Why Successes are More Important than Failures in SEO
Looking at the graph and the inbounds can tell you what succeeds. It will never tell you what fails.
People often focus too much on the negative. You can’t focus on negatives, especially in the realm of search optimization because — chances are — those negatives will happen much more often than the positives.
This is no truer than it is with link building. In order to succeed in linkbuilding, you need to know your successes. These are your places that you can turn to later, whether with future projects, or with the same project.
Failures, on the other hand, are not going to help you. You’ll find that, whether you’d like to or not, the failures will quickly fade from your memory while your successes are where your learn the most.
Case in point: I had a recent project that involved building the traffic for a kid’s website. The content was fun, interesting, and one of those types of tasks that SEOs envision as another cake walk. Building the links, however, was tough and I can’t tell you how many manual link requests I sent out to schools and educators. All that mattered, though — in the end — was that one single .edu link (like it or not, EDU domains are by and large still GOLD).
And the result? Traffic spiked. I still don’t know the source of that fortuitous link. All I do know is that the failures faded into memory the moment I saw the inbounds climb. All that mattered in the end were the triple sevens.
