back to th future

October 21, 2015 is the future in the movie “Back To The Future”

Released in 1985, Back To The Future is a movie where Marty McFly travels through time. I was 8 years old when I watched this “rad” movie but if I recall correctly the gist was Marty, played by Michael J Fox, went back in time 30 years and had to get his parents to fall in love or else he would cease to exist.

Or something like that.

Recently I had the opportunity to examine a site I built in 2001.

This site is easily the most powerful site I have ever built.

A few points:

  • The site has held hundreds of #1 positions in Google for over a decade.
  • If I put an article on it, on topic, it ranks in under 10 minutes.
  • One of the service pages has 107 links to it. I honestly had no idea. 100% natural my friends (it was the first of its kind).
  • The site has been linked to by various government agencies and local universities for over a decade.

What did I learn?

While search changes every day, SEO really doesn’t change a whole lot. Sure, there are lots of little tweaks that can be done and ways people can implement breadcrumbs and structured data thingies people can do but the most important aspect of SEO for the foreseeable future will remain content and contextual, natural links.

When I built said site I simply wanted to inform people of absolutely everything I discovered. This was an electronics repair website. Did I understand SEO 14 years ago? Absolutely; I have been building powerful online presences before Google existed and am one of the oldest SEOs on the planet. Did I build links? No. Well, a couple of my .gov links had a little assistance, but otherwise, no. I simply wrote content. Lots of it. 1,400 pages of it. Some pages were small, some were 4,000 words long- whatever was necessary to accurately convey the information the reader needed to know.

Over the last 5 years I have worked in SEO full time. I have studied SEO, read many articles, converted sites to HTTPS, issued DMCA notices, tweaked hreflang tags, installed flux capacitors, done audits all over the planet in a variety of niches. At the end of the day, if I went back in time, there is absolutely nothing I would do differently, and in the future, probably not much will change either.

User experience, content, and links trump all. That is how I win in SEO in every niche I select, and how you can as well. Notice I said select, don’t try out outrank Microsoft for the keyword Windows now.

Happy #BackToTheFutureDay!

BTW, did you know the hoverboard exists?

Len

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