Shortest SEO Guide

<i>Or you can just create. The beauty of just creating is that when you build something really, really good, the links will flow to your site.</i><p>Thought experiment: Ok. I just wrote a page offering to give away 20 bucks to the first thousand people that read it. Let's say I am rich and can afford to give the money away. Can't get any more interesting and traffic-worthy than that, right? Heck, this is the kind of thing you'd want to send links to your friends, right?<p>So tell me where it is.<p>SEO is marketing, plain and simple. That means that there is an active component to it -- sharing links on HN, phoning some friends, making some posters for the dorm. Whatever.<p>The value of what you output has nothing to do with some sort of inherent quality. It has to do with how many people you can expose your content to and what ratio of those people are going to like what they see enough to give you a link.<p>SEO is not quality. It's popularity. People don't link to you because you wrote great stuff, they link to you because they like you, are a fan, want to look cool, etc. These are all things that you actively have to go out and cultivate.<p>To say it's all passive is to miss the entire point and to pander to the audience. With all the keyword optimization going on with that page, and the fact that the entire tone of the article is pitched directly to HN and hacker-types, I can't help but feel that author knows better. (I don't mean that as a slam. Perhaps I am the guy in the audience that spoils how the magician's trick is done. If so, I apologize)

It's interesting that in this post about "Simple SEO" he does a bunch of "advanced" things that aren't mentioned -- highly optimized page Title and URL (which appears intentional as it does not match the blog post title), post title optimized for social media sharing and CTR, a version that's too large for most blogs so that bloggers will link to it (with optimized mouse-over text to boot). When he references on-page factors and then says "I used to worry about these above factors" -- well, it feels a little dishonest to me.

At the ecommerce company I work for, I keep repeating this in terms of SEO:<p>"Even though this guide's title contains the words "search engine", we'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work."<p>Does creating a link farm hidden in the sitemap create value for users? What about spamming articles on ezines with no valuable content? Ha.

Google itself stated something like: "build the best website and we'll change our algorithms if needed".<p>It's an endless game between Matt Cutts his team and SEO spammers but I bet long term on the first one.

My little site (regional) gets 150k visitors &#38; 2-3M page views per month on average. About 70% of those visitors find us through search. Our goal is to lower that number, but at this point it does not bother us. We know that it is in all search engines best interests to keep us at the top of the search results because we are the most relevant website for our topic/services...all of the search engines recognize this and one of the search engines knows this because they count our page views for us.<p>We SEO our site to make it easier for the engines to know what we are about...but we do not bother with much of the deeper stuff (all the onsite relational linking strategies).<p>The goal of every search engine is to deliver relevance. Be relevant.

I run a site (gamexplain.com) and have had a fair amount of problems getting our SEO up to snuff. We've followed a whole lot of the fundamentals espoused by people like the author of this article, but we still struggle with the incoming links, and that has hurt us somewhat. We don't really want to spam our articles to every aggregator and blogger under the sun, though maybe that's what we should have been spending our time on rather than trying to write informative articles that stray from the norm of what you might see from other gaming sites.<p>Quite honestly, the best way for us to get incoming links in this industry, is to write articles that I would not consider "quality content," but rather inflammatory, misguided, or just plain offensive. In the past, articles that fell into these categories have even garnered us attention in the academic community, so take that as you will.

Getting 50% of your traffic from search isn't a success, that's actually kind of bad (depending on the details of course, which weren't given).

Not controversial at all. "Content is king" is almost an SEO standard (with EGOL as its herald). Meta: The proof is the article itself. It's some age-old tested SEO wisdom in a controversial/trollish linkbait sauce. In the world of SEO this article is but an annoying splash.<p>"Make sites primarily for users, not search engines". Anyway, it is a point that really needs to be repeated over and over again, so for that the article maybe has some merit.<p>Yet I fear it may inspire another rash of linkbaitish articles linked on sites like these, where the purpose behind the content isn't to inform the user (about doing whitehat SEO), but to get the user to link to it. If these fastfood social links were all that counted for determining quality and authority on the web, icanhazcheeseburger and top 10 lists would outrank us all.

This is perfect.<p>Yes, there are ways to game the SEO system, and lots of companies make this their reason for being.<p>But for 98% of the common website-owning populace, SEO is most simply about publishing information that people want and find helpful. You can spend your time whoring for backlinks, or generating content. One is valuable to your target audience, the other isn't...<p>IMO, the more advanced SEO tactics are for when you have built a foundation of content and can then concentrate on making some of the farther corners of the Internet aware of your content.<p>Granted, I'm not someone who labels myself an SEO expert though.

I've only got one word for this guide: Refreshing

An analogy to this guide's strategy:<p><i>Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.</i><p>Which parallels YC's golden rule:<p><i>Make something people want.</i><p>In general, I agree with both of the statements as solid business advice. After all, nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Make a good product first, and then market it.<p>Although I do have to slightly disagree on one point. If you've built a better mousetrap, or made something people want, how do you let them know? The general strategy seems to be "let the product speak for itself." The same advice is prescribed in the article: write good content and let it speak for itself.<p>Well, good content is critical, I agree. Gunning for rankings on crap content is a sure way to fail. But it's lazy to leave it at that. You must let people know that your content is there to link to. Post it to newsboards and forums. Gather a following on Twitter and let them know. Market it. The real gem from the article is that the difficulty of the sale and the quality of the content are inversely related. Make quality content and the sale will be easier... but you still have to sell.

I've done a lot of SEO and this really nails it. But my own form of the very most important rule of SEO is slightly different.<p>It is, "Build links to content that people will want to link to."<p>The reason for this different wording is that in my experience, you can have highly linkable material, but without a critical mass of attention, it will get limited results.

This seems exceptionally misguided and short-sighted. The example the author cites is for his blog. 50% of his blog traffic comes from search engines; he doesn't do SEO, therefore SEO is a waste of time.<p>Has the author ever attempted to land competitive keywords in competitive markets? Has he tried bringing in direct sales leads through organic search-engine results?<p>People who are really good at SEO can show legitimate improvements in sales from their SEO tactics. It's not simply a matter of "if you build it, they will come". Yes, maybe they will, but when?<p>Does it make more sense to write awesome content about, let's say, vitamin supplements, for four years, get a nice following and hope that some people buy from you? Or does it make sense to try to jam your site onto the first couple of results for "vitamin suppliments" on Google by employing some of the SEO tactics the author considers a waste of time?

I wouldn't say that this is complete advice, but it's the most important principle. Many of the people who have the worst trouble with SEO have sites that nobody would care about, such as real estate agents.

a couple years old, but still the best guide to seo: <a href="http://powazek.com/posts/2090" rel="nofollow">http://powazek.com/posts/2090</a><p>"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work"

I've always been one of those "Field of Dreams" SEO guys. "Build it and they will come."

awesome, then i just create the createst magazine ever and make it language header dependend.<p>oh, googlebot does not use language headers? well an seo could have told you that........