Approaching SEO
Search Engine Optimization is a field with a lot of gray areas and a number of approaches. This article outlines my approach to SEO. My approach is just one of many and is based on my experience in the field and what I have seen work and fail. It is not flawless. It’s not always right up to date with the cutting edge techniques. It’s probably not right for everyone. Nonetheless, it’s worth sharing as it might help you determine your own approach.
SEO is Only Part of a Wider Strategy
Search Engine Optimization is simply one part of a wider strategy that should be put in place for your enterprise. You should think on a strategic level about your enterprise and know where the Internet fits into your business goals. You should pursue SEO as a part of a wider Internet marketing strategy and you should pursue your marketing within the context of what you want to achieve on the Internet. SEO can complement your other marketing and your other marketing can complement your SEO. Optimizing for the search engines is not a substitute for a business strategy, it should usually not be your only plan for gaining traffic or your only method of attracting customers.
Staying at the Top
I want to get the sites I work on to the top of the rankings in the main search engines but I want to stay there. I want to build long term, sustainable results. I don’t want to panic every time Google tweaks their algorithm. I don’t want to be launching a new get rich quick site every 2 months and watching them get banned just as quick. I’m pretty smart but I don’t have the resources or the technical expertise to accurately reverse engineer the algorithms behind the major search engines. Some people thrive on these challenges. They are constantly launching new domains, spamming their way to the top of their markets and disposing of banned and penalized sites to move on to the next project and to develop the next technique to beat the engines. I don’t have the time for that. Neither do most people who are attempting to build a site or to run a business.
Building sustainable results is not achieved with SEO tricks or spam. Anyone who has been working in Search Engine Optimization for a while has probably strayed into some gray areas. In the 90’s, they’ll have stuffed some keywords in places visitors won’t notice but search engines will. They’ll have gathered some links that aren’t purely ”natural” in the eyes of the search engines. Most of us have been under pressure from a boss or a client or simply from our own goals and tried to press the magic button for quick results at one time or another. In general, however, I don’t have the time or the energy to stay ahead of Google’s efforts to detect spam and the sites that I work on are too important to risk long term penalties for short term gains.
Building for long term success in the search engine game means looking at site structure, developing useful content, getting inbound links, thinking SEO all the time but never only SEO. For me, it means staying away from spaming the engines. I’ll use every technique that I know to ensure that I have relevant content on the key phrases that I’m targeting. I’ll organize my pages and write page copy to ensure that a search engine spider is aware of the relevance of the page. I’ll find the best links from the most relevant sites that I can and as many as I can get and I’ll probably stray into some gray areas now and then. What I won’t do is attempt to deceive the engines as to the content or the relevance of the pages or sites that I’m working on.
Content is King
If the SEO game has sound-bites or platitudes similar to those you’ll hear from politicians then this is one of the most used. “Content is King” is a cry heard often from SEO’s with all kinds of divergent perspectives. The “Build it and they will come” brigade who believe you can just title your pages, make them standards compliant, write some great content and wait for the money to role in believe it. The “SEO Copywriters” believe it. Many of the “Links are the only thing that matters” types believe it too. “Content is King” is pretty much a meaningless statement in relation to SEO because almost everyone who says it means something different.
Unfortunately, it’s also true. You must have content that serves the needs of your visitors. You must have content that makes your page and your site relevant to your search queries. You must have content that can feasibly excite the interest of other website owners, bloggers or whatever and be worthy of links. The unique and relevant nature of your site content is the future proofing of all of your search engine optimization efforts. Regardless of why the search engines rate your content today you want to rank tomorrow.
If you can genuinely, honestly, say “This is the best site about <<my subject>> on the Internet” then it’s the search engine’s job to place you where you belong. You’ll still need to give them a helping hand here and there but you have a good start. If your assessment of your site is more like “It’s another of the thousands of sites on <<my subject>>” then it’s time to get your creative thinking cap on.
On Page vs Off Page Factors
Should you be optimizing your page content or focusing on generating links? For me the answer is simple and the answer is both. Your page should be relevant. It should include your target phrases in the key on page elements of the document and if you want to rank for an even vaguely competitive term you need to generate inbound links. I’ll probably talk more about this at some stage in the future but there are SEO consultants out there who do nothing but generate links. They achieve results and they are convinced that links are the only thing that counts. There are still SEO consultants out there who analyze and change Title tags and other on-page content, write copy to appeal to the search engines and do little or no link building work for their clients. Guess what, they achieve results too.
You can show me the Google results for “click here” as many times as you like and point out that the phrase isn’t on Adobe’s page and you won’t change the fact that I’ve seen Google’s results react to changes in page content and I still see it.
Inbound links are a major (currently the major) aspect of what ranks where on today’s search engines but they are not the only factor. When trying to achieve search engine results I want everything that I can think of working for me and that includes optimizing the on-page factors that are indicators of relevance.
Listen to Everyone but Don’t Believe Everything You Hear (or read)
There is a lot of advice out there about search engine optimization. As you’d expect, the SEO community is strong on the web and whether on forums or the blogs of various experts, advice is easy to find. You would be insane not to use this resource to help develop your knowledge of SEO. The trouble is that for every factual piece of information that’s available there are hundreds that are out of date, or confused, or wildly speculative, or just plain nonsense.
The problem is that search engines are just so damn secretive about the methods they use to rank their results. We all learn through our experiences, hypothesize about what might work, test various factors to determine whether we can use them to increase our rankings and along the way increase our knowledge of what works. At the end of the day though, nobody gets to see the whole picture. That certainly includes me.
SEO is a task that is undertaken without complete information. That’s just the way it is. People crave the certainty of knowing exactly how everything works and some of the advice you read will be from those with big enough ego’s to think they have it. Be very wary of adopting that certainty. SEO is definitely one of those areas where it pays to keep an open mind. There are kernels of knowledge out there on the Internet and there are certainly well accepted theories and techniques that have been proved to be effective but there are very few certainties in SEO. If you find the recipe for Google’s secret sauce, feel free to post a link to it here but if by some strange chance it happens to be accurate, expect Google to change things fairly quickly.
You should read widely in an attempt to educate yourself, to be aware of what is going on in search and in the workings of the various engines but you should think for yourself while you’re doing it.