Successful Site in 12 Months with Google

as relevant today as it was in 2002?

[Andinio]

In 2002, Brett posted an article about how to build a successful site for Google:
[webmasterworld.com...]

I think everyone would agree, it was excellent at the time.

With all the changes with the G-algo since 2002 and the current introduction of BD, i ask:

Is the advice within Brett's article still the standard or simply a romantic reflcetion of what some consider the Goolge glory years?

Regards
Andinio

[tedster]

There are just a few areas that I see as becoming a bit dated. One is submitting to major search engines -- it's not really required these days if you are getting any inbound links at all. When it comes to directories, Looksmart is not so prominent now as it was back then.

And many more people are on broadband (the 80% dial-up number is not true now) -- but "lean and mean" pages are still strong performers and the file size advice is good. To do it well, you shold definitely work on your html and css chops.

The overall approach and philosophy is really solid today, just as it was in 2002.

[julinho]

To me, the article is even more relevant today than it was back then; what Brett said in the article was, basically, publish good content that people are looking for.

Today, Google algo is more capable of recognizing a site with good content (by using semantic analysis, identification of copies, user behavior metrics, etc); in 2002, if you had enough PageRank, getting good positions was easy, even with poor content.

[ddem1]

I sure hope Google is more into content today cause that would help me a lot. But I guess due to all this BigDaddy stuff, have to wait for them to index all the backlinks a little longer.

[Liane]

I agree, the whole theme of that thread and Brett's philosophy was "build content and they will come".

Five years later, I am still building content and the bots are still eating it up. My traffic increases with every new page I build.

That is a marvelous thread and I think Brett should update it!

[LJCoolB]

I still use the Successful Site in 12 Months guidelines and always recommend it to SEO newbies.

Although some details have changed since 2002, the recommendations are still solid.

[caveman]

I suppose this could be an overstatement, but AFAIK, any webmaster/site operator who hasn't read it is operating at a disadvantage.

If you have something worth putting on the Web, and all you ever do is internalize the concepts in that post, you should do fine for yourself.

I would love to see BT update it, however, at some point.

[nickreynolds]

I have a small but growing site, that's been going about 18 months and is making me a small income. The advice on this forum has been invaluable and Brett's article was essential. It challenged and changed some of my preconceptions about webmastering and gave me the tools to build my site.

[2by4]

It's not as easy as it was then. Some things have changed, but the basic ideas are still pretty much accurate, though not the growth rates you'll see on average, some may, most won't, even if they follow the stops religiously.

But overall it works. The reason is pretty simple: almost nobody can create new content every day that's worthwhile. Lots of automated stuff, but new content? That's hard. I think Brett was laughing a little to himself when he wrote that, deceptively simple words for something that few can do. I have yet to get a client to understand that this is the key to long term growth and long lasting success. Takes too much ongoing work, no tricks can replace it, although seos try, all those automated junk content scripts... Oh well.

Lean and mean pages absolutely work, I prefer to put it the opposite way: why is having a bloated page good? Who does it help? WebmasterWorld is the best example of this that I can think of, although there are a few other sites out there that get it too. Oddly enough, most of them have PR 8 or 9. That's not a coincidence.