Patterns of Use

“You can never go back.” My grandmother said that to me once when I was feeling regret over the way I had handled some situation as a kid. That expression mirrors the philosophy I have tried to shape my career around: keep moving forward.

As a programmer and as a search optimizer I have never allowed myself to remain satisfied for very long with any particular accomplishment. In these fields, the journey is the destination and the destination is the next launching point for the next journey.

It’s more fun — for me — to be doing than to be remembering what I’ve done.

In terms of search engine optimization it is more rewarding — for me — to be learning than to be coasting on what I’ve learned. I do coast from time to time. Everyone has to. You reach a point where you’re so busy you just don’t have time to stop and play with the interesting stuff. Or you don’t feel good. Or something.

So whenever I cease to coast and take up once again the challenge of moving forward, there is always a nippy feeling in the air — a little anxiety. The question, “Am I still up to this?” parks somewhere in the back of my mind and doesn’t go away until I hit that first milestone in the latest journey.

It’s important, when you undertake an experimental project, to set milestones for yourself. Every large and complex task is achievable on an incremental basis. And because we need to exercise care and caution in our experiments (you don’t want to send an entire group of Web sites tumbling into the penalty bin), learning to pace ourselves is a good thing.

Search engine algorithms are designed to look for patterns of abuse. Good search engine optimization algorithms should be developing good patterns of use. You as the Web site promoter want to develop a catalogue of resources that you use without being abusive. You also want to develop an inventory of Web sites that other people want to use.

Use and abuse are often confused in this industry. People who have no patience, who want it now, tend to be abusive. If you’re planning to be in business on the Web for the next ten years, spending the next six months building your Web resources should not seem like an undesirable cost to you.

If your business plan only calls for instant gratification in search results you’re doing it wrong. You need to allocate resources over time to building your Web resources so that you create a large, strong, relatively stable foundation of Web content that is valued and recognized.

You don’t have to be the site at the top of the search results in order to obtain and accrue value. You don’t have to be the site at the top of the search results in order to draw qualified traffic. If you’re making a profit, you have all the time in the world to figure out how to make more profit.

People who rush their optimization tend to concentrate heavily on specific techniques. Those techniques inevitably undermine their efforts. Any particular optimization technique makes you vulnerable to penalties and filtration. If all your optimization is done the same way, as soon as you cross the line all your work is rendered a complete waste.

It is better to diversify your optimization and proceed from milestone to milestone than to launch huge volleys of “optimization” into the Webspace.

If I were a spammer, I would opt for diversification and slow-paced growth.

Since I’m not a spammer, however, I see no reason to pursue a different strategy. Oftentimes the only difference between search spam and good content is excess. If you create a useful resource you should be okay.

Usefulness, by the way, doesn’t require that a resource be useful to everyone. I have no interest in lhama farming but I am sure there are people who appreciate any informative sites they find on the topic. The fact I don’t value those sites doesn’t make them useless, worthless, or search spam.

So if you limit the usefulness of your own content that should be okay, too. We can’t all create the next CNN, Encyclopedia Britannica, or Weather Channel site. We don’t have to. If you create a site that is only useful to a few thousand people (outside the context of search — so-called “SEO friendly” sites are really just spam), you’re doing well.

Anyone who creates a resource for a small community (some little town in Arkansas, for example) is doing as much for that community as the people who created the best resources for New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, and Chicago did for those communities.

The small scale sites with small audiences are just as important and valuable for search indexes as the huge mondo sites. The need for information should define the boundaries of the site. The boundaries of the site determine some of your milestones. Your available time and resources determine other milestones.

I think you’ll find that the more milestones you set for a Web site project the less that site ends up looking like spam, and the more useful it becomes to someone. The greater value lies in creating a useful resource than in obtaining the temporary benefit of implementing a “technique” that seems to work.

I think you’ll also find that your patterns of use stabilize over time as you devote less effort to technique and more effort to usefulness. It helps you select better resources in your own Web search and surfing as well as helping you create better resources.

And if you create a site that isn’t perfect, don’t agonize over it. You can fix it going forward but you cannot change the past. Remember, you can never go back. So you might as well keep moving forward. You can always change direction if something doesn’t work out for you.