SEO Theory for Beginners

The SEO Theory site appears to be building its audience, and given how many articles I’ve written over the past few months maybe it would be helpful to the new readers if I recap the basic points of SEO Theory.

The definition of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the art of designing or modifying Web pages so that they achieve high rankings in search results and pass converting traffic. The folks at work asked me to add that last part and it does seem reasonable.

The SEO Method

The SEO Method is experiment, evaluate, adjust. That does not mean in any way, “When in doubt, go read SEO blogs and forums.” Read the blogs and forums when you’re bored, and maybe to be randomly inspired to try something new.

The Spammy Method Test

You know it will get you penalized if you find yourself asking, “Is there anything wrong with [insert SEO trick here]?” Trust your gut instinct. If you read about a great technique in an SEO forum or blog, and you really really really want to try it out, ask yourself, “Can I live without this domain?”

Experiment, evaluate, adjust doesn’t mean, “Try every lame trick you read about on blogs and forums with your most precious domain.” It means be reasonable, be sensible, be prudent, be moderate, and definitely be conservative. Leave the sneaky nonsense to the black hats who burn through 10,000 domains a month.

The Four Reasons Your Rankings Change

Your rankings in search results change because:

1. Of what you do with your pages
2. Of what other people do with their pages
3. Of what search engines do with their data
4. Of what people search for

We Need Links For Three Reasons

We need links to:

1. Get crawled (and indexed)
2. Be validated (earn trust)
3. Compete in highly optimized queries

We don’t need links just because some idiot in a forum says we need them.

Links pass 6 types of value

1. Traffic
2. Visibility
3. Crawling
4. Trust
5. Anchor Text
6. PageRank

How To Get Out Of Google’s Supplemental Index

Get value-passing links from pages in the Main Web Index.

Third-party analytics software sucks because

Third-party analytics packages like Google Analytics under-report your data by as much as 24-30%. It’s true. One reason this is so is that between 12% and 15% of surfers usually browse with Javascript turned off (they are so not into AJAX). Other reasons include: failure to connect to remote server, incomplete page loading, and ISP timeouts.

The Good, The Bad, and The Spammy

The Good – Link baiting is cool if you can create the content and spam the social media sites, but for long-term traffic give real value to other sites.

The Bad – SEO blogs and forums are great places to learn what not to do, as most experienced SEOs spend a lot of time saying, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that, either! You’ll be sorry!” Corollary: The first post in any SEO discussion is almost always wrong.

The Spammy – Every linking technique you pick up from blogs and forums is virtually worthless because it will be abused and spammed to death. The less specific the advice, the more it makes you think and be creative, the better.

No Such Things

• There is no such thing as a “quality link”
• There is no such thing as an “irrelevant link”
• There is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty”
• There is no such thing as “an authority Web site”
• There is no such thing as “an authority link”

And the most important fact you should take away from this blog: There is another search engine update coming. Are you ready for it?