SEO Practices and Techniques

Search on “SEO practices and techniques” and you’ll find a smattering of articles about “SEO best practices” led by Google’s description of the industry. None of these articles really addresses the query, however. In fact, I say the query “seo practices and techniques” is ambiguous — so who can blame the marketers who positioned their self-promotional content high in the search results for “SEO practices and techniques” for doing so?

Maybe people searching on SEO practices and techniques really do want to buy someone’s eBook about how to do search engine optimization. Hey, you never know. Maybe the eBook author knows more about SEO than all the SEO bloggers and forum admins who have been dispensing free advice for years.

In my opinion, an article on SEO Practices and Techniques should provide an overview to the specific practices and techniques that the SEO industry actually uses, without lumping them together into an arbitrary list of “best practices” or “bad practices”. Of course, we do want some assessment of risk, cost, and benefits — I just think we need something a little more comprehensive (but concise) than what you’ll currently find.

So here is the first SEO Theory attempt to list SEO Practices and Techniques.

SEO Practices – What is a practice?
“Practices” is a complicated word with many meanings and uses. I think, however, that most people probably use “SEO practices” in the sense of “the way people do (search engine optimization)”. That is, SEO Practices is (in my guess) most often used with the idea of “how we optimize for search” in mind.

On an interesting side note, when Todd Friesen first joined Visible Technologies last year, one of the company founders said to us, “With one of you I have an expert. With two of you I have a practice.” It was, for me, a very profound moment because it led me to consider many things … that would ruin this article if I discuss them here.

The day has not yet arrived when people are actually looking for “SEO practices” in the sense of two or more experts working together (but the cat is out of the bag now).

SEO Techniques – How does a “technique” differ from a “practice”?
Like “practices”, “techniques” is a complicated word with many meanings and uses.

If you asked me how I would differentiate (for the purpose of discussing “SEO practices and techniques”) between a practice and a technique, I would say that a practice is more enduring, persistent, and consistently applied. A technique may have a short lifespan of usefulness or may only be applied on an occasional basis.

For example, it is an SEO practice to perform keyword research and analysis at the beginning of an SEO campaign. It is a technique to look at how people use keywords in their unoptimized copy. You might use that technique more when you’re building a query space and less when you’re invading an established query space.

Furthermore, I think that in order to qualify as a “practice” something has to be done by more than just one person. Otherwise, regardless of its lifespan of usefulness, it’s really just a “technique”.

SEO Practice – Keyword research
The search engine optimization community was built on query analysis, search idiom trends analysis, and basic keyword research. Search engine marketing, search engine placement, organic SEO, pay-per-click marketing, social media optimization — they all look at keywords, how people use keywords, how people compete for keywords.

Keyword research is not easy to define, describe, or teach. You can teach someone the basics. You can write about about how to get started in keyword research. But there are many keyword research techniques. Some tools can be used in more than one way. The more complex keyword research tools let you configure all sorts of reports.

There are keyword tools provided by search engines, metrics services, and people in the SEO community. Some tools are free and some tools require a subscription. Some tools get their data legally and some tools — well, rumor has it there are some very intriguing tools out there.

You may do your keyword research differently from everyone else, but you’re still doing keyword research if you’re optimizing for search. That’s a practice.

SEO Practice – on-page optimization
People in the SEO community remain skeptical about the inherent value of on-page factors versus the inherent value of “one really good link”, but you’ll notice that virtually every SEO knows to stick those keywords into their page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs. And, hey, many people even say you should actually use the keywords on the page at least once.

Looks like on-page optimization is really an SEO practice after all, doesn’t it?

But there are many different SEO techniques for on-page optimization. The title tag alone has spawned three camps of technique artists: we have those who put keywords before brand, those who put brand before keywords, and those who sacrifice brand for keywords, and those who sacrifice keywords for brands (that’s really four camps, but can you reasonably say that the fourth group are optimizing for search? — interesting question, though I digress).

Meta description tags also have their techniques: some people hammer the keywords in the meta description; some people just grab the first sentence on the page; some people repeat the page title; some people write thoughtful descriptions using alternative language; etc.

Keywords description tags take a huge beating in the SEO community. There are still many people who use them but there are now many people who say they are (nearly) worthless. Only Ask and Yahoo! (among the major search engines) care about the keywords meta tag but there are other search engines out there and some of them may provide very useful site search. There are keywords meta tag techniques that are considered spammy (repeating keywords many times, including many irrelevant keywords) and keywords meta tag techniques that are considered good practice (using only relevant keywords, power keyword optimization, providing alternative spellings, etc.).

Page heading markup (Hx) tags are much misunderstood. For years I have pointed out that the search engine algorithms have evaluated Hx tags. I never said you would rank well in a competitive query if you put your page keywords in the H1 header. In fact, some people eschew H1 headers and prefer H2 headers. Some people feel you should only use the Hx markup code the way it was intended: to organize information on a page in a logical hierarchy. Still, one technique people occasionally talk about is putting all their words into an H1 header (will it get you penalized? Probably not, but it won’t help, either).

When used correctly, HTML markup language constitutes a resource of “signals” that search engines may use to evaluate which words are most important to your copy. However, after indexing and analyzing billions of documents, how can any major search engine reasonably expect the HTML markup to be used correctly? Taken together these signals may incorporate a high noise-to-signal ratio but when you stress what is important to your copy (rather than try to make all your copy seem important) the search engines seem to respect your decision and give SOME weight to how you say what you say.

Nonetheless, complying with W3C markup standards is a technique that has received a lot of attention. It qualifies as a practice but not as a search engine optimization practice (the major search engines have said they do not look at compliance as a factor or signal in their algorithms). On the one hand, requiring compliance (or at least rewarding it) would help search engines evaluate on-page emphasis better. On the other hand, they’d unnecessarily penalize a lot of non-compliant Web documents (W3C standards only apply to HTML documents but search engines index and rank many other types of documents).

Repetition, as I have often said, is key to search engine optimization success. It’s also a quick way to get penalized or banned. You can use the same words too many times and trip some sort of filter. So many SEOs (perhaps most SEOs) avoid or only minimally apply the technique of repeating keywords in on-page copy (preferring to get their repetition in off-page copy through link anchor text).

A good SEO copywriter will support the repetition with sufficient surrounding copy to make the repetition work effectively. The copy will be easy to read and understand by most people — hence, the search engines won’t object to the repetition. But a good copywriter will refrain from using a keyword 50 or 100 times on one page in most cases because it’s really hard to justify that kind of keyword hammering.

Okay, I do it sometimes but I don’t repeat my keywords back to back (like “seo practices”, “seo practices”, “seo practices”) unless I’m making a point (I could just as easily have said “seo techniques”, “seo techniques”, “seo techniques”). It looks stupid when you just do it solely for the sake of repetition — that’s what we call “spam” (Stupid Practices And Methods). It may look tedious if you illustrate your point a few times too often but that’s just writing with style (in my humble opinion).

Emphasis can be created in more than one way. For example, you can italicize your emphasis or bold your emphasis or underline your emphasis. You can also “quote your emphasis” (or ‘quote your emphasis like this’). And you use large fonts (sorry — no example because it would make the paragraph look messy), colored fonts, pictures with ALT= text, and do other things that would make a Web designer’s mother cry with joy.

But you can also create emphasis through … REPETITION. Yes, Virginia, there are multiple techniques for creating emphasis! You can also mix your emphasis markup, or repeat your emphatic markup, or mix and repeat your emphatic markup. You can emphasis with headers, bullet points, lists, and combinations. You can emphasize keywords here, there, and everywhere — even in your outbound link anchor text.

So the basic SEO practice is to utilize on-page optimization techniques, but no two SEO copywriters or SEO technicians use the same set of SEO techniques the same ways in their daily SEO practices.

SEO Practice – off-page optimization
So this is the big one. Everyone in the SEO industry engages in off-page optimization. It’s not just a practice, it’s a mandate. But the application of the practice/mandate is not consistent.

Some people restrict their off-page optimization (either through ignorance or preference) to just building links. I think, however, that most people probably do more for off-page optimization than they realize or at least consider.

For example, if you’re still submitting to directories then you should be writing good descriptions, picking good categories, vetting your directories, and designing listing titles that emphasize keywords and match your page titles (sometimes you have no choice but to use the page titles). Some people create a page title for a directory submission, wait until the directory approves the listing, and then change the page title (this is considered sneaky SEO but it’s not clearly unethical SEO because page titles naturally change over the course of time anyway).

Directory submission is not just a technique, but rather a set of techniques. Some people do it through automated software. Some people hire off-shore submitters to do it for them. Some people maintain a spreadsheet of directories with specific submission URLs and requirements. Some people just go to a search engine and type in “Web directory”.

Directory submission should always be complemented by directory optimization. You should never assume a directory listing is only good for the link it provides. Why bother with a directory listing that won’t send traffic? The odds of its links passing value are not very good. Directory optimization may include promoting the directory through your own resources (I don’t mean reciprocal linking, but actually recommending the directory to people). Directory optimization definitely includes picking the right category(-ies) as well as constructing a listing that stands out from the rest while emphasizing keywords as much as the directory editors will tolerate.

There was a time when people made good money just writing directory descriptions for Yahoo!, DMOZ, and a few other directories because those listings made the difference between search visibility and search invisibility. Most people were terrible directory optimizers and I suspect most SEOs today would be terrible directory optimizers either for lack of practice or out of pure laziness.

A directory can only be as good as the quality of its listings. Most Web directories are spammed to death by cheap, lazy, link-loving SEOs (which is not to say that all SEOs are cheap and lazy, nor that all link-loving SEOs are cheap and lazy).

Link placement techniques abound in multitudes. Some people place all their links through social media sites (and most of those links don’t count much in search engine indexing for a variety of reasons). Some people place all their links on blogs. Some people place all their links on reciprocal partner sites. Some people design broad, complex link placement strategies using spreadsheets, databases, reporting tools, and more to track their progress.

Link placement strategists fuss over whether a link is in a list or embedded in an article. Link placement experts worry like old nannies over what the link looks like, what the anchor text says, and how much visibility the link has. Link placement techniques may call for providing the text preceding and following the link as well as the anchor text. Link placement techniques may call for leaving the anchor text in the hands of the linking party.

Subliminal marketing is a more subtle approach to off-page SEO. It’s an SEO practice because people still use it, although it is falling out of favor. The point of subliminal marketing is not to get the links but to get the mentions (of a domain or URL), preferably favorable mentions. So you don’t drop links to best-seo-blog.com but you mention the domain in as many relevant places as possible.

And now the so-called “White Hat” SEO community will be mad at me for reviving subliminal domain dropping techniques. Sorry, guys. The point is that people still use techniques to build brand value beyond getting link anchor text. There are SEOs who work with the news media (on behalf of clients) to ensure that domain names are mentioned in articles. There are SEOs who write copy that mentions domain names for blogs, for forums, in blog and social media comments where links are forbidden.

Just getting that mention might improve your search visibility in ways link-centric SEOs cannot imagine. Your domain name may appear in someone else’s text snippet. Wouldn’t it be cool to get a mention on CNN even if it’s not a link? Oops. I let the cat out of the bag, didn’t I?

Conclusion
The truth is that there are multiple SEO practices for off-page optimization. The vast majority of the SEO industry focuses on off-page SEO practices and SEO techniques. There is not necessarily much uniformity in the pursuit of these SEO practices, the application of these SEO techniques. Some firms (and individuals) focus on only one or two off-page SEO practices. Some firms and individuals are more flexible in their services.

And there are multiple SEO practices for on-page optimization, too. We’re about as clearly homogenous in our SEO practices as lumpy butter.

For the sake of brevity, I left out a few other SEO practices (metrics and analysis certainly qualify). I’ll have to come back another day and pick up where I left off in my discussion of SEO Practices and SEO Techniques.