Don't Bother With SEO. Use Real People Optimization Instead.

Staten Island, NY Posted: 3/1/2015 1:00:00 AM

Want advice about improving your rank in search engines? Just build your site... and STOP TRYING to boost your rankings.

It's only natural. If your neighbor was a doctor, sooner or later, you're going to ask him about some of your aches and pains, so it shouldn't surprise me that so many people come to me for advice about getting more search traffic to their web sites. It happens so often, I've come to expect it whenever I'm at a party.

To me, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a dead issue. People are spending way too much time and money on SEO, and it's got to stop.

Don't get me wrong. I know there's an entire industry devoted to Search Engine Optimization. Even big companies like Amazon (Alexa) and GoDaddy jumped on the bandwagon and started to sell services to boost search rank. It's just a pointless money grab.

Most SEO tactics cause more harm than good, which is why search engine optimization companies go out of their way to tell you that their company only uses "White Hat SEO"... their way to tell you they're like the good guys who wore white hats in old westerns. This is to give you the false impression that all of their optimizations are completely safe.

First of all, there's no such thing as White Hat SEO.

Instead of debating which tactics are considered White Hat (Safe) or Black Hat (Unsafe), don't look for any tactics. Who says you need ANY tactics? It's not a game, it's a web site. You don't need a strategy, you just have to make content that speaks to your audience.

Speaking of audience...

WHO is your audience? I've got news for you Sparky, it's real people... not Google, Yahoo or Bing.

If you remember only one thing from today's post, remember that Google, Yahoo and Bing are NOT YOUR AUDIENCE.

You don't need to gear your content towards search engines and you certainly don't need to impress them with your mastery of their search ranking system. In fact, as soon as sites start to take advantage of their ranking formula, they change it... on purpose... specifically to insure that people who understand their ranking formula don't get there because of it.

I want to be crystal clear here. Search Engines HATE when you do anything to try to improve your rank. I do mean Hate.

Hate is a strong word. I repeated it for a reason. You have to understand, the only thing that makes one search engine better than their competition is the quality of the results. Google became the #1 search engine specifically because when they launched, their results were drastically more accurate than their competition. Whenever a site tries to take advantage of their ranking system by building content specifically designed to boost it's rank, they stand a great chance of actually displacing better sites that don't use the same optimizations. That's actually bad. Very bad.

Some of you may be wondering why optimizing your content so it ranks higher is bad for search engines.

Think of the web as a bottle with a billion different pills in it, and you're Google. It's your job to help people find the pill that will cure them from whatever ails them. At first every pill looks the same, but because your search formula is the best, when somebody is looking for a specific pill, you deliver it reliably and the customer lives. It's critical you deliver just the right pill, or you'll (literally) lose customers.

Your formula is working great. Every time somebody looks for a pill... you deliver... until people figure out how your formula works, and tinker with the system enough to make their knock-off pills look like the perfect match. Before you know it, countless pills that aren't as good as the ones you normally deliver pop out, and your lose customers. Your only chance for survival is to change your formula, and try to ban everyone that tried to game the results.

With every change in search formula, the only sites that consistently remain on top are the ones that didn't have any optimizations in the first place. They simply had quality content. Any content that is there specifically to impress the search engines can only harm you.

Deep down, that's all that matters. Put content on your site that real people want to read.

Ever since SEO companies came along, the hardest thing for search engines like Google to do is figure out what any given page is about. When the page is stuffed with meta tags, keywords, link / word clouds, and countless other things designed specifically to make them search friendly, it makes it much harder for them to accurately index it. This is one reason search engines like Google had to start ignoring a lot of things like keywords and descriptions in meta tags.

Want proof? NONE of the SEO companies who've ever contacted me ever rank well under the term "SEO"

I've seen too many people waste their money on SEO. Some may have seen a temporary bump in their search traffic, but most of those sites eventually vanished entirely right after Google changed their search formula, which happens quite often.

The bottom line is if you focus on content real people will actually want to read, you'll rank well, even if you've done zero optimizations, and you'll know for sure that any changes in search formulas won't have any negative effect on your position.

If your content is easy for people to understand, search engines will understand it too. Real People Optimization. That's the only search engine optimization you'll ever need.

Real People Optimization (RPO) is still the best way to build an audience. Period.

Joe Crescenzi, Founder

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Don't Bother With SEO. Use Real People Optimization Instead.

Want advice about improving your rank in search engines? Just build your site... and STOP TRYING to boost your rankings.

To me, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a dead issue. People are spending way too much time and money on SEO, and it's got to stop.

First of all, there's no such thing as White Hat SEO.

WHO is your audience? I've got news for you Sparky, it's real people... not Google, Yahoo or Bing.

I want to be crystal clear here. Search Engines HATE when you do anything to try to improve your rank. I do mean Hate.

Some of you may be wondering why optimizing your content so it ranks higher is bad for search engines.

With every change in search formula, the only sites that consistently remain on top are the ones that didn't have any optimizations in the first place. They simply had quality content. Any content that is there specifically to impress the search engines can only harm you.

Want proof? NONE of the SEO companies who've ever contacted me ever rank well under the term "SEO"

The bottom line is if you focus on content real people will actually want to read, you'll rank well, even if you've done zero optimizations, and you'll know for sure that any changes in search formulas won't have any negative effect on your position.

Real People Optimization (RPO) is still the best way to build an audience. Period.

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