Part 1: Your Guardian Angels
Part 2: The Virtues
Part 3: The Temptations
Temptations of an SEO Saint
“I can help you with that,” he whispers over your shoulder.
You glance back from your keyboard. “No thanks. I’m fine,” you reply, quickly returning to work.
A few seconds pass and you can still feel warm breath on the back of your neck.
“You don’t understand,” he continues, setting a hand on your shoulder. “I’m a search engine optimization professional.”
A part of you believes him, but you remain silent. You feel him scanning the wall of text on your computer screen.
“Again, I’m fine,” you say, your voice cracking.
“Tell you what,” he chimes, feeding off your uncertainty. “I’m going to set my perfect, award-winning, best-in-the-industry strategy right…. here.” A single sheet of paper glides onto your desk. “And when you’re ready for me, you just give me a ring.”
You let out a sigh of relief as the SEO demon’s hand slides off your shoulder. As you readjust the halo floating above your head, your gaze drops down to the ketchup-speckled paper on your otherwise clean desk.
Smiling to yourself, you crumple it up and toss it in the trashcan. Why? Because you, sir (or ma’am), are an SEO Saint.
5 Paths to SEO Mastery
By: An SEO Professional Demon
***Editor’s Note: Please never do these things.***
1. The Shotgun Approach
Shoot for a bunch of keywords at once and you’re bound to hit something! Why waste your time “researching “and focusing on a single keyword or subject when you can just cover everything in one go? The people at Google don’t want you to know that, by using a variety of keywords, your page can rank number 1 for as many search queries as you want. It’s a flawless strategy, my friend! And they’ll never notice what you’re doing!
2. Buy Links
I’m sure you know how important inbound links are for rankings. Don’t listen to all those SEO hippies trying to play the “natural link building” card. They ain’t got money like you and me! I know a guy that knows a guy who will put some links to your page on their website – and tons of others – for some cash. Cheapskates are going to try and say that the quality of the website linking to you matters – that your page could potentially rank worse. My professional opinion: Why in the heck would quality matter?
3. Write For The Crawlers
Try and argue with this statement: “More traffic equals more money.” You can’t! That’s why, when we create your webpage content, we are going to focus solely on getting it ranked numero uno. How? Repetition and redundancy, baby! As an SEO professional that is professionally trained in SEO and SEO professionalism, I know that the more times a word appears on a page, the more relevant and professional the page looks to search engines in terms of professionalism. It may look a little weird to customers at first, but they get used to it.
4. Borrow From Friends
Let’s face it. You’re going to have writer’s block at some point. When this happens, don’t waste time scanning the blogosphere for inspiration. Rather, use a quick Google search to figure out what content is already ranking, and copy it. Asking for guest bloggers is a waste of effort when you can just blog on their behalf. If their stuff worked once, it’ll work twice!
5. “What They Can’t See Can’t Hurt You”
All that alt text and HTML is a giant window of opportunity, my friend! Customers can’t see it when they look at your page, so stuff everything with as many keywords as you can. This way, the search engines will think your content is mega-relevant, especially if you ran out of places to stuff keywords in the content!
This is just a little taste of the SEO mastery I embody. I will valiantly lead you in a battle to the tip-top of every search engine in this unfair world! Who else are you going to trust?
(Dearest guardians of SEO, please remember: these are all bad ideas. A lot like sticking a fork in a toaster.)
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