The reality about Traffic and Content.

I recently had a friend that went to an SEO conference in Melbourne where Australian businesses owners paid over $900 to attend a series of lectures where many famous SEO experts, revealed for hours the most confidential and exclusive SEO theories, concepts and best practices to achieve top position in Google.

What I find interesting is that usually 99.9% of the people that will leave this type of conference will never implement any theory, concept or strategy for a very simple reason: SEO Experts, tend to complicate the SEO industry .

So when I think about the $900 invested in a weekend of SEO wisdom, I can’t stop thinking … mmm what a waste of money!

The reality is that I’m a true believer that when SEO companies experts approach to potential clients they have one objective in their mind: To complicate them, to confuse them, to explain things with so many technical terms, than the normal Joe the Business man will simply believe he can’t take control of his own company SEO strategy.

Paying $900 for a SEO conference is not a lot, specially if you can find SEO concepts that will help you to build your traffic and most important increase your ranking, but usually these conferences don’t go straight to the point, and they fail to explain clearly what the exactly you need to do to increase your keyword ranking.

Also, paying $900 to hear an SEO guru tell me that…
“To make it in your Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing arena, you just need to have passion about your business. Write good content and traffic will come” … makes me extremely sick in my SEO tummy .

The advice that traffic is related with good content is a typical typical lame lie, that many SEO companies love to tell their clients, because at the end of the day, it sounds better to say:
“sorry you need to improve your content to be Number 1″
instead of
“Don’t worry about the content, instead go out there and get more links for your site”

Believing that Google understand the amazing quality of your content, and that by just the nature of your words’ you will rank in 1st position, is like telling kids that Santa is in fact the biological father of the Eastern Bunny : It is not true .

If you don’t believe me try to see how many times you find Harvard University ranking in 1st position for any term? Mainly because the quality of the content is not equal to ranking or traffic.
So, why are so many gurus telling companies you that they write great content, and if you are passionate about their industry, they will sooner achieve, position 1 in Google for their selected keywords, if they keep sticking to build the best content possible ?

Well, the main reason is because many of these gurus are gurus by teaching people how to rank, but not by ranking their own sites. The love to talk about SEO, but they don’t make a living from optimization their own sites, or by building niche / industry related sites.

How many of these Gurus are ranking 1st for the keywords loans or mortgages? for sure none of them, instead of all them work for other companies, providing advice and consultancy services.
It seems we keep forgetting that SEO is about one thing: Being 1st in Google. That’s it. Nothing else. if you can’t be 1st in Google for your term, you are loosing the battle and another site, anther company is getting your visitors, your users, your potential customers and your money.

But again, nobody tells you that when you spent $900 in a SEO conference. Instead they will tell you about the relevance of social media , networking, youtube, forum postings, facebook advertising, etc. It seems like a funny conspiracy to make you believe that to rank you need to make friends, and work hard to make people love your site.

“Create great content and then traffic will follow” — are you for real?

So what happens then? You, or the poor beginner that saved the money to pay the amazing SEO conference, start to follow the advise of these gurus.

They open a Twitter account, they create a myspace profile, they try to comment in all the forums in the world trying to get new visitors, and after spending 10 to 15 hours per week, they discover after a few months, how useless and exhausting all these type of tasks.

The Truth is that SEO conferences will not be so interesting if the SEO expert will tell you the things in PLAIN and RAW English, like the reasons why people don’t manage to rank their sites.
Are you ready for the truth?

1. People are lazy, not just lazy, but usually professionally lazy, so lazy they are perfectly happy to pay $900 just to hear the secret that will tell them how to RANK fast. People want a magic bullet, a quick fix, a fast solution. People don’t want to realize that ranking a website is like building a businesses, it takes hours and hours of sacrifice, work and dedication.

2. Just 3 Steps: Ranking one website has to do with 3 basic things: Keyword research, SEO content and Link Building.

3. Is all in the Links Baby:  If you don’t link build you will not rank. That’s it. Link building is boring (in fact it is one of the most boring things you can do….), but if you don’t do it, your site is worth nothing. the more you link build the more “brownie points’ you have in the eyes of Google Santa.

4. Forget about the Content. You don’t need to have 1000 friends, followers or network’ partners to rank. Even your content doesn’t need to be just amazing . In fact I have sites that rank 1st in Google with content that seems written by a 7 year old french kid with very basic level of English. (well, actually I am a 1/2 french, 1/2 Colombian guy leaving in Australia with a very strange English accent….)

5. Forget about Social traffic. If you really want to Rank, forget about the social hype, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Digg, Facebook. Social Media only needs to be done to build one thing; Links – not friend, not cool internet buddies that rub your back while you believe that “everyone loves me and everyone thinks my site is great’.
Remember: Internet Buddies don’t become customers, they are internet buddies mainly because they are wasting their time “surfing” the net, instead of producing results for their own sites.

6.  Links override everything: Any on site SEO errors or deficiencies, like Metatags, Titles, link structure, sitemaps, can be over ruled with contextual inbound links to your site.

7.  Work it: SEO is about dam hard work, about doing the same thing over and over again: Producing links to your site – that’s it. That is the secret (I just gave you the secret without charging you $900 dollars)
Choose the right keyword, research your competition, great content with the relevant keyword and go out there, into the Jungle and build inbound links, day at night, night and day, like a beast. The more your build the stronger your site will become.

So what about Links? Is just getting link like a manic? Well, kind of , but we need to understand that not all links are the same.

The kind of Links we want are off a high Google PR page or site, related to our niche/industry , Links that have been indexed by google for a while, links that are inside content that is related to your industry …
Also we want to have our keyword anchor in the link and we want to be sure we don’t give away links out of site to every single person out there.

Confusing? Well, not really, it is just a method a system, and what internet marketers really need to do, to rank sites is to build links, to create link building strategies.
And believe me, it is not exciting it is boring, it is tedious, you have to do it none stop and once you think you are doing keep doing it again.

Do you need any more secret info to increase the ranking in your site? I don’t think so. The problem with small website owners is that they spend hours trying to learn everything about Search Engine Marketing, instead of deciding to do something about it. Small businesses owners love to think about their site, instead of working in their site.

So now that you saved the $900, what can you do with that money? invest it in your online marketing strategy, buy domain names related to your site, create some extra blogs, or pay an SEO monkey like me, to do just one thing; Link building….
….. because only when you build you will get that organic traffic that is free, effective and converts.

We have more SEO Ninja Posts right here

• April 30, 2011 -- Brave SEO experts until you confrot them.
• December 2, 2010 -- Meet the Clowns that Talk about SEO