SEO is bullshit, frankly on-page SEO is stupid easy

In my own words, SEO is so ridicules that people actually addressing it is the utter crap… SEO is bullshit, frankly on-page SEO is stupid easy, right..? I appreciate that mentality and hope for it to be spread, because it’s true isn’t it?

Really, when you’ve written some good content with keywords the best describing words in it, and you’ve published it with your CMS that uses good titles, heading-tags etc. Then you’ve done pretty much most of what you can do without getting into shady techniques. Now it’s all about getting links from people who love your content.

I’m sure you’ll agree that such random examples as the following statements are totally right. And that the statements clearly show various stuff people know and therefore they can conclude that SEO is bullshit.

1. SERP listings are presented in the best way
   Search engines are super smart and they know which is the best way to present your pages in the SERPs. Their listings are made so you’ll have the best possible CTR and the description is the ultimate pre-sell text available in your content, thereby providing you with maximum conversion rate.
2. Getting multiple listings in SERPs can’t be done internally
   Being smart about internal linking and content won’t make search engines like Google show multiple pages and indented listings in the SERPs. This is solely based on how much other people like / link your pages. Secondly, there’s really no reason to have multiple listings.
3. Diversifying anchor text and internal links is unimportant
   It’s not possible to gain better rankings by having diversified anchor texts in internal links. Nor does it matter if your internal links are linking to specific points of your website because it won’t increase overall link popularity for the important content anyway.
4. Organizing your content in a tree-like structure is the best
   Websites with internal linking based on a typical categorized structure is the best way to organize you website and navigation. It’s not true that you’re missing out on rankings because your most linked pages are the “about” and “contact” pages. Nor is it true that your product pages are buried in the bottom of the hierarchy.
5. Everything is perfect as long as your HTML validates
   E.g. the order of links in the HTML isn’t important. Again we know that search engines are damned good at figuring out your HTML, so your rankings wouldn’t improve by having a different link order in the HTML. So there’s no optimal way to order your links and therefore you can’t risk lack of rankings because the link order. All in all you html doesn’t matter if it just validates.
6. Re-packaging and publishing existing content is shady
   You shouldn’t re-package and publish your existing content in different ways because it will always result in duplicate content penalties on doom you to supplemental hell. Also, this is of course not something that could actually improve usability nor will it bring you additional long tail traffic.
7. URLs for removed content should always return a 404
   Since the content isn’t there anymore the URLs should obviously return a 404 header. It will make the search engines understand that you no longer provide anything relevant about the subject. Redirecting the URL with a 301 to somewhat related content is shady and isn’t good for usability.
8. Domain setup doesn’t matter if just the site is accessible
   Search engines fully understand how your website is meant to be. Even though your content is accessible from many different URLs and such, the search engines will figure it out and present your website as it should be. Other people screwing with your indexing and ranking can’t be done.
9. You don’t need to prevent your site from abuse
   It’s obvious that SEO has nothing to do with your CMS or such because there’s no way others can mess with your rankings because of the “features” in your CMS.

Now that we’ve gone through those examples, which there are many more of, it should be obvious to anybody that SEO is bullshit and the so called on-page / on-site SEO that people do, is darn simple and there’s not much more to it! And if it’s beyond the simple stuff, then you can bet on it being shady. It’s also obvious that oilman is way off. So hurry up and spread the word - the world needs to know…

Now, while everybody is out there paying $5000 for link bait just to rank for “some ridicules keyword” I’ll be scraping content, using free databases and so forth, just to republish it in a way I think is better, and pick up the millions of low hanging fruits in long tail searches. I’ll provide clients with advice on website changes that will quad double their traffic in merely weeks. Changes that their in-house programmers and copywriters can do in just a couple of days.

Disclaimer:

1. This post contains heavy use of irony and humor. If you missed it then please re-read. And if you’re going to post something about me being stupid because of what I wrote above, I’ll advice you to re-read statement #8 and #9 before publishing it.
2. I have a huge deal of respect for both Jason Calacanis and Shoemoney. This post isn’t to say that they’re wrong, I just think their recent statements about SEO is a bit too bold.
3. I don’t think link bait is stupid. I think link bait is great and a lot of fun. But it’s really far from the only and best way to gain all that delicious search traffic.
4. I’m sorry if this post got messy and it it’s difficult to follow. I guess that’s the downside of trying to be funny in my second language.
5. I’d just mention that the “examples” were just random things I could come up with, which can make a great difference in SEO, yet very few utilize/take care of them.

Update: Added #5 to disclaimer.