Simply writing it isn't going to make anyone know its there.

The honest truth is you are defining SEO based on Forum and black hat SEO not what SEOs in businesses and corporations all over the world are doing.

Hi gpacx,

Just want to start by saying I understand your frustration of having to sort through all the information about SEO, I was there and its been a long journey trying to sift out whats good and whats bad.

Google is incredibly unreliable I monitor several websites and the rank positions change almost daily.

I have seen some people and or companies claim that they can rank you #1 in google, and others always say that's impossible to guarantee. I just want to clarify that you "can" guarantee a first result position quite easily, but it would usually be a brand name or some word that no one ever searched for before. So yes you can guarantee a #1 spot but it probably won't do you any good. What's the point of ranking if no one is searching for it right? Its best to avoid anyone that says SEO is guaranteed.

If you are planning on hiring an SEO firm, I would first do a little bit of homework yourself. Start by answering these questions.

• What are your marketing goals
• Who are your target customers
• What are some alternative advertising channels
• What is the projected ROI on each channel

The reason for the list is SEO is not for everyone. Last year in fact I audited two local companies who were looking to hire an SEO company and when I did keyword research for them they both had a low search volume for the state. It wouldn't have mattered if they were first for 'all' of their keywords. SEO was not going to provide them a return on investment.

I wouldn't say that SEO is cheating. The search engines job is to provide the most relevant content for a search. An SEO's job is to make a webpage the most relevant page for that search.

Making a great website that provides value to readers is a great start. But that's only half of the battle. Having a content strategy to target your customers (readers) is another large part of SEO. The old days of build a website and people will find you are long gone.

I would say try building the site yourself first. There are free accounts you should get, google search console, bing webmaster tools and google analytics. Make sure you integrate these into your site so that you can monitor its progress.

Do this for the first 6 months then you will know if you need any SEO help or not.

I just want to put my 2cents for this post, in particular this quote

Generally when I see this it's people who are paranoid of doing some work with low search volume keywords who have not ranked for enough keywords to know better

I get that question all the time when I consult about low search volume

In most cases my experience is I've had the best money making traffic for non-existent volume to low volume keywords

While keywords that I use to rank page one that are now impossible to rank on page 1 with tremendous amounts of search volume never actually performed even close to what Google reported

I was not the only person who reported this when I checked around with other SEO people

Here is what matters

I saw a graph the other day from someone promoting his service about how he increased his traffic with some SEO magic and I happen to notice something that had slipped by me when reading the graph they had 4000 keywords targeted( wish I had made a copy of it) but I will demonstrate it with other graphs I found to make my point





Notice how many keywords these graphs show

if you want to get traffic you have to be everywhere, regardless of the search volume

one of the biggest problems of individuals who want to rank in Google is using too few keywords and expect large amounts of traffic to show up to their websites

what you need is a vast amount of keywords to be seen on page one somewhere regardless of search volumes


Another point a good one by Yukon, which I agree with

Overall this is a true statement, but not always
I have a test site up in a tiny niche for testing purposes I compete against a site with lots of links

I did a trustflow chart to see what the links looked like



First two URLs are my test site

Links are great and always positive if they are good ones, but they don't always control on who ranks


Next if you want to get to page one for a large amount of keywords you need to know who you are competing against

I use Domain Authority because there is nothing else that will give me a quick overview at a glance

Disclaimer: this is not a Google ranking factor, never has been it's a third party metric that works for me to know at a glance what my competition looks like

Here is an example of what I mean, dating niche very hard niche to break into



the red shows the amount of authority websites I would compete against if I chose to compete for divorced dating, upon more research I found two other related dating keyword groups that I would have a better chance ranking for page one

Point to this post you need to do the right research to understand the niche you want to compete in


Anyone who want's to be successful in SEO needs to stop believing what I see being repeated over and over about search volumes it doesn't matter it's a lie, what matters is get to page one many many times traffic will eventually show

Do your research and test and test some more

sparrow what a great value post, incredible read and really interesting data available there.

Would you be able to explain a little bit more about the first graphic and the second one with the scatter plots? I'm not exactly sure what it's trying to tell me. From the first image what I'm seeing is that the traffic starts to really go up when you have a large amount of different keywords that you're ranking for and that you can only expect good traffic once you achieve this.

I don't really understand the second graphic at all. I think I know what trust flow and citation flow are in this case, like one is how many links you have on your page and the other one is how many links are to your website on other pages but I don't really understand what the graph means in particular.

The third one just seems to indicate that there's a big difference in how hard it is to break into certain niches depending on how many sites there are that are ranking for certain numbers of keywords, so when you do this analysis you can see that if there are lots of big authority sites ahead of you it could be very hard to outrank them and start to see the traffic that you want.

Excellent post.