Perform a Google search for “SEO tips” and you will get upwards of 33.2 million results. The kind of tactics you read about make it seem like SEO is the single most complicated and cryptic marketing tactic you can master.

From in-depth lists of relevant secondary keywords to website plug-ins that use complex algorithms to calculate if your keyword density is too high, too low, or just right, we treat SEO like it’s neuroscience. But the truth is, as SEO develops, it is only becoming easier — if you’re willing to work at it.

Quit playin’ games with SEO
When search engines were first popularized, they were moderated by humans. But the number of websites quickly ballooned to the point where having real people moderate search results was well beyond impossible. Introducing: spiders.

A web crawler, or “spider,” is a program that systematically browses the web in order to index its contents. When this technology first appeared, the algorithms used were very simple. This meant it was fairly easy to “game” the search engines, tricking them into showing your website in the search results you wanted, even if it wasn’t relevant.

This led to so-called “black hat” SEO tactics, like

• keyword stuffing,
• invisible text,
• doorway pages,
• etc.

How to succeed at SEO without really trying
But the ultimate goal of a search engine is to please the users, and that means turning up the most relevant possible results. That means that the search engines of today are constantly modifying their algorithms to be more accurate — and that means more difficult to trick.

Google, the world’s most commonly used search engine, has made their stance on SEO clear: Make pages for users, not for search engines.

If that’s truly what all SEO is headed towards, then the answer is simple: Don’t worry about SEO. Just write relevant, high-quality content. Search engines will always be changing, trying to become more up-to-date. You don’t want your content to lose optimization value as time goes by. Instead of using cheap tricks, trust that SEO is improving to the point where great content will get noticed and distributed … because that’s what people are searching for.

Need help creating quality content to bring people to your website? Contact the experts at Proven Systems by email or at (970) 223-6565 for a no-cost consultation.