
Shortest SEO Guide - JonathanFields
http://lifedev.net/2011/03/shortest-seo-guide/
======
DanielBMarkham
_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._

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?

So tell me where it is.

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.

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.

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.

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)

~~~
Jabbles
"SEO is not quality. It's popularity"

Search Engines' goals are (probably) to show people the way to the "best
content". Whilst they use "popularity" as a metric at the moment, we don't
know how that will change. As they adjust their algorithms they will find more
ingenious ways of finding "the best content" (I can't define that), making so
called "optimizations" useless.

Your thought experiment works, but only in the absence of perfect (or
futuristic) search engines. If Google's NLP power massively increased, and
they'd indexed your site, I'm sure it would be found, even if no one had
linked to it. It's the search engine's job to find it. Current methods of SEO
are violating the encapsulation we usually have around the search engine (a
black box function _string - > URL[]_). SEO is looking into how SEs work and
trying to game the system. That's fine, but as SEs improves SEO will move more
towards "Content is King".

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I've been observing SEO for several years, and out of all the things I've
learned as a technologist, SEO is the most frustrating. It's consistently
murky and unpalatable to me as a programmer because of it's lack of logic. And
as far as pointing out how it works, I'm not happy with the state of affairs.
I've simply decided that I'm going to talk frankly about how I understand it.
Maybe you guys can straighten me out. I see so much posturing on SEO -- even
by the guys who claim to be "shooting straight" that it's discouraging.

The problem you have is that you are trying to describe a system that has no
specification. That is, there is no testable definition of "best content" that
is repeatable and applicable to all users. After all, this was google's entire
schtick -- the reason everybody thought it was cool was because they managed
to hack the problem better than anybody else had up until then. But there is
no solution. It's not that kind of problem.

One of the reasons SEO drives me nuts is that the concepts we are so used to
in programming, "black box", "answer", "best content", "user", etc -- don't
really have firm meanings in the way we would like them to. Yes, it would be
awesome if there was a little magic box that told me what to do (or gave me
all the answers) but -- and this is important -- even if there was, _it
wouldn't be a black box_. We live in a digital age. Anything that can be put
into code is instantly commoditized.

There is another assumption here that is equally slippery (aside from the
fuzzy nature of all the adjectives and the impossibility of making the system
opaque), and that is the idea that somehow one can determine content quality
mechanically. That's like saying you can pick the "best" painting at an art
show by using some kind of hand-held scanner and an image-processing
algorithm. Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not
deterministic. We are not machines.

We keep wanting Search Engines to work like the library: go to the card
catalog, pick a topic, find authoritative sources. But they keep working like
the dance hall: show up with your best suit, make some friends, and work the
crowd, become popular. That's frustrating. But as one SEO expert told me in a
recent interview[1], if you don't use social signals (popularity), how else
would you do it? This is the way we've been judging content since 3 guys sat
around in a cave looking at mammoth drawings.

[1](If you have time, you might want to listen to the interview. I tried to
touch on this exact subject because I know how touchy an issue SEO is:
<http://www.hn-books.com/Books/SEOMoz.htm#the_video> )

~~~
derefr
> Content is about people interacting with people -- it's not deterministic.
> We are not machines.

Here's a thought experiment for you, then: imagine that someone builds a
product called TheBestSearchForYou, where you step into an advanced MRI
machine and think your query. Then:

1\. Your brain is copied into a billion virtual emulations, each of which then
sees a single page from the TBSFY's index.

2\. TBSFY then measures (through whatever destructive, invasive process is
necessary) which em had the most positive response _according to their own
utility functions_ (which are all the same as yours, mind.)

3\. TBSFY returns to you the page that gave "you" the strongest positive
response.

4\. Then the ems are stopped and deleted, because—since you're going to be a
slightly different you the next time you make a query—it's useless to keep
them around ;)

I would say TBSFY adheres to the definition of an "optimal" search engine,
however infeasable. The actual question it raises, though, is how closely
TBSFY's results can be _approximated_ by a company that knows increasing
amounts of personal information about you.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is a fascinating line of discussion because such a simple question
generates such unforeseen complexity Here we're only three or four comments in
and we've already brought in an MRI and a supercomputer. :)

But once again, there are assumptions you are making that I'm not ready to go
along with. The biggest one is that I know what is good for me -- that I have
a set of criteria (even if un-describable) that can be replicated. The beauty
of real-world interactions is that there is a mix of happy and sad,
interesting and boring. Sometimes the guy you meet at the gas station says
something off-hand that you think about the rest of the day. Human social
interactions require an element of randomness. As a social animal, I need to
interact with a machine that also has social needs, not a machine that is
trying to make me perfectly happy.

That's a big deal, because if you're looking at this as some sort of
optimization function, yes, we could somehow come up with a system that would
optimize your happiness, or emotional reaction, or whatever. I'd argue that
places like HN and most social sites are early attempts at optimization. We
will continue to get better.

But let's say I'm angry. Some guy in a clown suit cut me off in traffic. You
know what would make me happy? Seeing a bunch of clowns on fire, that's what.
But do you know what I _need_ to consume? Something that reminds me that all
people are human and deserve respect. I would absolutely _hate_ consuming that
material, but a week from now, a month from now -- anytime but right now -- I
would tell you that it is the right thing to do.

In fact, this optimization process is a grave danger: we risk becoming zoned
out in little echo chambers where the only thing we consume is the rock candy
of me-too, feel-good content.

It's a tough, probably intractable problem, at least until we come to terms
with what the nature of the optimization needs to be. It would not surprise me
to discover that the optimization that is best for the species as a whole and
the optimization that makes me the happiest are two completely different
things. Not good.

~~~
derefr
> It would not surprise me to discover that the optimization that is best for
> the species as a whole and the optimization that makes me the happiest are
> two completely different things.

That is absolutely so--thus the need for a complex
<http://singinst.org/upload/CEV.html>, rather than a simple one which just
averages everyone's utility functions together.

~~~
hallmark
That was a pretty dense read, at least for me. I particularly liked two parts,
though they may not add up to the meat of the paper:

1\. "If you find a genie bottle that gives you three wishes, it's probably a
good idea to seal the genie bottle in a locked safety box under your bed,
unless the genie pays attention to your volition, not just your decision."
Nice. Grown up version of some cartoon plots.

2\. The description of spread, muddle, and distance. Very relevant to
political theory.

If you are able to compose a tl;dr of the entire paper, that'd be awesome.

------
jonkelly
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.

~~~
kgtm
Or, what he is saying is that the "advanced" things you notice pale in
comparison to the real value of content.

~~~
bigiain
+1 - Notice he finishes with this:

"Sure, optimizing page titles and header tags within posts can help your
chances of ranking highly. But the biggest boost that you’ll get comes from
getting links."

This is something _everybody_ who's spent any time researching SEO knows, but
way too many people ignore it - probably because it's time consuming and
_hard_. All the on-page stuff is relatively straightforward. Inbound links are
at least as important as anything you do on your own site.

Like Ted Dzubya says: "Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100%
of SEO."[1]

It's much easier to tell your boss/client that you spent 25 hours doing
keyword research and tweaking page titles, headings, the body copys keyword
density, adding keyword targeted landing pages, and a/b testing the signup
button colours, keyword optimising navigation and menu labels - instead of
spending 3 days getting overwhelminghy rejected asking other people to put
links to your "content" on their site.

That's mostly why it works. "Page rank" is successful precisely because it's
harder to game than any of the on-page stuff you can do (anyone remember the
keyword meta tag? What a quaint idea! It's quite a nice reminder of what the
internet used to be, back before spam was invented...)

[1] [http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-
science.htm...](http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.html)

------
ffumarola
At the ecommerce company I work for, I keep repeating this in terms of SEO:

"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."

Does creating a link farm hidden in the sitemap create value for users? What
about spamming articles on ezines with no valuable content? Ha.

------
valjavec
Google itself stated something like: "build the best website and we'll change
our algorithms if needed".

It's an endless game between Matt Cutts his team and SEO spammers but I bet
long term on the first one.

------
cabinguy
My little site (regional) gets 150k visitors & 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.

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).

The goal of every search engine is to deliver relevance. Be relevant.

------
MicahSeff
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.

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.

------
petervandijck
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).

~~~
heyitsnick
Could you elaborate?

~~~
petervandijck
A typical site that does well in Google gets 70-80% of their traffic from
search.

No details were given about the other traffic sources, so getting only 50% of
your traffic from search sounds like a failure to me (that, or a meaningless
statistic).

~~~
acangiano
That is true if you don't promote your site on social media sites. If you do,
and have interesting content, you'll regularly hit front pages and your
analytics will look like a series of horse ears. When you get up to 100,000
page views in a single day from sites like Reddit, it's pretty hard to have
80% of your traffic coming from organic search.

------
blauwbilgorgel
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.

"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.

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.

------
brk
This is perfect.

Yes, there are ways to game the SEO system, and lots of companies make this
their reason for being.

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...

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.

Granted, I'm not someone who labels myself an SEO expert though.

~~~
glenstansberry
Exactly. Great content gets you like 95% of the way. The advanced, fiddly
tactics are for the other 5%.

~~~
patio11
_Great content gets you like 95% of the way_

File this away next to "A good product is 95% of marketing" and other patently
untrue things engineers like to believe.

Quality content and linkable content, for example, are not coextensive sets.
You could write the world's best guide ever to cross-stitching school uniforms
(did I just make that up?) and you'd get less links than DHH gets for _not_
cursing during a Rails keynote. If you're doing SEO and you haven't figured
out that linking behavior is very different in different audiences, I'm as
worried for your future as I would be for a salesman who was doing high-touch
enterprise software sales for rooms full of third graders.

There are also easy ways to shoot your great content foot off, and I really
wish I could pull in examples from clients here. Hypothetical example: suppose
a YC-style company is founded by a noted industry expert who has a great
personal brand. They produce a ten-page guide to a particular new technology
their startup uses. The guide is, far and away, the best quickstart guide on
the Internet with regards to that technology.

Q: Their startup benefits from this a) a lot, b) a little, c) virtually not at
all?

A: I don't know. Where did you post it?

Q2: Come again?

A: Like, physically, on which page does that best-in-class guide exist?

Q3: Oh, our Posterous / Github account / etc.

A: _facepalm_

~~~
glenstansberry
Not an engineer. You can't promote something that sucks.

~~~
apu
_You can't promote something that sucks._

Perhaps, but I think 'patio11's point was that even if the product is great,
it could be worthless without the right marketing/promotion/SEO/etc.

So you could be anywhere from 0% to 100% of the way there with just a great
product.

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

------
dkokelley
An analogy to this guide's strategy:

 _Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door._

Which parallels YC's golden rule:

 _Make something people want._

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.

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.

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.

------
gohat
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.

It is, "Build links to content that people will want to link to."

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.

------
ssharp
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.

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?

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?

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?

------
PaulHoule
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.

------
flamingbuffalo
a couple years old, but still the best guide to seo:
<http://powazek.com/posts/2090>

"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t
work"

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

------
bauchidgw
awesome, then i just create the createst magazine ever and make it language
header dependend.

oh, googlebot does not use language headers? well an seo could have told you
that........

