How to use SEO Theory for the best return on investment

Preamble – How to apply SEO Theory in real SEO

We occasionally hear from people who say they try to implement the ideas I share on SEO Theory but they don’t see good results. That’s understandable because I sometimes delve into more theoretical concepts and leave out the applied techniques. This blog is the place for theory, the whys and wherefors of SEO, but I also want people to get something more than an occasional “that’s neat” feeling.

As I’ve said often before, sharing specific techniques and resources openly is counterproductive because people tend to abuse them and burn them out. If I could show you how to acquire 1,000 value-passing links in a week without using forum and blog spambots, you’d probably sit up and take notice. So would the search engines. So would the spammers. So would everyone.

Well, the time it takes to develop the tools and methods to build 1,000 links in a week is considerably longer (in my opinion) than the time it takes the SEO community to render those tools and methods ineffective. That is not to say I would be revealing so-called black hat techniques. It’s just that when everyone attempts to leverage the same advantage, there is no advantage for anyone. Call that the Law of Opportunity Equalization. In brief, the law tells us that any advantageous methodology loses value as more people implement it.

If you bring a V-6 engine to a road race where all the other cars have only V-4 engines, you have an advantage. If you win the race your competitors will all want their own V-6 engines. You can upgrade to a V-8 when the rest of the field has upgraded to the V-6 level but as soon as they see your new more powerful engine they’ll do whatever they can to acquire their own V-8s. The only limiting factor on the escalation of technology will be available resources and the science that drives the technology.

Search engine optimization works the same way, so you have to fall back onto an old fencing strategy called the tactics of mistake. Actually, Sun Tzu and Machiavelli were probably very familiar with this strategy. In essense, it means you let your opponent make the first mistake (if possible, you provoke him into making the first mistake) and then you take advantage of whatever vulnerability he has inadvertently revealed.

No matter how tempting it may be to try out the silly parlor linking tricks you find on SEO blogs and forums, it’s better to develop your own linking resources without sharing them. Don’t obsess over whether other people figure out your resources (they will). Just don’t tell anyone what you are doing because if you do, someone will use your idea for linkbait on a blog. Stupidity is the most widely distributed disease in the SEO community.

Requirements for an effective SEO campaign

In search engine optimization you only have two tools to work with: links and content. In fact, you cannot have the links without the content, but you can have the content without the links.

There are only two factors that outweigh all other factors in search engine results algorithms: trust and repetition. By trust I am referring to what the search engine will tolerate from a Web site, not “authority” or “PageRank”. Repetition can only occur in content, either on-page or off-page. You need to earn trust and you need to repeat your keywords enough to compete without setting off alarms and filters.

All search engine optimization begins with content: documents. You can create them or you can use someone else’s documents, but you cannot optimize with links alone. There are some very stupid people in the SEO community who focus on, obsess about, and only talk about links. Regardless of how successful they may be, they are doing it the hard way. You want the burnout-resistant short cuts.

Here are the rules for effective SEO:

1. Don’t be prissy.
2. Be pragmatic.
3. Don’t panic.
4. NEVER, EVER, ever, ever AT ALL attempt to figure out why a search engine’s results have changed while the changes are still rolling out

Prissy SEOs suck – You’ll see a lot of prissy SEOs on the blogs and forums who say, “I would never do that” (or the equivalent). It’s not prissy to refuse to do something that may incur a penalty. It’s prissy to refuse to do something because you think it’s ugly. Ugly beats the pants off prissy every time and you can always go back and make the ugly stuff pretty after you see what is working.

Pragmatism is NOT stupid – If you’ve got an idea that works, and it doesn’t incur any search engine filters or penalties, there is no reason NOT to use it. But that doesn’t mean beat it to death and it doesn’t mean share it with other people. Don’t depend on one idea. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket. Be pragmatic AND effective.

Don’t allow SERPs to upset you – People get upset with search engine results all the time. Even on my own team the less experienced members of the group still make worried noises whenever Google flips something upside down for a few days or a few weeks. They’ve all seen this happen at least a few times but I’ve watched it happen with many search engines many times. Panic is the SEO’s worst enemy. Clients panic and scream, complain, threaten to take their business away, etc. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent a search engine from changing its results. Get over it. So what if people are screaming at you? Their yelling doesn’t change anything, either. The worst thing you can do for an SEO campaign is try to please a screamer by “doing something”.

You cannot analyze an update until its done – A couple of weeks ago, Google put things on hold for about a week. By the time SE Roundtable and Webmasterworld were reporting on the freezeout it was already two days old (give or take). By the time it was over, the complaints were reaching a crescendo and they (as usual) continued for a day or two longer. During this 8-day freezeout (or whatever it was), people at WMW (as usual) tried to figure out what Google was doing. They offered all sorts of bizarre, stupid explanations. Even Tedster, who has been around the industry longer than sin, couldn’t refrain from looking naive and stupid.

You absolutely cannot explain what a search engine may be doing until it’s done, because most of the time these so-called “updates” are NOT updates. The search engines every now and then stop and tinker under the hood. This kind of activity has a very clear and specific pattern. I’ve never seen it happen where the search results did not radically improve after the tinkering stopped. What do I mean by “tinkering”? All I mean is that normal daily behavior stops without announcement or expectation and then a few days, sometimes a few weeks later you see everything start moving again.

I launched new Web sites at the start of this last tinkering period. Whereas I normally see new sites appear in the search results within days, nothing happened. I stopped producing new content for a week to wait and see what happened. I knew something was going on because of the complaints other people were making publicly. Last week everything started moving forward again and my new sites started appearing in the search results. So we lost a week. Big deal. It happens often throughout a search engine’s year. It’s not worth looking stupid in front of everyone by trying to deduce some new algorithmic tweak. I expect better from experienced voices in the SEO community.

Step 1: Cover the basics because most people won’t

You gain an advantage over your competition by starting out with more knowledge. There are three mistakes you can count on most people (SEOs and non-SEOs) to make at the start of a campaign:

1. They assume that most people would search for content the way they do
2. When they choose active queries, they choose the ones with the most traffic
3. They follow “good SEO advice” and focus on only a few queries

According to one recent estimate I came across, more than 1,000,000,000 people now have access to the Internet (many of them probably have to use shared computers). These people don’t use the same language, don’t use the same idiom (expressions), don’t share the same values, have different interests, etc. They are NOT all going to search the same way. You can do yourself a favor by assuming however you would search for something is very uncommon.

I’ve watched experienced SEOs obsess over high traffic queries. A few have even told me I don’t compete for “high value” or “money” queries because their queries have more traffic than mine. These guys also usually drop their jaws to the floor when I point out I get 20-30,000 referrals from Google every month just for a non-competitive site.

Your job as a search optimizer is to bring in as much qualified search traffic as you can get, not to be a damned stupid fool who only competes for the most competitive expressions on the Web. You’ll occasionally get a customer who wants to be a damned stupid fool. You can’t do anything about that, but if you don’t cover yourself by actually bringing in traffic through underoptimized queries, you’re not going to provide much value to your client. You may not be able to keep every client forever but they grumble louder than they walk when you bring them traffic. Remember, stupidity is the most widespread disease in the SEO community and the general population has a fair share of it, too.

But SEOs SHOULD know better.

As far as good SEO advice goes, there is nothing wrong with it when you temper it with what should be common sense. When you’re just starting out with an SEO campaign, you’re chances of success with 5 queries are better than your chances of success with 500 queries. But if you have a lot of experience you can map out a strategy to go for those 500 queries. Just don’t make the mistake of trying to capture the 5 highest traffic queries first. Everyone chases the big queries. You need to chase the big traffic. There is a huge world of difference between the two concepts.

Step 2: Do the Web site right

You have to create content about your topic. The most common problem I have seen on new Web sites is a lack of content. Some people are good at generating boilerplate. Some people will devote reams of electronic paper to telling you how great they are, sharing testimonials, etc. The hardest thing for people to do is just create text that focuses on whatever they are doing or selling. Talk about your service. Talk about your product. Give the search engines relevant content to ingest and leave the bullshit off your Web site.

I’ve looked at very large sites that were content-poor. Just because you can put together a CMS and spit out 50,000 pages filled with city names and boilerplate text doesn’t mean you’ve actually got any relevant indexable content. There are some temporary quick fixes that will help your pages look more relevant to a search engine (use your keywords more often) but in the end you have to create unique content that establishes its own value. All the links in the world won’t help a sad, sorry site that doesn’t provide any value.

To build a good Web site you need to understand its structure before you start laying out templates and organizing content. You have to define its navigation mechanisms (and for a large site it is imperative that you have several navigation mechanisms). You have to define your cross-promotional tools and priorities. You have to decide what you will use your internal anchor text for (hopefully something better than linking to “home”).

You should never include Javascript or “rel=’nofollow’” in your internal navigation. If some idiot forces you to do this, you need to provide an alternative navigational structure that ensures their foolish sense of what’s right won’t get in the way of real search engine optimization. You need at least three crawable links to every page on your site. If you have a page you’re not willing to link to honestly, that page doesn’t belong on your site.

For a large site two mandatory navigational structures include the HTML sitemap and the search tool. That leaves you with defining a good navigational system (you’ll have more than one “menu”) and cross-promotional lattice. The cross-promotional lattice determines where your cross-promotional links will be placed and what they will point to.

You can break any of these features from the beginning as long as you fix them. The sooner you fix them the better.

Avoid the so-called “flat site” architecture. Even search engineers have recommended this approach but that just underscores their inexperience with designing effective large site structures. You NEED a tiered structure, a hierarchical system (but you MUST shoot yourself if you start babbling nonsense about “siloing”). The tiered, hierarchical structure makes your Web site manageable. It doesn’t have anything to do with search engine optimization. The problem with so-called “flat site” architecture is that you have to impose a virtual tiered, hierarchical structure on it — and it’s easier to screw up a flat site than it is to screw up a complex tiered, hierarchical site.

When you can “walk the tree” in your mind, visualizing how someone might surf to every page, you’re on the right track. If you cannot see how the pages are related to each other either through your links or your directory structures, you’re lost. And if you are lost, you’d better believe the search engines and visitors will get lost, too.

You don’t need to worry about how many clicks or directories deep you go with your site design. You need to worry about how quickly you can get a visitor to the right content. That has nothing to do with how many clicks from the root URL or how many nested directories you have. After all, every page on your site should be indexable and should rank for something. That is what true search engine optimization is all about.

Step 3: Do the links right

You can create as many links as you need. You can do it on your own site or on someone else’s site. It doesn’t matter. To a search engine, links are links and they only need to be tested a little to determine if they should be trusted.

You can start out by submitting an XML sitemap (or several, for large sites) to the search engines. Make absolutely sure you’ve placed navigational links on your most link-rich pages (like “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, “Terms of Service”, and “Contact Us”) because the search engines will follow those links (so will people).

If you’re an SEO servicing clients you really need to have one or more blogs where you can announce new client sites. A single press release placed on 2-3 PR wire service sites will also help. If you don’t have your own blog network then sign up for Ralph Tegtmeier’s 20 Links A Day. Understand that his team reviews all posts to make sure they comply with the guidelines. They’re not a 20-spam-posts-a-day service by any means.

If you’re an in-house SEO or do-it-yourself Webmaster, make sure your obligatory blog is on its own sub-domain or domain. It’s better, when you’re tying a site to a single blog, to start the blog on Blogger, Wordpress, or some similar service that sends random visitors to all the blogs. A moderate-sized Webring may help if you can an appropriate one (no fewer than 50 non-spammy sites, no more than 100 sites, all sites must have functional code, all sites must be current and relevant).

Don’t get caught up in the “if one is good for me, 50 will be superb” syndrome. If you’re using blog posts to help get a site indexed, don’t use autoposting features (no email posts, no scraper posts, no generated text posts). Ideally you want to update the blog once per day. It takes about 2 months for a daily-post blog to build sufficient trust to help other sites consistently.

Avoid superlatives and stupid-speak in all communications related to the Web site. DO NOT: “proudly announce”, tell people you’re “pleased to release”, or otherwise look like a damn fool amateur who doesn’t have a clue. Whether it’s a press release or a blog post get to the point as quickly as possible, use as few adverbs and adjectives as possible, and explain the features or benefits in detail without looking like a smarmy gutter-level sales pitch generator.

People want information first, conversion second. They need to feel like they are making the decision to take the next step. Give them enough content to feel comfortable enough to make that decision.

If for any reason you feel you need more links, your first response should be to give them to yourself from your own assets. Only after you have taken that drastic step of actually adding crawlable, indexable content to your site are you permitted to think about how you might obtain links from other people’s sites.

When you do turn to other sites, refrain from doing any of the following:

1. DIGGing yourself
2. SPHINNing yourself
3. STUMBLEUPONing yourself
4. Social media profiling yourself
5. Creating forum profiles and footers
6. Commenting on blogs

You can tell which people in the SEO community are amateurs when it comes to search engine promotion; just search on their names. The more social media profiles that show up, the fewer clues they have about what they are doing.

If you were hiring an SEO today, who would you want to help you: someone whose query shows a lot of positive comments from other (real) people, or someone who has spammed the social media sphere to death in a ridiculous attempt to engage in “reputation management”?

It’s okay if you have 20 Web sites to get them all to rank for your own name, unless they all look the same. I don’t try to manage my personal name space because there are several other Michael Martinezes out there who are trying to create visibility for themselves on the Web. Nonetheless, I’ve been active on enough sites that it is common to see 4-6 sites I have contributed to in queries for my name.

And there are many sites where you’ll find both positive and negative comments about me in various capacities (including my work as an SEO). I’m not promoting social media sock puppets in my name space. I don’t need to.

Get links from sites that are not active link resources for the SEO community. Find sites that don’t respond to requests for links and give them reasons to link to you (sometimes, all it takes is a few well-placed links on your own sites).

If you’re going to buy links, make sure you have a set of quality tests that have nothing to do with price and Toolbar PageRank.

If you’re going to exchange links, make sure you’re doing it because the links themselves can provide traffic both ways, not because it’s “good for SEO”.

If you’re going to ask for links, give people a compelling reason that benefits their visitors; don’t try to sell someone on the SEO crap about trust, value, and “good for SEO”. The last thing we need is for you to create another obsessive link hound.

If you’re already active in a forum somewhere, it’s okay to link to your new site in your profile or footer (check forum rules). Tell people about what you’ve done. But don’t go chasing links in forums you don’t care about.

If you’re commenting on blogs, it’s okay to give people a link back to your site, but don’t use the “me too” blog spam tactic. Say something worthwhile. Show people you’re not an idiot who just throws out “Great Post!” comments on popular blogs. If you like what someone says, why not tell people WHY you like the post WITHOUT sharing your personal experiences?

Sharing personal experiences in blog comments is about as suck-windy and amateurish as you can get. Naturally, it’s one of the most common ways people in the SEO community create links to their sites.

Be Stealthy

Don’t draw attention to yourself unless you have the resources to engage in an SEO war. Sooner or later someone is going to notice that you’ve captured previously unoptimized query space and that you’re benefitting from it. They’ll come after you. Just be patient, it will happen. Don’t rush it.

Search engine optimization is very much like playing “King of the Hill” with one very important difference. In the classic “King of the Hill” game, even the strongest player will eventually get tired and one of the weaker players will knock him off the hill. In search engine optimization it takes a very long time for the dominant Web site to become weak. Each new king has to become stronger than the previous king in order to effect change quickly.

The less often you find yourself trying to knock someone else’s powerful site out of the top position in the SERPs, the better you’ll have become at search engine optimization.

You’ll also find that content really is more powerful than links because it takes less time and fewer resources to create and optimize content than it does to outrank a link-rich site.

Conclusion

Is that still vague and ambiguous? If it is, I’m sorry. Again, this blog is about sharing principles, not techniques. But I hope this helps some of the people who have been feeling frustrated with all the theory.