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The best kept secrets in SEO

Posted by admin on February 7, 2007 in SEO Theory

If you cannot get a new Web domain to rank competitively in six months, get out of the business. I don’t believe any domain should have to age for 1-2 years before it can be ranked for a commercial term. That’s absolute crap.

It’s this kind of nonsense that has stripped the SEO industry of its ability to deliver results to the business community. Is it any wonder that people have begun losing faith in search engine optimization?

There is no such thing as an “aging delay”. There is no such thing as a “sandbox”. There is a clearly documented sandbox effect but the primary reason for the effect is the way people expect new domains to rank well on the basis of cheap links.

Search engine optimization is not supposed to be about rankings. It’s supposed to be about traffic. The difference between a true expert in the field and someone who just plays at being an SEO is that an expert — a real SEO expert — understands the power of the page. People who go to conferences, listen to the babbling heads, take notes, and read all the blogs just come away with two really stupid ideas: you have to rank on links and you cannot get new domains to rank.

Any page on a Web site has the potential to draw traffic from a large number of query expressions. Just because you optimize your page for really stupid SEO tricks doesn’t mean that page should only produce converting traffic from queries for “really stupid SEO tricks”. But that page can also draw traffic from: links on other sites, advertising that mentions the specific page URL, news copy that mentions the specific page URL, (unlinked) Web copy that mentions the specific page URL, email, references in books and articles, etc. I’ve gotten traffic to deep content from all these sources and more.

Here are five signs a site has been optimized by an amateur SEO:

1. Only the home page anticipates search-driven traffic
2. The on-page optimization consists of a title element and keywords meta tag stuffed full of words
3. Most if not all of the links pointing to the site are typical “drops” in forums, blog comments, etc.
4. The pages have very little straight text content compared to navigation, advertising, graphics, and testimonials
5. All pages link back to the “home” page rather than to the “site name”

SEO is not rocket science, but it goes well beyond how many links you can beg for in a week.

You want high quality links? Here are some rules to apply in filtering out the purveyors of low quality links:

• All you have to do is ask for the link
• You can sign up and give yourself links
• You can buy links from the site
• You see advertisintg on the pages
• The site has a reciprocal links page
• The site only provides sales copy (no informative content)
• Every paragraph has typographic and grammatical errors

If a Web site is engaged in the buying or selling or exchanging of links, run away. Maybe it will pass value today but what about tomorrow and next year? Do you really want to trap yourself on the treadmill of having to replace old, dead links year after year? Me, I’ll take the stability offered by editorially chosen links. They’ll stay around because of the value I create in my own content.

Does that mean I have to wait 1-2 years to get links to my content? Of course not. What’s the point of having a Web site if you’re not going to promote it for two years? That’s just stupid.

If you’re going to put out a Web site, tell people about it. Just don’t expect to get your search results from links. You get search results from optimization, and optimization is not about links. There are plenty of fools in this industry who will insist it’s all about links. I can’t help them, except to consistently point out they are wrong.

Which doesn’t mean that every link-generating guru is a fool. If they are getting links to build traffic and audience, they have no reason to care about search engine results. In fact, here are the basic rules of search engine optimization:

1. Never reveal everything you know
2. Never depend on any one search engine for traffic
3. Never depend on search engines for most of your traffic
4. Always design every page on your site as if it’s the first page any new visitor will see
5. Always update your content 1-2 times a year
6. Always review your keyword research 1-2 times a year
7. Never trust a third-party analytic tool for anything more than a quick, on-the-spot measurement of progress as compared to past measurements

And the methodology is simple: experiment, evaluate, adjust

What more do you need to know about search engine optimization? Algorithms change year after year. Search engines come and go. Web sites come and go, but good Web sites stay. They are good because someone cares enough to ensure they stay around. That tender loving care begins the moment you conceive of your site, not 2 years after you’ve put it on the Web.