Relevance, Sammie the Index Spider and You

Relevance is king with SEO. Let me introduce you to Sammie, the index spider. Sammie loves fresh, new content and that is what she scours the World Wide Web in search of. When she finds something that she's never eaten before then she files it away neatly in her index. The better something tastes and the more unique it is then the higher up in the index it gets placed. Simple, right? Wrong.

Do you have any idea how many people ring the dinner bell, via meta-tags, keywords, summaries, links, etc., and tell poor Sammie that this fresh, great tasting new morsel is waiting for her? Yeah, it's a lot. How many of those folks do you think actually leave her anything new, meaty and juicy? Yeah, very few indeed, like content marketers. More often than not, web-masters jiggle her web with promises of great content and yet deliver stale, albeit well-plated, saltine crackers. It doesn't take very long, usually, for Sammie to catch on and not come running nearly as quickly when she realizes that she was fooled before by the same person now trying to get her attention.

On the flip-side, Sammie has a great memory for those places where people actually deliver on their promise of great content. And, pretty much, every single time that these favored places leave new content she gets there quickly. Yes, she shows favoritism. Heavily. She's also very quick to hold a grudge through penalty.

Why waste inordinate amounts of time analyzing data for keywords, traffic metrics, bounce vs. exit rates, etc. to build the best looking sign promising the absolute best content around all of that effort...to deliver an old, stale plate of saltines? Why not just prepare Sammie good tasting content over and over again? That's right, bribing Sammie works.

SEO Trickery and Shenanigans Paralleled with the Tale of the Tortoise and the Hare

In every telling of the tale, the Tortoise always beats the Hare no matter how many shortcuts the Hare takes. In the end, after all of his exhaustive efforts, wide-open running, trickery and shenanigans it is the Hare's laziness and refusal to just run a fair race that is his undoing. The Tortoise always wins through slow, steady trotting along the path and he always plays fair...unless, of course, you take into account the Looney Tunes renditions of the tale.

Exactly how does this relate to search engine optimization(SEO)? Well, it seems as if there is this pervasive ideology concerning SEO that tends to avoid doing the one thing that is time-tested, tried and true...and, that is the slow, steady creation of original, substantive, high quality relevant content. Keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden text, spinning text, etc. were all used and worked for some time. They became black-hat because they were gimmicks or trickery. They were based in dishonesty, misdirection and simply not playing fair ball. After the initial burst of exposure, these methods almost always begin to fizzle and require a doubling of effort to maintain position. Some time passes, they wane again and require a re-doubling of effort. Eventually, the bots catch on and make every bit of that hard work disappear and push the site to the 63rd page of search results. The really sad part is that no matter how many times unethical SEO gets punished there are people out there that try it again and again. If the Hare were in SEO then I'm sure this would be his business model.

The Tortoise would slowly, ethically follow the rules and enjoy the scenery as he trudged along towards his goal. I doubt the Tortoise ever really thought he would actually beat the Hare. The Tortoise would be an SEO that didn't believe in shortcuts and chicanery. Let's face another fact: relevant content has always been what both the search engines and the audience want. All of the fancy algorithms are not used to find relevant content nearly as often as they are to find shady, manipulative practices. Be the Tortoise.