A short post from yellowwing, an SEW member from up north in Winnipeg, had this to say today:
I've taken the philospohy of SEO as 90% Linguistics and 10% Math. Beat the competition, not the search engine. It is much easier to analyze other sites than to reverse engineer what the vast team of Google Phd's (sic) have come up with lately.
This brings up an interesting perspective about the two ways that SEOs approach their dilemna. In my experience, simply beating the competition (at least at Google) is not enough these days to rank at the top. You must obliterate the competition, in terms of quality and quantity of both content and links.
This could be due to the much maligned 'sandbox' that Google has many sites in, or it could be simply a matter of getting enough attention. In either case, the same hard effort is neccessary to compete.
SEOmoz offers tools and resources that help SEOs do it both ways - the link analyzer tool is certainly a competition based analysis system, whereas the FAQs and advanced articles take a more in-depth exploration at the search engines' preferences in general.
For my part, I prefer to know as much about the search engines as possible. It's why I've been spending so much of my time reading white papers and research articles from IR researchers and search engineers - getting an understanding of the mindset and plave where the designers of technology come from is, to me, invaluable.
Great Post! I would like to add few things into it. Throughout my carrier I faced up different stages of link building. In early days like in 1999, there was no concept of link building. People used to send emails and selling their products online. Then in early 2000, directory concept was brought up. People used to submit their websites in directories, not to rank well but to find themselves in search results. Then dmoz got appreciation and people used to submit their Websites over and over. Sooner, dmoz realized that mostly the spammers submitting single website twice and thrice even. So it goes on an on where article directories got popularity and then link exchange, and so many other tactics were used to ranking well in search engines. Nowadays I have been observing that people used to submit their websites on social sites for a quick backlink, but still they are digging into more complex results to get dofollow links. So competition is always there, every Website that rank well in search engines having push from different SEO and SEMs Experts. So I totally agreed with your statement that to defeat your competitors by both ways improving links plus contents. God Bless You for this good article.
Thanks,
Bilal Qayyum
404 on the advanced articles
"In my experience, simply beating the competition (at least at Google) is not enough these days to rank at the top. You must obliterate the competition, in terms of quality and quantity of both content and links."
This phenomenon is probably due in large part to the concept discussed in the article "Filthy Linking Rich" where he says that the biggest link holders often recieve the most links and the new sites with few links don't get linked at all. So you have a mammoth task in passing up the competition who is rich and get's richer!