Jeff D’Urso’s Blog

Over the years I’ve heard lots and lots of debates from experts and charlatans on the best way to “get to the top of the search engines”, the most prominent approaches falling into the 15 year cat-and-mouse game that started when someone figured out how to game WebCrawler in 1994 with keyword stuffing - to all sorts of elaborate methods used today to “make Google think the content would be interesting to an end user.”

And all of these SEO methods have had one thing in common…

When they crash - they crash HARD! From websites that go from the top to the bottom in one quick “Google Slap”, to websites that got entirely banished & blacklisted from the search engines - to stories of companies that built their entire business (and hiring plan) based on “free traffic” from SEO, only to have it disappear randomly in an instant (and with no way to rebuild the traffic, or business for that matter).

SEO just seemed to risky - and for years I recommended PPC as the far safer alternative.

As strong as the allure of “free traffic” from SEO was, I personally had much better luck with pay-per-click search engine marketing, most notably on Google. In fact, I built DestinationWeddings.com’s traffic machine almost entirely on Google PPC in the early years - and it was great!  Sure we had to pay for each click, but with solid conversion on the back-end, PPC allowed us to predictably put money in, and get more money out the other side.

And we didn’t have to worry about random “Google Slaps” coming out of the blue and hitting our traffic when we least expected it. It was so good that for a while I strongly believed SEM was the only solid traffic strategy, and SEO should be used with great caution.

But then I learned about an SEO strategy that actually works.

In late 2007, I reconnected with college classmate Sherman Powell, and he told me about ArmyProperty.com, which at the time was a homegrown site he built by creating interesting content he thought army personnel would want to read. They did, of course, because it wasn’t written to “seem relevant” to search engines - it actually was relevant.

But here’s the interesting part - every time he created a new page on the site, it very quickly went towards the top of Google, and his traffic kept growing until he had hundreds and then thousands of users coming to the site - to read the content, and to use the other tools he built there.

Relevant SEO Content –> High Google Rankings… Go Figure!

Since Sherman enlightened me to how SEO really works, he and I have worked on the site and have been able to generate enormous levels of traffic - all by continuing to build relevant content and presenting it in a way people actually want to read it. And of course - it turns out in the end it can be easier to create actual relevant content, rather than trying to simulate what you think Google might consider to be relevant content…