SEO The Old School Way

There's been a lot of changes in search engine optimization at least over the past 9 years that I've been doing it. Back in 1999 keyword stuffing was considered, if not white hat, then a reasonably grayish-white way to get a web page to the top of the rankings. Back then, you would come across many websites where the tops of the pages (above the fold as they say) were for the visitors of the site and keywords stuffed at the bottom of the page were for the search engines.

But, over time a consensus among webmasters, SEOs and the search engines emerged that this method was not preferable. What developed as preferable over time was writing complete sentences for the visitors of the website without any regard to the search engines. But, for a while the search engines lagged in rewarding this behavior ahead of the keyword stuffing behavior.

It was only after this reward system took hold, and the ranking algorithms became savvy to this trick and delivered a consistent reward-punishment system to shall we say, good pages versus bad pages, that webmasters and SEOs had a playbook in which to follow. Of course, many years ago, much of this was unspoken.

There was no Matt Cutts from Google or Google Guy giving SEOs hints here and there of what behaviors were considered white hat, black hat, gray hat or snow cone hat. Before the days of Matt Cutts, SEOs had to guess and talk to each other on message boards to compare, confabulate and surmise what was going on with the latest algorithm change or anomaly (of course this still goes on today).

But, just as the search engine algorithms evolved so have the black hat SEOs who have kept one step ahead of the search engines (or tried to) and have become even more sophisticated at gaming the system. Cloaking, sophisticated redirects for siphoning Page Rank (PR) or cheating link partners have abounded.

An entire industry has evolved around buying and selling text links for the purposes of passing PR from one site to the next. The buyers want to buy enough PR to get their websites up in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and those doing the selling are happy to make a profit doing just that.

But, even throughout all the efforts to game the search engines, old school SEO hasn't changed that much over time. The basics of keyword research, on-page optimization, link-building and tracking results, which is the core of SEO has stayed the core.

Sure, there are new wrinkles as to exactly how to do this core of white hat search engine optimization. Within the past couple of years, blogs and social media have both come on strong and evolved. Old school SEOs have had to be flexible and adapt to new market conditions and even embrace the new online media.

But, when one gets lost in the new and shiny techniques (which is easy to do) it is important to pull back a while, gain some perspective and realize that old school SEO will still get a website where it needs to be. And, as trust is important in any business relationship, clients can rest assured that their white hat won't get their website dumped at the drop of a hat for using black hat techniques that the search engines have caught wind of and penalized.

Old school SEO still rocks and there is no reason to believe that this will change anytime soon.

Copyright SEO Services

Tom Stevens writes about and practices search engine optimization, Internet marketing and advanced SEO services for many clients who prefer going old school.