What other people’s queries teach you about SEO

If you’re in the real estate business one of the best things you can do for yourself is to pick a few queries related to the care and feeding of bears and watch them.

If you spend most of your search results page analysis time looking at your own queries you develop an insular point of view that disassociates you from the Web. You see this all the time in SEO forums where people who rarely participate in discussions talk only about their own queries. They usually judge the Web by what happens in their own verticals.

One vertical does not the Web make. 100 verticals are barely adequate to show you that the Web is diverse.

Helping someone else optimize their site for a vertical you’re not familiar with doesn’t really help you. You’ll become entrenched in the day-to-day analysis and optimization. You want to watch queries that only have a little value to you. You want to come back and check these queries a few times a year, maybe once a month at most, so that you’re familiar with the major players. You want to be familiar enough that you’ll notice new sites when they hit the top 10.

If you analyze placements in those other queries your instinct will be to look at their backlinks in Yahoo! first. After you finish wasting your time with useless nonsense like that, you should force yourself to look under the hood. For that matter, just look at the copy on the pages (look at the cached versions if you can).

Look at Archive.Org to see how often the major players may change their content.

Look at how many times they mention the query terms. Find out if they have optimized their content for query terms. See if they are using links to boost their relevance for those query terms.

In short, force yourself to look at the Web as if you’re new to it. Let each evaluation feel as new and fresh and thrilling as the first time you actually began analyzing your own results. Nothing sharpens your SEO skills faster than working from a foundation of ignorance.

Stop using your favorite SEO tools that dispense bland Toolbar PR and backlink reports (they tell you nothing useful in determining why a page is relevant to a particular query).

Think about why people might value that query, the content that is served in those search results, and why someone who is not involved in that vertical might link to content for it. Go looking for those obscure links that are both relevant and useful but which clearly are not placed by SEOs attempting to boost relevance through anchor text.

Search engine optimization is all about everything but the links, but that is the hardest lesson for most people in this industry to learn. If you don’t look at everything besides the links, you have absolutely no clue as to why a particular page ranks well. Even if a page is obviously ranking highly because of links, you need to ask yourself, “Why are those links pointing to that page?”

This is not about figuring out how to create link bait. This is about understanding how and why people value content that doesn’t mean anything to you. It makes you objective. It makes you think. It underscores for you just how useless, meaningless, and irrelevant Yahoo! backlink reports really are to search engine optimization.

Looking at other people’s queries forces you out of your comfortable old shoes, away from your grungy favorite chair, and out into the cold, harsh desert landscape where you have no trees to shade you from the sun, no water to quench your thirst, and no fast food restaurants to satiate your hunger.

Looking at other people’s queries separates the idiots and fools (”Just look at their backlinks in Yahoo!”) from serious optimiers (”Why is this page ranking well in this query I have rarely looked at before?”).

Looking at other people’s queries makes you think about what is relevant to a query, how it’s deemed relevant to a query, and why you really you might not be doing things the same way as everyone else.

Pick a subject you find to be immensely boring and find queries that pertain to it. These queries need to produce relevant results. These queries need to be served by well-designed Web sites that are not obviously optimized (they may be optimized, but one of the lessons you should be learning from this exercise is that there is more than one way to optimize for search).

Find queries that produce naturally relevant results. Find queries that produce optimized results.

Look at the Web as if you have no investment in how it’s served up by a search engine. Be the calm, dispassionate third person who doesn’t care which side wins. Be the curious search user.

There isn’t a day that goes by where you cannot look at some competitive query for the first time. Each day that you only look at queries you’re familiar with a day you have wasted because you have done nothing to teach yourself something new about the Web.