Why It’s Important To Diversify With SEO

Earlier this year the official Google Panda update rolled out.  This update hit websites in every niche and destroyed the rankings of websites that didn’t have quality links and didn’t have quality content.  Up until the Panda update it was pretty darn easy to get a site ranked in search engines because “black hat” methods worked quite well, such as blasting forums or blogs with links.  I personally saw my competitors doing it and outranking us but I knew it was only a matter of time until these unethical, spammy, and possibly illegal acts would be discovered by search engines and something would be done about it.
I actually was quite pleased when the Google Panda update finally came around because most of our sites saw a good increase in their rankings nearly overnight.  I also have been getting more and more SEO clients after the panda update because other “SEO companies” (And I use that term loosely here because I really don’t consider them SEO companies) didn’t know how to react to the fact that they can no longer plug in URL’s in a software and get ranked online while they sleep.
So this brings us to the point of this blog post– why it’s important to diversify with SEO.  Let’s talk about the other industry where the word diversify is typically used–investing.  It’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket–so diversify would mean holding stocks, bonds, commodities, and all of these in different industries.  A portfolio invested 100% in Apple’s stock or 100% in gold isn’t going to do well in the long run, whereas a diversified, balanced portfolio will usually do quite well.
This is also the case with SEO– if we focus on building ALL forum links, ALL blog links, or ALL directory links, we aren’t going to see good results in the long run because it’s only a matter of time before Google catches on to all these questionable linking methods and punishes sites for them.
At Simple SEO Group, we build not only quality links (Which means no spammy links, no questionable links, no links from junk directories) but we also make sure that we diversify our links and also incorporate content into the mix.  This makes SEO more time consuming but it’s worth it to make sure our clients see the results they want and to make sure that these results stick.  I was just reading a blog post on another site asking people to comment if they lost their job or closed their SEO business after the Google Panda update and there were boatloads of people commenting on there about it–people who used to spam search engines to get quick rankings and now they have nothing.  Slow and steady wins the race.