SEO is Easy
Posted on May 12th, 2008 by Nick Sullivan under SEO
I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about SEO; What it is and how hard it is.
Personally I just see it as following rules and never like to admit people as experts on it as it’s always changing and I don’t think it’s hard enough a field to have experts in.
I’ve always done fine in search engines and have never needed to get an ‘expert’ to use their special powers to do it for me. It’s literally as simple as following instructions. As long as you keep up with what’s good and what’s not, it’s all good.
Some basic SEO pointers from a non-SEO-expert:
- Write clear, descriptive, keyword friendly page titles. Never compromise viral ability or site integrity for search results though.
- Write short, effectively distinguishable, relevant META tags.
- Write quality content. If you can, fit keywords naturally into your rhythm but again, don’t force it. If it happens or, you can make it happen naturally, do it. But great content will result in great backlinks, which in the long run are much better practice for your SEO.
- Use no-follow on links you do not trust or links you do not feel are relevant. But in my opinion, if you have to use no-follow, why are you linking that link anyway? I only ever link to relevant sites or sites that I deem trustworthy quality.
- Use image tags on all your images. I have found images to be pretty effective SEO wise. On one of my first posts I was the very first Google Image result for ‘YouTube Logo’ in a post about YouTube. Just because I used that as the image title tag. I foolishly changed this image and I never got that position back but on some of my other sites, I cover a lot of the first few pages of Google Images with image results for decent, relevant keywords.
- Use a redirect on your URL to have it point to one only; It should only ever point to http://www.yoursite.com or http://yoursite.com so that if someone types one of them, it will go to the other. If you don’t do this then search engines will treat your 1 domain as 2 domains; Defining http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.comas separate sites. This isn’t good, you will get different pageranks and it will weaken the overall SEO effect of your site.
- Do NOT make any paid posts or sell links, Google will punish you. If you don’t care about PR, as I don’t, don’t worry. But if you do and you do either of these, expect a bitchslap from Google.
Moral of the story is, don’t pay anyone to do your SEO. It’s not worth it. A lot of so called ‘experts’ charge ridiculous amounts per hour to do easy work, stuff you could do yourself with minimal effort.
There are some legitimately good SEO people out there such as Aaron Wall - creator of the SEO Book. He genuinely knows a lot about SEO and I believe he genuinely likes to promote the development of it and help the knowledge of it grow amongst webmasters. I own his SEO Book and it’s definitely the best stuff I’ve read on the subject. That being said, there wasn’t too much in there that I didn’t know or wouldn’t deem easily findable for free. But, it’s still a very nice SEO guide and collection of links and helpful tips. I recommend reading it just for the knowledge expansion.
I know this title is a little provoking as there are a lot of people who base their careers on this subject and me saying ‘It’s easy’ does sound a little disrespectful. I don’t mean it to be perceived quite like that though, I just mean; It’s really not as hard as you may think and with a little research and effort, you can be a self-proclaimed expert on it much easier than you could be…. an affiliate expert.
(4 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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May 12th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I think it would be more like a pimpslap from Google, but the point comes across the same.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Nice article - just came across to your blog.All the post are good and informative….
Thnx for sharing this info
May 13th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Very well explained … good info for newbies … will share this with my few frds who r noobs in webmastering
May 13th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Good basic steps explained here
May 13th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
There are a variety of reasons why someone would pay someone to do SEO for them, beginning with the fact that it is time consuming. If you’re going for very competitive terms, you literally need hundreds of links being built all the time (because the sites that rank high for very competitive terms have hundreds of of links being built to them daily). Many times people hire SEOS to help them simply because they don’t have the time, even though they know how to do it. Many times people have problems with their internal link structure that they don’t even know about until they talk to someone with years of experience in SEO.
I have to disagree with your assertion that SEO is easy, and I doubt anyone with years of experience in Internet marketing with agree with such a claim. If it’s so easy, then anyone could just go and rank in the top 10 for an extremely competitive keyword, like myspace layouts. But obviously they can’t.
Also, in regards to your question about why anyone would use nofollow tags, there are a number of reasons why you would use nofollow links, especially on internal links. You can read about them here:
http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/nofollow-helps-internal-linking-and-conversions/
May 14th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I didn’t say people didn’t pay people because it was time consuming. That’s obviously a reason but pretty much the only one for me.
Also about your MySpace / popular keyword point. Obviously it’s hard to get to the top now because there is years of already indexed, well established sites that Google already favor, so getting close or above them takes a lot of effort indeed.
But the only real ’secret’ is a good site. If you have a good site / service that people actually want to use and link to, you will get to the top because Google will notice how many people are linking to you therefore realise you are one of the best sources for said subject.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I think SEO = budget
if you have good budget, you can do good SEO
May 21st, 2008 at 9:25 am
Cars Blog - you don’t need any money in SEO. You can do it by your own as stated by Nick in his post. You can actually transpose it. If you have good seo, you can do good budget
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:30 am
Good advice! I think a lot of the readers get frustrated due to mainly because they don’t see their site in the front page of Google search. With patience and tweaking they can do it.
May 25th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
I’m doing SEO myself and agree with you that it’s not worth to pay to somebody else to do it. It takes time, but I think it’s totally worth it. By the way great advice on SEO. Sure it’s basics, but still seo made easy