Blogging - The Best SEO Tactic - Official

First off, thanks Stephen for pointing this out to me.

There are so many tactics that SEO's and site owners use to improve their search engine rankings. One of the most daft is for them to pay good money to people to spam other websites asking for links. To me that's the same as naively spending money doing a load of broad match PPC with the hope of getting the odd sale. Or even worse, you could see sending out loads of unsolicited "link building" emails as doing broad match with no negative-match keywords. To me not doing link-building with a laser-sighted approach is just pissing money down the drain - just my take on it.

A better approach is to use the Spy Glass Link Analysis tool [can't be bothered with the affiliate link - I'm not greedy] (thanks Robert) to really get under the skin of the linking nature of your industry and just cherry-pick the sites you want to target and then follow the advice I've given before.

Having just done this and used the SEOMoz tool to get the link landscape you'll probably find that:

* Your competitors have wasted a lot of their time with free or paid directories that have no PR and are often not even cached by Google.

* Your competitors would have wasted their time with article sites that also offer very little benefit.

* Your competitors would have got most of their link-love from sites are authorities in their industry (Hitwise was a good one for a client's competitor) that came out of a business relationship, not out-right link building.

* Your competitors are talked about in blogs or forums - so offer something unique and interesting that will get the chattering classes interested.

* Your competitors have often registered with Dmoz.

In all, using this approach and supplementing it with the information in my other post, link-building should only take you an hour or two a month.

Overall, don't ask for links for the page rank, my method is to ask for links because they're good for the internet user and if they're "ego links" - think about if you get a kick out of having that link, think of the kudos.

So I've said what I think is crap, I've shown you what I think is good, so let's show you what Google see's as the best method for SEO. That's right. One "simple" method for SEO success that I've been talking about for years:

BLOGGING

In a recent Webmaster Help Groups call with Matt Cutts, he was asked:

"if you can do one thing to improve your websites positions on the SERP’s."

And Matt's answer:

Create A Blog

Just think about the inherent nature of blogs:

* Topic-focused
* Attracts links NATURALLY
* Light design
* Often good internal linking structure
* Regularly updated
* Links out
* Good KW architecture
* Variation of content

You've got the essentials of good SEO there in a tin!

So my advice (take it, leave it, but make your own mind up) is, don't waste money with mass-produced link building, be targeted with your link-affairs and create a good, well balanced blog - I out rank well established sites on competitive keywords with a site that has PR1 - just by blogging.