The Trick to Succeeding at SEO
I was setting up a feed reader for my CEO the other day, sifting through page after page of syndicated resources in search of the diamond in the rough. Naturally, there were more than a few flashy search engine optimization blogs to consider. Having long ago subscribed to their more reputable cousins, it surprised me how many “secret sauce” posts were being featured on these blogs. You know the sort; “Top 10 SEO Tricks to Succeed on Google” or “The Secret to Rankings that the Experts Don’t Want You to Know.” Seeing all of these, I figured it was high time I wrote my own. 
So here it is, the secret that will tantalize search engine spiders and make your site rank above all others. Drum roll please. The trick to successful search engine optimization is…
…don’t use tricks. That’s right. What? Not what you were expecting? Sorry to disappoint, but it’s the honest-to-Google truth. The most important thing I learned in the SEO industry was to avoid illegitimate tricks first and optimize second. Spamming search engines through cloaking, cross-linking, keyword stuffing, or any of the other techniques collectively referred to as “black hat SEO” will inevitably hurt your rankings more than they’ll help, possibly even getting your site dropped. Thus, the most important thing to succeeding in SEO isn’t what you do; it’s what you don’t do.
You’re probably wondering how that can be, when there are plenty of anecdotal examples of sites using tricks to rank well and getting away with it. It’s true that these sorts of things can work, at least in the short term. In the long term, however, the search engines will find out. What was accepted as a viable trick yesterday is getting sites delisted today as the search engines update their algorithms to catch it.
Thus, in the end, there is no trick to succeeding in search. You create an accessible website, fill it with valuable content, network with other site owners, and you’ll rank. It’s that simple. Tricks just get in the way.