Forget generating backlinks and submissions to zillions of mindless directories. As search engines get increasingly smarter and the new Web is gradually more humanized than ever before, search engine optimization is now a whole new ball game.

The key to a successful SEO strategy is to actually be as human as possible. Don’t think of a search engine as a cold, calculating nasty robot. Think of it as a human librarian, or a literary critic. The reason for this is that search engines are consistently improving their semantic processing and are learning to think more and more like the way we humans do.

Additionally, we know that one specific search engine, Google, uses a team of hundreds of human website reviewers to vet through thousands of websites in an effort to produce a truly relevant, competent web index. This is important, because the whole purpose of search engines is to get the searcher to exactly what they want, filtering through piles of irrelevant information that may well be relevant elsewhere.

Successful SEO

What SEO now means is to generate exceptionally relevant content. Intense relevance is now key to a successful digital marketing strategy, to make sure you produce exactly what your target audience needs, and that you keep your web page coherent, your content concise and limited to the context at hand. This is important, because extending your subject matter to include more ideas and information will dilute the perceived importance of your page to the subject at hand, thereby harming your search engine ranking with regards to that particular subject or keyword(s).

Intense Relevance

Intense relevance means that you go out of your way to ensure that:

• You have a well defined target audience for a particular web page
• You take a web page at a time, recognizing its unitary value independent of the website
• Ensure that the information you present in your webpage does justice to its title
• Ensure the title does justice to the information within the page
• Ensure congruence of all page elements, including title, Meta description, the body of the document, and the captions within.
• Finally, you ensure that the facts you present actually provide value to the reader. This could be a new twist on previously existing information, or could help a reader learn something entirely new.

What about links?

We do know that Google counts incoming links to contribute to PageRank. Our answer: DON’T waste your time on them, because they’ll come naturally when you write valuable content that people love and want others to read. When it comes to SEO, it’s largely a self-fulfilling prophecy: quality content will lead you there.