SEO Life Guards: They Sent Beautiful Pilgrims After Me!

We see a lifeguard building on the beach and a yellow jeep with

This is a really tough moment for me: I just can’t disagree with beautiful women. The case is even worse as it is not only a beautiful woman I have to disagree with now – she’s also a pilgrim!

You might argue that a “marketing pilgrim” is not the same as a real pilgrim but I feel shocked and awed anyway.

Should I respond at all? Jordan McCollum is young and beautiful with her red long hair. Make sure not to miss her picture at the link above.

I wonder if she has freckles… but don’t tell my wife! I’m married! She is moreover very successful as she writes for one of the best known and respected blogs out there.

Who am I in contrast? A guy that might look like a Mexican, being so outrageous that Germany became too small for him… Well, let’s just start then before my doubts stop mein my tracks.

Is SEO Dead? The beautiful Jordan McCollum paraphrases me with the words

“SEO is dead”.

Can beauty err? Yes it can. I did not say that in my post at Google Blogoscoped she refers to. I wrote

“SEO as we know it … is obsolete”.

This is a minor but important difference. The angel is in the details! I didn’t mention death.

 

Don’t compete with the big guys

Beautiful Jordan McCollum goes on to pose some intriguing questions regarding my 10 tips how to get successful on the Net without SEO.

My advice #1 was to skip the keyword research before starting a web project and doing a niche research that is not based on Google instead. She asks

“But why limit yourself by not doing any keyword research?”

There is plain explanation why: Take the example of SEO itself. After your keyword research you will end up with a main key phrase that might sound like

“Affordable SEO for small business Orlando West”.

The keyword [seo] itself is so competitive that optimizing for it does not make sense. It’s way too competitive and broad. You don’t optimize for “big keywords” like that at all nowadays.

Instead you can create your own niche if you choose a new topic like “SEO 2.0” that is only covered by some casual articles.

My advice #2 is to use WordPress as it is already SEO friendly by birthright. She disagrees and tells me to install some plugins for the title and for the meta tags. I never said that you shouldn’t.

Besides who am I to say “no” again to a beautiful red haired female pilgrim? Of course if your blog or website title is Affordable SEO for small business Orlando West you have a title problem!

You should at least reverse the title order, post title first, then blog title.

On the other hand, if you have a neat little title like SEO 2.0, why bother? In this case it might even happen that I will rank better for SEO ;-)

Meta tags? Do they still exist? Well, I have to check my HTML 2.0 cheat sheet. Ah yes! Keywords and description.

Meta keywords are only used by spammers and newbies, not by Google at least not in a positive way.

Meta Description? You shouldn’t use it. Why? When you optimize for the long tail you can not put all of it into your description.

When you have no description Google will pick the keywords out of your site’s copy and highlight them. That’s far better.

Remember, this is SEO 2.0, not the 1.0 version the beautiful pilgrim speaks about.

#3 I say: Create a great CSS design to be linked just for the sake of it.

The sweet pilgrim states that SEO is about CSS all the time. Agreed, I’ve seldom seen Flash SEO sites indeed.

But wait, how many killer SEO/CSS sites do you remember? 1? 3? 5? Why not come up with a top 100 list? I collected well designed SEO sites for a year and have found a dozen…

Well, I could go on like that, but will go to sleep now, maybe I will dream about beautiful pilgrims and then go on with my replies later.

Last updated: May 15th, 2018.