The Future of SEO: Hire an English Major
Sep 25, 2014
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When I first started doing SEO back in 2003, I remember changing a title tag, a meta description, and the meta keywords on the homepage of a website owned by a New York City Dentist. In short, two weeks later, the dental website was in position number one on Google when queried by the search term: “Dentist Upper East Side.” The dentist got a ton of traffic, built up the practice; and, they still will get the occasional click although they haven't been on page one for quite some time.
Unfortunately, those days are over. They’ve been replaced by complex link building strategies, guest blogging, content optimization, and now even social media. The algorithms used by each of the search engines have become complex beyond belief, and organic SEO has never been so difficult. Their newest algorithms have turned link building into an art form. Your incoming links now must be from credible sources that are relevant to your industry. Your content now needs to be so darn good that people will feel compelled to share it on social media. If you have links coming from the wrong place, your website is docked. If your content never gets shared, and it’s written from a keyword perspective, your website is docked.
With Google’s newest algorithm updates, content is definitely king. You may have been thrown off by the fact that keyword-centric content is no longer a viable option. Google’s robots can now detect synonyms, making keyword stuffing obsolete. Back in the day, if you wanted to rank for the term “Web Design Firm,” you would write a blog post called “Web Design Firm” and add that keyword to the meta tags and the content. Now, if you write the same blog post, but a competitor writes a similar blog post called “Web Design Agency” and that article gets more social shares then that article will rank higher even when searching for “Web Design Firms.” Google realizes that “Firm” and “Agency” are interchangeable words, so the higher search result is the one that is truly the “better content.”
SEO used to be a science. We used statistics to determine keyword choice. Then we’d use meta data to influence page rank. The best new hires for SEO jobs were psychology majors, who were trained to analyze data regarding to real people. They would study the data and make deductions about search trends. Then, they could write solid content that carefully included the desired keywords. The content was good, but it would rank and it would bring traffic to a website. That’s old news. In the modern day of SEO, the content can’t be “good” or it will lose position to content that is “great.” If you need great SEO then you need a writer, not a marketer. Do yourself a favor and hire an English major to do your SEO, and pass on the Psychology degree. The future of SEO demands it.
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