What Prison Break Can Teach You About SEO
Even though Prison Break stopped filming a few years back, my wife and I just recently watched the whole series on Netflix for the first time. We don’t have cable anymore so we need to be more creative in finding things to watch now that we don’t have hundreds of channels to surf. Friends told us that Prison Break was a must watch series so we finally decided that now was the time.
We loved the series and as I was watching it I started to think about how it applies to SEO. Yes, that’s right; Prison Break and SEO have a lot in common.
Plan A, B, C, D…
If you’re in the SEO business or have been handling SEO for your company or your clients, change is something that you should be getting used to. In Prison Break, Michael Scofield was consistently having to revise his plans. No matter how foolproof his plans seemed to be, there were still glitches when things didn’t go exactly as planned.
This reminds me of the SEO business. For years the changes to SEO were few and far between and the basic principles worked for years at a time. Directory submissions, reciprocal linking, then on to article submissions and so. These tactics each had their moment in the sun and worked quite well until Google shifted their algorithm to crack down on abuse.
This meant that over the years, SEO got a whole lot more complex. Blasting a few hundred directory submissions and writing a dozen articles was no longer sufficient in the eyes of Google and in fact, may get your website penalized. This has lead to many more ranking factors being considered and strategies having to change depending on the specific website being optimized.
Clear As Mud
With all the ranking factors being considered today, SEO isn’t as simple as it once was, and as I wrote in a previous post, lots of bad SEO companies are still thinking that SEO is straightforward. They’re still implementing Plan A…over and over and over to the detriment of the websites that they work on.
The key to SEO success today relies in your ability to think on your feet, react to changes in Google’s algorithm and constantly adapt. Every day needs to be filled with reading and testing, not getting down to work and ignoring the daily or weekly changes that are taking place.
This is not an industry for people who don’t like learning!
