Ok, i'll finally admit it

Sorry for the late-night email, but something was on my mind that I just had to share.

SEO is not dead… yet

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So a few of you have reached out taking my last email as a sign that you should call it quits.

That was not quite my intention.

So I want to clarify my points.

In the previous email, I mentioned that, at least for the time being, I would not recommend anyone start a website as a side hustle.

I still stand by that, but there are always exceptions to the rule.

Just because I may not recommend it for a beginner at the moment, doesn’t meant that you should stop working on your sites that you have spent a long time growing.

Let’s re-examine what the HCU and the latest Google update have done.

It has made gaining authority the primary factor in ranking consistently online.

Meaning if you want to rank consistently and avoid Google also updates, you will need backlinks… and a lot of them.

If anyone wants to start a site today, they still can, but be prepared to lean more heavily on building a brand and links to your site as the main driving factor and the content is secondary.

Content is king… but a king is nothing without his authority.

How do you build backlinks?

You can use the quick and easy ways to do this by social signals and even blog post comments.

However, the more impactful ways to link build is HARO, which uses a marketplace like NOBS Marketplace or Whitepress, Indexy, and good old-fashioned outreach to brands in your niche and shoulder niches.

On Twitter or X (I totally hate calling it that), I recently posted about how I had done all the on-page SEO tricks I could think of but not having a backlink was the main thing holding the page back.

I added just one, little old backlink, and BOOM, it shot up…

So Backlinks still matter… even more now than they did before.

Build links and brand first… then highly monetized content with Top 10 round-up posts and reviews with some informational content to support those.

Add good internal linking and start waiting for the bucks to come rolling in.

That formula still works, but you need the time/budget to do it.
 

Chat soon,
Chris Myles
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