What makes an SEO technique “advanced”? That’s a question I ask myself every year. A lot of the “advanced” methods I first shared ten years ago, while still relevant today (because good SEO doesn’t change), are so widely used now that it’s not really appropriate to call them “advanced” techniques. In computer programming advanced command structures and algorithms handle more complicated, more sensitive, more valuable tasks. In search engine optimization, though, advanced methods are generally the ones most people don’t know about but which deliver a lot of bang for the buck.
Advanced SEO can improve in 3 areas in 2017.
For that reason I rarely share truly advanced SEO tips and techniques. I’m selfish and I like to keep the good stuff to myself. And a lot of the “good stuff” is so esoteric that it won’t really help most people. A refined SEO strategy should be tailored to the specific needs and content of a given Website. After all, the purpose of search engine optimization is to improve the relationship between the Website and the search engine.
Advanced SEO really doesn’t have anything to do with acquiring links for a Website. That’s basic stuff. There are a thousand ways to get links for a site. Some of them require more tedious effort than others. Some of them work better than others. Some of them earn more penalties than others. None of them have anything to do with “advanced SEO”.
If you think you are ready to take on advanced SEO, or if you feel that is what you have been doing for the past X years, ask yourself: how efficient are your methods? The less efficient your SEO is the less advanced it is. You cannot scale up efficiency in SEO. Quite the contrary: the more you scale up production of anything (links, content, or research) the less efficient your efforts become. The law of diminishing returns kicks in much more quickly. Advanced SEO does not scale. Ever.
Recap: What Makes a Technique “Advanced” SEO?
I look for three criteria:
- Almost no one knows about an SEO technique
- Almost no one can use the SEO technique
- The advanced SEO technique provides a high ROI
It’s really impossible to measure or quantify these criteria. You can argue that almost no one knows about a method if you don’t read about it on blogs. But what if a lot of people simply take it for granted? Only beginning writers rehash what everyone knows and most SEO writers who keep practicing their art quickly graduate to more informative topics.
But what if someone shares a previously unknown idea that henceforth becomes well known? Does the idea fall out of the range of “advanced SEO” because it’s now more common knowledge? Perhaps a corollary criterion to item 2 is that implementing the idea requires some adjustment per Website. In other words, a truly advanced technique cannot be autoreplicated, mass produced, scaled up, or otherwise turned over to a bot. It requires a real human being to do the job and you won’t accomplish the task (much) sooner by throwing more people at the problem.
But I will add one more item, which perhaps is a corollary to both items 2 and 3: the Advanced SEO technique simply works better, more efficiently, than common SEO practices. I always look for efficiency, which contributes to return on investment.
Advanced SEO for Speeding up Websites in 2017
One common topic in SEO presentations and discussions I have seen over and over again this year is “how to speed up your Website”. The message has been well honed by the Web marketing community in general. Most people are emphasizing the user experience benefit over any potential SEO benefit, and that is as it should be.
As someone who has written his fair share of “how to speed up your Website” articles, I don’t find much to object to. The one piece of bad advice that is still being shared and repeated is for people to use “prefetch” markup on their sites. Prefetch is simply the worst possible advice you can give to anyone who wants to speed up their site.
- Prefetches use up more CPU cycles, slowing down the server
- Prefetches use up more user CPU cycles as well, slowing down the browser
- Prefetches waste processing power and bandwidth
Prefetching is an absolute nightmare for mobile phone users. The more sites that tell browsers to prefetch content, the slower those mobile connections become. You really need to stop and think about what you are doing when you instruct every browser that comes along to glibly fetch page after page from your site. You may THINK you’re creating a faster site but you’re only creating the illusion of speed. In reality you make everything slower.
Never, ever use prefetch as a site speed enhancement. That is just not the way it works.
How should the advanced SEO speed up a Website? The answer to this question should make you sick. You should slap yourself up side the face for the next week. And most of you will not be able to do anything with it (which is why it’s so advanced for 2017).
Are you ready? The best way to speed up a Website is to upgrade the hard drive(s) to solid state drives.
About half of you know what a solid state drive is. They are usually referred to as SSDs. They are also called “flash drives” because they use a form of flash memory to store data. There is no disk in an SSD. It’s just a stack of ultrathin memory wafers. The speed improvement of SSDs over traditional spinning hard drives is just absolutely massive. A lot of pro gamers have abandoned hard drives in favor of using SSDs. Maybe all of them have now done so.
One common objection to replacing hard drives with SSDs in Web servers is a fear of drive failure. Although early SSD technology had a much shorter life expectancy than contemporary hard drives, a lot has changed over the past 5-7 years. SSD manufacturing technology has improved to the point where the projected life expectancy for various modern SSDs ranges from 50 years to 120 years depending on “normal usage”. Assuming your Web server needs to beat the drive to death every day, you might shorten that projected life span to something like 5-10 years. Maybe.
Nonetheless, if improving Web site speed is really that important to you(r client), get rid of the spinning hard drive and replace it with an SSD. You’ll be amazed at the speed improvements. And the neat thing about this SEO technique is that you don’t have to redesign any Websites. You don’t have to squeeze image files (sacrificing quality). You don’t have to go through extensive lists of suggestions on how to speed up sites. And you absolutely don’t ever need to implement any cheap tricks like prefetching pages.
I have written about the benefits of switching to SSDs on The SEO Theorist and our Web Hosting Services blog. This is an advanced SEO technique that needs to become a widely implemented, commonly understood strategy.
The day of the spinning hard drive is nearly over. If you are not integrating solid state drives into your SEO strategy, get out of the industry.
Caveat: SEO Must Always Support the Business Decision. You should propose the upgrade strategy to your (employer / client) every year until they make the switch. But people will look at how much SSDs cost versus traditional hard drives. You get less storage at a higher price, and they may prefer to compromise on speed for space. Don’t beat your head against the wall if that is the business decision. Instead, get out your checklist of meticulous details to tweak and hope that you can get all those changes made to the site.
Not everyone is ready for truly fast Websites. You’ll see that once they compare prices on SSDs versus hard drives. The difference is not that great but the costs add up as your Web server needs increase.
Advanced SEO for Building Traffic in 2017
Everyone wants to compete for those high volume queries. I understand that you want a piece of proven traffic. That’s one way to go about building traffic for a Website.
And, of course, most people now at least pay lip service to exploiting long-tail queries. Although there is no formal or widely accepted definition for “long-tail queries” I prefer one used by a number of search engineers: any query that drives about 10 searches in 90 days is pretty long tail. You could go with a definition that uses 10 referrals in 30 days. That is still low volume traffic.
But the real money, in my opinion, will be found in queries with no traffic at all. It’s easier to optimize for search when no one else is competing with you. I explain why this is a great strategy for 2017 in the article I linked to. I’m not going to repeat all that here.
Most people won’t invest any time and resources in zero-volume queries but I expect that will change in the next 2-3 years. As more people compete for those proven keywords, more people will be driven to find traffic from other queries. The lowest of the low hanging fruit is all the rotten stuff laying on the ground.
You can build a lot of interested, high-converting traffic with queries no one else wants. Many of you do that now without realizing it. It’s time for this strategy to come out of the advanced SEO toolbox. Everyone needs to understand why it’s important not to ignore queries on the basis of how much traffic you think they generate. Alongside proven value you should be considering potential value.
Advanced SEO for Website Design in 2017
Stop using Javascript. This touches on several challenges facing today’s search optimization specialists:
- How to improve site speed
- How to improve crawl
- How to improve user experience
Javascript is a disaster on all three fronts. The more scripts you embed per page the more fetches you require a browser to request. You might be able to speed things up a little if you switch to HTTP/2 but there are some very scary security issues with HTTP/2. We don’t recommend that anyone convert their server to use HTTP/2 if they have a choice. You absolutely do not want to do this if the only benefit you hope to gain is to speed up a Website.
Javascript is the medium of widgets, especially third party widgets. We’ll never get completely away from it because we use Javascript to embed analytics trackers, social media content, and little widgets that do things.
But you should never use Javascript to serve the primary content of your page. AJAX and anything that works like AJAX is just an awful user environment. Any Javascript interface that is constantly fetching content forces people to stop and wait for their browsers to load more data onto the same page. Users don’t like having to wait. An infinite scrolling scheme is just plain stupid unless you’re Twitter. Not to mention the fact that this kind of content eats up memory.
If you can prevent your (employer / client) from investing in a Javascript-heavy page design, do so. It won’t just create a slow-loading page, it will create a bad user experience. And, oh yes, not every crawler on the planet can handle Javascript.
In fact, Googlers just flat out tell you that Googlebot won’t crawl dynamically served content. If the Javascript is pulling content into the page after the page initially loads, Googlebot won’t see it.
So stop buying into all the hype about how great Javascript is. I know the Javascript development community won’t agree with me but they are not the ones who have to improve the relationship between Websites and search engines. Technically, Javascript is the least efficient way to accomplish that, so no matter how many hacks and fixes you find to get around all the limitations of Javascript, you’re just making life harder for yourself (and your employer or clients).
Javascript is being used too much. Ease up on it.
Wrapping Up
Search engine optimization has to evolve with the times, but not in the way most people describe it. Every time I see someone write “SEO has changed a lot in 20 years” I laugh out loud. No, I just roll my eyes. Some people never learn.
Search engine optimization hasn’t changed in 20 years. The Web has changed, but what we have to do for SEO is still pretty much the same thing. We have to manage crawl, monitor the guidelines, and find new queries to develop content for. And somewhere in there we want some links. Nothing has changed as far as SEO is concerned.
But advanced SEO should be different today from what it was 20 years ago. More people should understand the basic stuff now. The truly advanced stuff is not going to be that easy to do, not necessarily because it’s hard to understand. The greatest obstacle to implementing advanced SEO is your own attitude. If you believe it can’t be done you won’t try to do it. If you feel there is insufficient value in it you won’t make the pitch.
That more than anything else is what makes advanced SEO so advanced. Not everyone groks it, not everyone can do it, and most people don’t realize just how efficient they can be. You learn that with experience. You learn that by admitting that what you believed was the best you could do yesterday is not true today.
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Great tips Michael. I was wondering, how often does Google crawl a website? does it depend on the settings we make or it’s all up to Google?
Crawl is all up to Google. They take a number of different factors into consideration. We don’t know what all of those factors are or which ones are most important. And I wouldn’t put it as “how often does Google crawl a Website” because they may fetch the same page many times over before fetching every page on a site at least once.
I see. Thanks Michael for responding! 🙂
What about dns-prefetch?
Thanks
The way the Chromium project describes it they are trying to keep the DNS pre-fetching as close to the user as possible, but do you have any idea of what that does to a mobile phone when there are dozens of links on the page? Just because some Googlers decide that eating up user bandwidth is okay doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. People who solve complex problems need to step back and look at the big picture before launching their cool schemes into the wild.
If your pages only link to a few domains (say, less than 10 per page) then DNS pre-fetching probably won’t be an issue. If visitors are browsing several pages on your site their browsers should cache frequently referenced domains such as those used for fonts, analytics, social media markup, etc. But if you’re linking out to a lot of distinct domains you’re asking the mobile browser to conduct a lot of wasted, useless transactions.
Now multiply that by the number of Web documents a typical mobile user looks at every day. If they are all triggering DNS pre-fetching then a significant percentage of the browser’s activity is going into wasting bandwidth. No one gains anything from all that pre-fetching. It’s a horrendously stupid idea. And as such will most likely be baked into a majority of Web applications before people who monitor all this stuff start to blog against it.
Meanwhile, if your goal is to speed up page ABLE then what possible benefit does anyone get from warming the browser with information about pages BAKER, CHARLIE, and DOUG? Just speed up the page the visitor is looking at.
Thanks for your reply.
What I’m dns-prefetching (and preconnecting) are all items that load directly on the page. CDN URLs, analytics, and domains called from ads that are loaded every time (ad.doubleclick.net for example). I don’t dns-prefetch anything that is not loading directly on the page.
I don’t believe you are accomplishing anything with DNS pre-fetch. Since the browser has to load all that stuff when it renders the page anyway you’re not saving any time. Page ABLE has to tell the browser to prefetch the DNS information for whatever is on page BAKER. Here is what the Chromium site says:
There are some limits to what the prefetching causes to happen. These guys are not stupid. Their idea is just more acceptable for the desktop than for mobile browsing, but once all the Web is running on HTTPS the whole idea of DNS prefetching will die anyway. The browsers won’t prefetch anything used by HTTPS pages. Hence, if you were to link to SEO Theory today and use DNS prefetch to tell your visitors’ browsers to start resolving domain names used by my pages’ resources, nothing would happen.
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/dns-prefetching
Hmm… everything else I’ve read on the subject says it is effective reducing the time for loading external content into the page. Examples:
https://csswizardry.com/2013/01/front-end-performance-for-web-designers-and-front-end-developers/#section:dns-prefetching
https://coderwall.com/p/fasrqw/speed-up-your-webpage-by-using-dns-prefetching
https://css-tricks.com/prefetching-preloading-prebrowsing/
Thanks again
That’s because they don’t know what they are talking about. You’re not saving any time. You’re telling the browser to work on more than one page at a time. To the user it looks like everything loads faster (assuming the prefetch actually accomplishes anything) but they still have to pay for the bandwidth. For the desktop that’s not an issue. For mobile users it is.
Time = money. “Saving time” costs someone money. Always.
Hi Michael ,
Your contribution to Advanced SEO tricks is appreciated , It is rightly said by you SEO tricks to enhance traffic remains the same All we need to do is to emphasize on making sure that each web page has appropriate title tags and that the content is not “thin” or low-quality & other Off page tactics.