We spend a lot of time and resources providing educational content for our members and the customers of Sapphire Collaborative (www.sapphirecollaborative.com), but the time we put into our research is minuscule compared to the total amount of time and money all SEO professionals worldwide have spent researching and writing similar educational material.
The SEO training industry is a multimillion dollar industry. Greater than that is the amount of money SEO professionals make to do the work instead of their clients.
Would it surprise you that Google is already in the process of creating ways to rank all websites correctly regardless how good or bad the search engine optimization is?
The sum of Google's knowledge and research into human patterns and behavior is enormous, and just gets bigger every day. When you allow them to track your online search patterns, they can reasonably predict the types of things you search for.
Google is sometimes criticized for its search results. It's very frustrating to see your competitor rank higher up when their website is horrible and not at all optimized. People who spend a lot of money trying to tweak every possible SEO factor get really upset when their website doesn't come up #1.
We could say the optimized site is "over-optimized," or we could say there must be some "black hat" going on. But perhaps the reality is that Google is figuring out ways to help smaller business that simply can't afford the time or money to optimize their site.
On occasion we've tried to reverse engineer some of those poorly optimized sites to see what lead to the high ranking.
The answer we've always found is rather surprising.
Those simply "non optimized" websites are usually only a few pages, but each page is written naturally as if someone was talking to you. The page names are also simple, with titles of "Jewelry Services" and matching file names of "jewelryservices.html."
From all the SEO techniques we know, sometimes a simple site with only 3 SEO characteristics will trump all others. It's easy to accidentally get these 3 correct when you don't know what you're doing.
So here they are-- the 3 things that could make a simple website trump all others:
1. Have a one or two word page title, like "Repair Services."
2. Name the physical page "repairservices.html" and put it in the root directory of your website.
3. Write all the information about your repair services in a conversational style.
Considering we are seeing this happen more often, it seems like the 3 items above should be a primary strategy for all websites. If you decide to take this strategy, you should start with a simple repair services page that briefly explains each service.
Then some time in the future after measuring your initial ranking you should consider adding sub pages that go into more detail about each service. Make sure you go back and measure your ranking again after adding those sub pages; if you lost ranking because of those sub pages you will need to delete them.
