An SEO Analogy That Will Change Your Strategy

This analogy is going to change your SEO strategy today! It explains why you should change your Seo focal point today and be more cautious of your competition more than just Google.

An analogy is a comparison of two entirely different things that can be used to clarify or explain one based on another. Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Steve Jobs and countless others have used them to be able to communicate their ideas in a better way. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, "Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home."

At some point, everyone uses analogies to somehow simplify things. Here is an analogy that will work great for your overall SEO plan. I am going to compare SEO with a track and field racing event.

A little background about this Race!

The event is hosted by the organizer (Google), they set the rules and guidelines, and they have certain pre-requisites for each runner (website). There are many teams (competitors) but only 10 will get rewarded (ranking).

Something about the organizer - Google.

The organizer (Google) has requirements that the runners stick to. They cannot use performance enhancing drugs (spamming), the runners need to be within a certain weight and age-group (websites should be coded with the valid mark-ups and indexing potential). The organizer makes money by getting people into their arena and it makes more money by getting only but the best to compete with each other and yes, they do favour the older and popular slightly more. Google makes money by being able to produce the most accurate results for a search term. Without this credibility, we might as well go and use other search engines. They are absolutely in love in finding the best runners.

Google only sets the race, it is absolutely non-personal in terms of runner evaluation and uses a program to find who the runners in the race should be. This program (Google Algorithm) gives a final score for each runner and Google is aware that some of the athletes know how to deceive their program and so they continually find ways to pull out runners who are trying to fool them.

Something about the runners - Websites.

The runners have exceptional skill at writing content, building website popularity and they always want to show off to Google that they should be the top choice for search terms. Runners are also aware that being at the top of the race brings in more money and popularity. The runners also know that the demand to see this race is very high and daily brings in more competitive runners.

Let the SEO races begin!

Before we start the race, we know one thing for sure. Google`s algorithm is dynamic – that it changes from time to time. But these changes are always in favor of those who listen to their guidelines. Google`s work as an organizer is only to hold the location for the race and to make sure only runners that follow the guidelines can run. The rest is then up only to the runners!

The runners however are highly dynamic; they are more aggressive than Google. It`s their strategy and their out-smarting of the competition that will bring them closer to the finish line. Mind only that no Google guidelines are being broken.

To Conclude:

Do you know the Google Guidelines well? Do you know what they favor and what they frown upon? – Than that’s all you need to know about having a baseline strategy for your SEO. However, that is only about 10% of this game.

90% of your focused SEO activity then, should be directed at outsmarting your competition. Care should just be taken that no guidelines are being broken. Starting today, you should take archives of the SERPs 3 pages back and every single runner/website should be looked at thoroughly. This way you can always be informed of what works for industry. Seos are clever – might as well pirate a few ideas!