Richard just posted an article about basic Search Engine Optimisation. Rich is no SEO - he’s a coder, but in an hour or two of research he picked up the basics of on-page. I’m constantly shocked at some of the comments I hear regarding SEO. Its regularly sold-in to clients as a “black art” - difficult and hence expensive. Only yesterday I called out a colleague who had written as part of a pitch “the pages will be SEO-compliant.” WTF does that mean? XHTML compliant perhaps, which might help on-page, certainly. My point is though that these non-terms get thrown around willy-nilly and people start to believe them. The owner of a specialist SEO agency that we do a lot of work with mentioned yesterday he’d overheard an account manager saying a client would need to “tag their pages.” Meta tags? 5 years out of date. Image Tags? Doh. Technorati tags? Wordpress tags? Nope. Just “tags”. Evil non-information!
Its really not rocket science, unless you want to play the blue hat game. You discover keywords that people are actually searching for. You create content that those people might want to read. You make sure the title tag and headings are relevant and the keywords - and other similar keywords - are in the content body. Then you get backlinks from blogs and other related sites.
Some people get it. These people (yes that is nofollowed!) don’t. As for more detail on on-page and some thoughts on off-page (er, get links, one way, on topic, as many as possible,) this book by Dr Andy Williams (the top one,) is excellent reading. Don’t be put off by the title, its not just for affiliate marketers. Yes I’ve bypassed his squeeze, but if you have the slightest interest in SEO it would be a no-brainer to subscribe to his free newsletter.
In case you didn’t see the link earlier, Neil recently released Real Link Finder which finds blogs that don’t use nofollow. Clever piece of kit.
Dan Thies’ book SEO Fast Start is still a classic, and free.
None of the links above are affiliate links: do your own research and only spend money on products if you pretty much know for sure you’ll make it back. I’ve not personally tested all of the paid services mentioned.
Tags: 3 Comments
cool beans. Thanks Alex.
Neil.
You are right on target with this.
I find a lot of folks that believe SEO ends with the page/site layout. If only that were true…
Sure the page and site need to follow some basic conversions for SEO value. But the real work is off the page. Digging to find terms that you should rank for but don’t. Researching new phrases, understanding why your site is showing up for unrelated phrases and making changes to correct it. Emphasizing phrases that convert and de-emphasizing phrases that don’t.
Still, not rocket science, just diligence and wisdom that comes from doing this everyday for ten years.
You are oversimplyfing things here. If your businessmodel is based on “people find me in google” and over 100 people are dependant on the money that is generated by ads:
You think in other terms.
The people who think SEO can be explained in 5 Points are wrong. If you ever seen the difference in money made for a top1 ranking and a top12, you just dont care if people sell it to you as black arts: You just buy it, if it works.