The one thing that is timeless, that works, is good content.
If you write good content you will get far.
Flooding pages with keywords and link farms doesn't get you anywhere in the long run.
This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade.
On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week.
A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for humans".
Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering behind the CFAA.
Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of. While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search.
Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases, Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere on their list, but it's not very close to the top.
Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you.
Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters.
Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormous success and the other doesn't -- there's probably a ranking lottery.
And at the end of the day, if a content moderator or employee at Google likes your content, you'll have a better chance at ranking regardless of quality.
Similar to startups, I am curious as to how much of professional SEO success is about outreach. i.e. if I am mates with a uni professor and I write something about his topic, can I get a backlink from their valued .edu domain? What about .gov? Does this outrank better content? To what extent are forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, inc.com etc writers gaming this? (Or are they just looking for the virality?)
Is paying a content writer (who's area of expertise is, usually, being a content writer) a more noble attempt at gaming the system, I wonder?
But, I think it's a valid question since a lot of paid for content borders on being nothing more than an SEO game plan?
Paid content writers will often produce work that's well-structured, easy to read and grammatically correct but is just a rehash of something that's already been written about 100 times before.
I once employed a journalist to do a piece about a particular kind of insurance. She did a fair bit of research and even got quotes from prominent people in the industry.
I've seen the same piece many times in various guises, all well written but, essentially, her article with just enough of the words changed to make it 'unique'. Easy to find too since they use the quotes verbatim.
When challenged the response is always the same - 'we paid someone in good faith...'
For most people, they run a business, and their web presence is a tool to improve that business, and SEO is a tool to improve its effectiveness.
But cookiecaper seems to be talking about a totally different kind of SEO, in which the base goal is to generate traffic and monetize it, so SEO becomes the primary tool by which you look for easy keywords to target, and write content specifically for the search engines, not for a human audience supporting a pre-existing business.
That entire scenario is fundamentally based on gaming SEO. It is a short-term play for cash, and some people do well with it. But we're comparing apples to oranges when trying to match that up with the way an actual business would approach SEO.
Most of the aggressive SEO players I know about are supporting "actual businesses", not content farms that survive on ads. Our aggressive competitor had no content to monetize directly and no ads, they were competing with our service.
Note well that suggesting Google may not be all-knowing draws out the lackeys accusing anyone who may speak this heresy of not running an "actual business". Implying, yet again, that the only reason someone would speak ill of Google is because they're too perfect. Give me a break.
All of this misses the point regardless, because it's not "gaming" the system when you're playing by the rules. Google wants you to believe that its algorithm is perfect, so it says the best way to rank is to write good content, which they will magically identify and publicize. So you pay someone to write good content for your site and, as long as this content is actually original and useful, you're doing exactly as Google directs. That's not what "gaming" is.
SEO is still a thing because people come in naive enough to believe that good content will stand on its own merits, like I did, and then quickly learn it doesn't actually play out that way in real life.
I've seen many businesses including my own boom with good SEO. Back in the old days I got to #1 for "movers", but the tricks back then don't work anymore (which is a good thing).
Today, it's much more legitimate and I find the most success with keyword research. It's about finding what your target market is searching for and where your competition is or isn't.
Giving up on SEO is a losing proposition for any business that doesn't have a dominate brand or social media presence, which is most businesses.
Disclosure: work for Google nowadays but have zero insight into anything internal that's search related. The above is just common sense and should apply to most search engines.
For site maps, it helps Google find updated content if you have a large site. It's not required, but it won't hurt if you submit one.
I joined a startup in 2010 when SEO was all the rage. I was the second tech hire, and my boss left pretty soon after I joined because he was sick of managing and wanted to be a dev, so I became lead dev with another guy under me.
The tech was still relatively new to me, but I had previous knowledge of SEO from a few internships I had done while at uni. I also freelanced on the side, doing SEO audits for a few local companies. We ran a service in the legal space, offering leads to law firms from customers interested in a particular type of law, so the name of the game was to get as many eyes on the site as possible.
The MD wanted to follow a similar technique to our parent company, which was working well for them. This was essentially paid-for spam, and I felt really uneasy with this approach, so I suggested that we ignore a lot of the current SEO tactics and respect Google for what it is - a very smart search engine built by people that are smart enough to fix the common SEO tactics of the day. Thankfully, the MD listened to the dev team, and the focus was on building the best service possible. Instead of getting crappy backlnks, we ran competitor analysis tools to figure out why some people were doing well, and making our service better than theirs. Essentially, instead of playing the game, we wanted to deserve the top spot. We had content writers reviewing content regularly, a marketing manager that (eventually) backed us, and a manager that was happy to have a wildly inexperienced dev team fuck things up in the name of getting better.
Things went well for us, and we made some slow progress. After a while the Panda update happened, and we skyrocketed to the top of a lot of valuable terms, while the parent company (using spammy technqiues) crumbled, losing around 70% of their traffic. I think investment bailed, and we split out on our own. We ended up getting millions of visitors a month, and the company was acquired because of the work that was put into the product.
Since that experience I've almost completely shunned the SEO side of things, favouring organic online marketing. I know that a lot of the techniques that agencies would use worked - I saw them work myself on our competitors, but I also knew that they were a short-term fix with no long-term gain. By focusing on clean markup, good content, a clear architecture of information, and fast loading times, we beat the competition, and those values haven't changed eight years later.
The company handled data on investing, but their CMS was full of pages relating to totally unrelated things like Nokia phone repairs. It was the standard long tail approach, where a thousand pages of spam getting 10 visitors a day was enough to give them a legit boost on their main pages.
When the Panda update hit, these pages killed the site, and the spammy links propping these pages up were next to worthless.
From my experience if you're using any number of JS frameworks, this is almost impossible. If you're building a static site, you're better off just writing flat HTML or using a well known framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.
Reading a lot about it and experimenting with many sites is the best way to learn. It requires more than just good content if the keywords are competitive.
Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pain. Do have your title match your content. Do try to write unique phrases that are applicable to your content. And try not to copy/paste content around your pages.
Do all that, with clean markup, and your SEO will be good enough to beat out local competitors. (Even if agencies tell you differently.)