The high cost of taking short cuts

One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn as a UNIX administrator, as a Web server administrator, as a Web site developer, and as a search engine optimizer is that short cuts almost inevitably turn out to be the longest possible path to assured self-destruction.

In fact, I learned that lesson when I was a junior programmer many decades ago. When I took a job with a software firm that was developing cutting edge accounting software for mini-computer systems, my project manager told me to hit the file cabinets to get ideas for how to write new programs. All the code was there. So one day when I was writing a complex report I got stuck, went over to the file cabinet, and started thumbing through the files. I found a folder with programs similar to the one I was writing.

A few days later I had complete programs that did absolutely nothing. When my project manager and the firm’s owner came in to check on me I shared my frustration with them. We argued for about 30 minutes over why I was having trouble. Finally my project manager said, “I told you to just look in the cabinet to find code you can adapt for your own programs.”

“I did look,” I insisted.

“You coudln’t have,” my project manager insisted. “If you had looked, you wouldn’t be stuck now. Those programs all work.”

Suddenly, the boss said in a very quiet voice, “Michael, which cabinet did you look in? Which drawer?”

I pointed to the drawer where I had pulled the programs. My project manager looked at the boss, the boss looked at my project manager. My project manager said, “Oh…my…god….”

So, out of all the filing cabinets in the office, I picked the one drawer where the only non-performing programs had been stored away for future reference because one former employee of the firm had deployed broken code to the field. Unfortunately for my career, that wasn’t the only time I took a short cut on orders. I can’t remember any short cuts that actually worked.

A lot of people have shown me neat tricks through the years, ways to improve the efficiency of my coding, cool ideas for developing tools, even basic Web site templates that have served their purpose for a year or two. But every time I tried to quick start a project using someone else’s idea of a short cut, I ran into disaster.

There are no short cuts to success. Some people, who know more than you do about a specific task, can get it done faster, in less time, more efficiently, more smoothly, with less fuss and frustration. Those people can only lead you down the garden path to disaster.

Unless the wise old guru is going to sit down with you and take you through a project step by step, the best you can hope for is advice on how to set up and manage your project. You need to learn how to do things yourself, and that is equally true of both programming and search engine optimization.

If you only use short cut methods for your keyword research because some idiot in an SEO forum said, “Hey, use this free tool for all your keyword research”, you ignore a lot of available data about user queries. You form your SEO plan on the basis of incomplete information (and, yes, technically our keyword research is always incomplete but I don’t rely on just one tool).

If you only use short cut methods for designing your Web sites, you’ll get a site that looks worse than bad. If you don’t spend time and effort making your site usable, crawlable, aesthetically useful, and functional you’ll end up with a pretty bad Web site. The rule of thumb in search engine optimization is that every professionally designed Web site sucks. In reality, streamlined ugly text-laden sites tend to work better than any other types of Web sites.

If you only use short cut methods for building your links, you’ll end up with a lot of worthless, spammy links. If you’re serious about building links you need to spend time and effort developing linking relationships, link-worthy content, and achieving the kind of visibility that ensures people will link to your new content without you having to ask for links.

I have never asked for a link to SEO Theory. Yahoo! thinks there are a few thousand external links pointing to SEO Theory. Now, some of those links come from sites I control, but most of them are links from blogs that have editorially linked here (or where I’ve placed some comments). There are some forum links and a few static site links as well. And several of you have placed links to SEO Theory on DIGG, SPHINN, StumbleUpon, and a few other social media sites.

Is it a short cut if I promote this blog on sites I control? No. Why? Because no one else can do that. When I talk about short cuts, I’m talking about replicable actions. If you can show someone else a neat, quick way to do something you’re showing them a short cut. If you just happen to control a network of Web sites where you can place links to your newest Web site, you’re leveraging your own assets in a way that no one else can.

SEO Theory operates on the assumption that I don’t have to “build links”. It earns links. It accumulates links. It builds up a natural link profile gradually. All the social media love this site has earned has been genuine, non-manipulative, by-the-book link acquisition. That is what search engine optimization is all about.

Add content gradually (but at a steady pace). Create enough visibility that people know you are there. And then just be passionate about what you do.

It takes time. It takes effort. It doesn’t happen overnight. It works.

This blog is search update-proof. Why? Because it doesn’t rely upon search engines for traffic. It relies on you. SEO Theory gets lots of traffic from search engines. But search engine optimization is only the beginning, not the end.

Short cut SEO has splattered the shameful lost rankings of millions of Web pages across hundreds of search engine updates through the years. Short cut SEO is not worth the risk and cost to me. I’d rather build a time-proven resource that people turn to again and again rather than be a shooting star that burns out quickly.