SEO is overrated

Yes, you read the title correctly. SEO is very much overrated.

It really is not that hard. There is only so much you can do for onsite SEO. The rest of the factors are domain age and incoming links. That’s it.

Some of those factors are in your hands, others are not. I know there are controversial opinions on domain age, but my experience tells me that it is a big factor. I did a few tests, using old domains for splogs, as well as newly registered ones. The new ones got sandboxed instantly and buried, the old domains keep ranking to this day.

I also believe that on-site SEO is overrated as well. Google’s philosophy is to take away control from the webmaster, for the simple reason that he can abuse that control. That is why metatags are useless, and that is why onsite SEO is not that big of a factor.

Don’t get me wrong, I work on onsite SEO on all my sites. I just do whatever needs to be done, and forget about it.

But what exactly does need to be done?

Here it is, in a short list:

Wordpress site. The spiders love wordpress. 1st choice, everything else comes second.
Sitemaps. Submit to google webmaster tools
Similar posts plugin.
Permalinks.
Alt tags in images.
Close to 1.0 depth (this means how deep is every page from the homepage, the less, the better)
Keywords in domain. Domain age.

Those are the main ones really. You will read a lot of stuff in the SEO blogosphere, about silo’s and PR sculpting, and putting all files in the same folder, and using subdomains instead of subfolders.

It is all crap.

It is all regurgitated bullshit by people who do not fully comprehend algorithms and computers. Trust me, focus on this short list, master this, and you will be ranking in no time.

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