MIKE LEVIN LPVG SEO

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Down with Long-Tail SEO and up with Best Foot Forward SEO (BFF)

by Mike Levin

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Okay, what can’t I get across without just the main pages:

Now that the age of long-tail SEO is predominantly dead, we have to find other ways. It has gone from long-tail SEO to best-foot-forward SEO. Whereas longtail SEO consisted greatly of putting out as much non-overlapping but keyword-targeted content like I am now to cast both a large and tightly-knit net, “BFF” SEO consists of a pruning, trimming, revising, editing and content-promotion. It’s the era of polishing turds. Garbage in, eventually quality out. The question is just whether you expose that vision-and-revision process to the public or not. Also, when you have content that doesn’t fit in the trim, polished sitemap where does it go? Do you publish it at all? Do you risk bringing down your entire site with content that doesn’t immediately make the user happy?

I should really show what happens to my videos on YouTube due to the YouTube algorithm over the years.

Welcome to the era of “Best Foot Forward” or BFF SEO. It’s quite the opposite of “Long Tail” SEO, or low-quality niche publishing. No wonder HitTail went under a couple of years ago. It had a 16-year run then faded, as did the sort of content that it taught you how to produce. No more leaning into the algorithm. Implied in “Best Foot Forward” is doing the best you can do, being true both to yourself and your audience.

Interesting!

I can work with that. It’s actually pretty funny since I recently re-implemented my long-standing but on-and-off again slice & dice publishing system.

If the principles of long-tail SEO was writing a lot while ensuring adjacent topical overlap and an outward-spiraling net-knitting, BFF SEO consists mostly of fewer URLs within a hierarchical site-structure of the fewest but best topics that publication channel has to offer, then update and promote relentlessly.

The premise here is that it’s better to hold onto a few search results that produce for you than thousands that don’t. 10 pages that produce 10 hits is better than 100,000 pages that produce no hits. There’s just no scraping together the bottom of the barrel anymore.

Find what works and build on it.

But as opposed to building on it in the old way where you build out a site-section with article after article, you build a more shallow site hierarchy that promotes your top-producers to the top of the hierarchy and make the experiences on each of those pages the best they can be.

Hmmm. Let’s jump on that ChatGPT bandwagon. Cut this blog post here and publish some stand-alone blog pages produced totally by ChatGPT, in complete contradiction to BFF SEO, haha!