Internet Babel

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.