Old Style SEO Works, But How?

People been preaching that old style SEO is no good any longer, it doesn’t do the magic..that the search engines won’t buy those cheap tricks any more and will not count those links, which means your effort on building links through the old methods is worthless and just a waste of time.

But before I continue further, let me explain to some what old style seo methods actually are. One of the oldest, cheapest and easiest ways to get inbound links to your site is by submitting your site to free web directories. Many SEO’s will argue about this for the long run, but regular readers of this blog know that the tips I share here are for beginners and those that do want to make the first steps into search engine optimisation (SEO) and gain some visibility for their new site or even blog. However it is true that if you base your link campaigns only from free web directories your site will not last for long in the SERPs but still it will give you that needed time frame to gain new visitors and perhaps even new links if they do like your content.

But enough of that, let me tell you about my test and the results I had. I took a brand new domain, a keyword rich domain. The competition for that keyword was almost 4million results as broad search and around 200.000 results for the exact search. In the first page were ranking websites of 5+ years old and with PageRank of 3-7, half of which were DMOZ listed and some also had a listing on Yahoo directory as well, few of them only also had the keywords in the domain name.

The only weakness these sites had was their on-page optimization. My idea was, making a website with a better on page optimization and gaining slappy links to see where the site would head to, the only links that I was thinking to get were from free web directories and hired a regular guy to do that for me (cost was roughly $50 USD for that), aside the title and the description which were supposed to be different for each submission the guy had one strict rule that he needed to follow, the submission to the directories was supposed to be made gradually, roughly 100-200 directories a week and the total amount was around 1000 directories.

Within the first weeks I didn’t expected any kind of results, and so it happened, as soon as the directories were crawled and the links to my site were found I started to see the site moving gradually up through the SERPs, from 40th page down to 30th and so on…within two months I could already see my site solid on 6th page of Google SERPs for two different terms. Now all I have to do is compete with less then 60 websites to reach the first place in the first page, and the toughest one would have been the 10 sites that are in the first page of the SERPs.

So I decided to use another old style SEO, link exchange. My luck was that webmasters of this certain niche are not very SEO oriented so getting a link from them it was not hard, from time to time I would hit into a SEO webmastered website and would get refused a link because my site did not had any PageRank (but don’t ever let that bother you, remember..they WILL one day come back to ask a link from you). The links I exchanged with were ONLY with sites that were in topic, no slappy links anymore, straight in content links. All it took were 20 new links pointing to my site, and within the first four months my site was already ranking 12th in Google SERPs with only $50 investment for the directory submission and the cost of the writer of $80 a month to provide me with articles. It took me only $370 USD and four months to rank 12th place on Google SERPs (and already on first page on Bing), it would have cost me even less but since the site was already earning around $50 a month I felt greedy and optimized the site for several keywords and not just one.

I could have already stopped since I had made my point clear, I can still rank (for less competitive keywords) by still using cheap and old style seo methods but I became greedy and the site was already earning good money for a test site, so I decided to go on. My next move was article directories. Hired the same writer to write me another pack of 10 articles and submitted it to the biggest article directories and these next 10 articles got sphinned and stumbled and spread around naturally that brought me even more links that pushed my site on first page of Google SERPs for two main keywords without any hassle at all and the earnings of the site have doubled.

With just unique content, proper on page optimization and few links which I gained in the so called old style seo my site is outranking 5+ years old sites in less then half a year. Old style or not, it might work..you just have to try it by yourself before giving up just because someone says “hey that’s old style”.

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