I’ve just read a couple of blogs / websites that purportedly claim to sell expert seo services. One or two of them warble on about fucking ‘programming’ this and “training” this and “LSI” that to achieve to positions in search engines. Stone me what a black art I seem to be involved in. Hell, I can’t even understand what they’re on about. For me, simple seo is where it’s at….

This alone would be fine, but the actual copy on said sites reads like dog-shit (because of crap keyword stuffing) making it virtually impossible to understand in one read through, and what do you know, there’s absolutely hundreds of keyword stuffed links on these page pointing to internal pages and off site to “receiving” sites.

So basically, you take all this knowledge of the algorithm, all this knowledge of LSI, all this training and programming and… er bascially resort to keyword stuffing your text and overdoing it on the internal linking structure. Throw in a couple of external links from client sites for good measure. Syphon of some of the Google juice for your own site.

Utter shit, bog standard seo to the rest of us (that works, mostly).

For most sites, I firmly believe the answer lies in the simple stuff. KISS, Creativity. A genuine interest in cause and effect when examining the serps. A determination to think, replicate and tweak to beat your competition. This is what I always end up back facing, after all my “seo travels”.

Good content. Cohesive navigation. A handful of quality links.

Oh and while we’re on it, a page in plain fucking English please. There’s no point getting high in Google when the customer can’t even understand what you’re on about. Customers must think SEO companies are fucking dyslexic - no wonder they don’t want them touching their site!

Often the first thing a customer says to me after landing on the Hobo corporate site is;

“we contacted you because we liked the tone and style on your site”

…yeah, you could fucking understand it, you mean.