“What ‘Easier Ways’?”

In one of my first posts back at the beginning of November, I made the statement that “there are easier ways than blogging” to win at SEO.

Since then, I’ve received several emails asking what those methods are. It’s tangential to our main topic here, but since there is an obvious interest, here goes:

There are several ways to get high up in the search results. First, for those who aren’t familiar with SEO, here are a few core rules that you need to understand (I know, this is going to be simplistic. Still, send the emails if you must complain. I don’t mind.):

1. Your ranking has three basic components: relevance, popularity and timeliness (or “freshness” if you prefer).

2. Relevance means how your content relates to what people are searching for. This is where your keywords come into play.

3. Popularity: How many people are recommending what you’re saying to others?

4. Freshness: How new is this information? Is it out of date?

The search engines  run an algorithm that weighs keyword density, inbound links and how often the info is updated on EACH PAGE of your site. Blogs are certainly good for this, as they make it easy to publish information to the web. But blogs are primarily designed to facilitate communication (comments, trackbacks, etc). All of this is pretty much ancillary to your SEO mission.

If all you care about is your SEO ranking, then you could save yourself time and effort by simply hiring a writer to write a series of 300-500 word articles for you. Simply submit one article per day to ten or more article submission sites, with a link back to a page on your site that is seeded with 1-2% keyword density. And modify them and use them to create a lens per day at Squidoo.com, also with a link.

Within a year, you’ll have around 2600 inbound links (260 articles–one for each weekday–times 10 submissions), and you don’t have to fool with all of the reading and commenting and all the other stuff that social media entails.

Of course,  I don’t put too much stock into SEO for SEO’s sake. Like any tool, optimization has it’s time and place. But it isn’t the center of the online universe, lie some folks make it out to be; search results and pagerank are way overrated in terms of usefulness as metrics.

But if that’s your cup ‘o tea…drink up!