Why RoughMagick?
Toward the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero talks about giving up “this rough magic” – and gave freedom to Ariel, the fairy who helped him get revenge on his enemies. There are a lot of tricks used by supposed SEO and Internet marketing experts, but often those tricks can cause more harm than good. The last thing you want is someone helping you by scraping other peoples’ content, putting you in link farms, or spamming news wires with phony press releases. These might work in the short run, but after 10 years in this field, I can tell you that search engines eventually catch on to these short-cuts and they often punish royally their practitioners.
I remember in the early days of SEO (pre-2000) there were plenty of tricksters using doorway pages other bad practices. There was some pressure put on me to do the same: “Oh, why don’t we have hundreds of these single pages each optimized on a keyword?!” Because it’s a very bad idea. Anything you are trying to manipulate results rather than simple do the right thing to improve results, you put yourself at risk of being banned from a search engine. Even BMW got banned at one point – and had to beg it’s way back in (and reportedly had to give Google the name of the culprit – although I can’t confirm that happened.
The best SEO is that done to attract your specific audience in a compelling way. This is primarily done through well-structured websites and lots and lots and lots of good content (read: not copied from other people).
It takes a little longer and lot more work to achieve a strong Internet marketing presence the RIGHT way, but it has a persistent and powerful impact on the bottom line. SEO has come a long way from doorway pages and keyword stuffing and white words on white background (Note: Never did these silly things), but there are still people who want fast results and fall for short-term SEO strategies. These strategies can be at best ineffective, at worst, get you banned from search engines.
