I think, Branding and Relationship are the new versions of seo strategies. In the past months, a bunch of case studies, posts and reports have been published in popular blogs about how seo is changed in 2014 and will be in the far future.
What we have learned from there? Low quality contents, side wide backlinks, guest blogging, paid links, forged links and so on are supposed to be dead. We all are depending on Google, but what is going on there?
After reading some posts and views, probably Google is trying to indicate an important point. The point is the webmasters should alleviate seo and it should be substituted with branding and relationship. Let’s see why.
SEO is Now Branding: Google Still Favors Brands
In February 2009, Google made the update “Vince” which was stated as a minor change by Matt Cutts. But there was a huge change in ranking and dramatically the sites focused on branding get sudden ranking. They were spotted to the top of all other results. So, that easily describes that Google favors brands either it is big or small.
Nowadays, Google is still favoring the brands. In a post on SEOBOOK.Com, they said:
Over the years Google has moved to increase the weighting placed on brand-like signals in their organic search algorithms.
It is clearly stated that Google gives priority to brands rather than keyword based domains. We always see Wikipedia, About, Moz pages on top of Google’s search results. Why is it? It is sure that none of these sites are mainly based on keywords. Even all are focused on making the brand awareness. That is why all the search engines show these website pages on the top.
As there is no game or point view of keywords, why the process could be said as seo? Yeah, it is true that seo is not just keyword optimization, but the ongoing process is more likely as branding. It is why seo is now formed into branding.
Link Building is Now Relationship: Google Loves Earned Links
In many video statements, Matt Cutts tried to explain again and again, Google doesn’t like created backlinks, Google likes earned backlinks. If we force a page to make a backlink, it doesn’t seem natural. So as ruled, unnatural links are going to have negative values for sure. Then how link building should be done?
On the other hand, if a person writes a content and would like to make a link to your resource, it seems natural. This type of links is considered as earned from others. And Google is likely to these links. So it is proved while you are commenting or guest posting leaving a link inside it, there will be no value of it. Because it is created not earned.
As there is no deal of creating backlinks, how can we name it as link building? Link building is the process of creating links, but now the ongoing process is not an accurate link building. It is one type of relationship that will make the writers to link. Suppose two bloggers are having good relationships through blogging career. So if any of them write a high quality content, probably another could add this as a resource in his content. So that is what Google expects to keep up the natural results.
So, Time to Kick Off SEO, Welcome Branding and Relationship
In the above paragraphs, I explained, why I think seo has turned into branding and link building has turned into relationships. That is the truth because Google has completely changed their ranking algorithms. It is because seo has gotten too spammy. The seo process is so risky because every seo step is veiled with spam as Google thinks.
My Secret Case Study: I first thought about this matter on January, 2014 and decided to do a quick case study on it. I intended to rank a new blog just with branding and relationship as Google loves. So, I made a firm determination that there will be no link building for keyword optimization.
First of all I chose a short domain name as I wanted to make brand awareness. I am not revealing it, suppose it was x.com which’s niche was blogging. Then I started to make brand promotion. So, I jumped into guest blogging and social media because these are the best resources for branding. I kept up linking to brand name and its variations. But I kept keywords less than 5% of all links. Now I can see good ranking in Google where I have only 7 blog posts indexed.
That is why I finally come to a decision that branding and relationship is going to win the competition of search engine ranking. And the process I tried is not exactly seo.
