“I know that I know nothing.”  Socrates, Greek philosopher.

 Paradoxical, right?

Well, the same thing can be said for SEO. You see, search engine optimization is a constantly evolving field. What may have been true years ago is no longer so today. The effective techniques of yesterday can penalize you tomorrow and the efforts that once guaranteed you high rankings can send you plummeting down the listings.

That is why I take the Socratic approach to SEO. I accept that I know nothing, so then I am always open and ready for change.

Are you? Allow me to test your knowledge.

Publish Your Own Content

You write an amazing piece, post it on your site, and your traffic doubles!

You could be better of posting it on someone else’s site, someone who generates a million visitors a month versus your meager thousands. This will create more traffic for you, increase revenue and generate authoritative links, which will drive your rankings up.

Bad Links Are Bad

Self explanatory and for some marketers, it can induce bouts of frenzied link disavowing! Here’s the truth though: bad links can hurt your rankings but not as much as you would think. As your site grows, so will the junk sites linking to you. However, it is quite rare for these aggregator sites to get you penalized. So fret less and concentrate your efforts on creating quality content.

The More the Merrier

Popular knowledge dictates that the more content you have, the more people will share it. However, have you considered if people actually want to share your content? If you add pages that people don’t want to link to, you’ll see no increase in traffic.

Republishing Content

It’s considered to be a good thing when an authority site republishes your content and links back to you. The benefits seem obvious: you get a link back to your site, traffic increases and sales soar.

Maybe.

The problem with republishing is that it generates duplicate content. This is  punishable behavior by Panda. Also, the authority site will rank above yours! The caveat? Authority sites must use a canonical tag that leads back to your URL. This way, you can reap the benefits and avoid the penalties!

Don’t Buy Links

Are you sure you don’t want to buy links? Are you really sure?

Buying links can manipulate rankings but they are also a great way to drive revenue to your business. To work your way around the possible penalization, simply “nofollow” the links. This way, the search engine doesn’t count the links against you and you get to keep the added traffic.

My Final Thoughts

I’m always right and I’m never wrong. Oh how I wish that were true!

The market and SEO techniques are constantly evolving, so always try to keep an open mind and be aware of what’s out there, what works and what doesn’t. If you are willing to learn from everything, then it’s quite possible to stay high in the rankings.