Thinking of Search Engine Optimization as a science is inherently wrong.
Wanting more traffic, whether it be because your business needs visibility, or because you want your articles to be read and spread through the Internet, or because you want more people to see the ads on your website to feed yourself or even fuel your gambling addiction - that’s all fine, but doing it through the exploitation of SEO is just disgusting.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the exploitation of SEO is wrong – not that you shouldn’t do anything at all for SEO.
I agree with “Content is King” and with every SEO article that revolves around what makes content “king”: - A good title - A good description - How to write a comprehensible sentence
But that’s it.
Everything that has to do with backlinks, paying people to write articles for you and using buzzwords is just repulsive.
By no mean am I saying that my content is great, in fact, I don’t even care - I just write what I feel like writing, and most often than not, I write things that I don’t want to forget in the future (yup, that’s right, I read my own articles sometimes).
What I am saying is that if you need to start from your needs, and climb back to the user, then you’re doing it wrong.
Everything MUST start with what the user wants, and if you can’t put yourself in the shoes of your target audience, then you’ll never have truly good content, which brings us to the elephant in the room:
Content is King
Stop for a second, and ask yourself, “Why is content king?”
Because your users have a need, and your content is what fulfill that need.
This isn’t about using buzzwords or properly adding bold text here and there in your text, it’s about understanding your audience.
When you search for something on a search engine, you look for results that are the most closely related to your need, and if the first result you click on doesn’t satisfy you, you close it and move on to the next one.
So you have to put yourself in the shoes of those who visit your website - what do YOU think they’re trying to accomplish? Does the content you provide suffice?
I’ve seen a few blog posts about how StackOverflow is always highly ranked for programming-related questions, and it baffles me.
Of course it’s high ranked, SO is a merit-based search engine itself: somebody has a need, just like somebody searching on a search engine would, but as opposed to a search engine, users on StackOverflow are pressured into writing good questions and providing good answers through the use of points.
So because people are making amazing content, search engines are like “Oo StackOverflow always provides good content, so we’ll favor their website and rank them high!”
Anyways, SEO is common sense, not a science.