
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet - marrone
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
======
jrockway
Boiled down to one sentence: your web site should not be a massive image
served from a URL with fifteen thousand query parameters.

The best SEO tip is to have a site that is useful for the keywords you're
targetting. My website is a boring (design-wise) collection of text, but when
people are searching for something on there, it usually comes up pretty high
in the results. That's because I'm not trying to make my site "relevant" to
people that aren't interested in it.

------
davidw
That's actually fairly useful: it distills everything down into a few basic
rules, which is basically about how things should be with this stuff. It's not
exactly nuclear physics.

The comments on his site are funny. "Put me out of business". If all it takes
is a two page PDF to "give away all the secrets", then you were inflating the
value of what you sold in the first place.

~~~
glasner
a) I can't believe this linkbait made to the top of Hacker News

b) the people posting comments about giving away the secrets are newbies at
best.

~~~
Mistone
most people can grasp the general seo concepts fairly quickly, a quick guide
like this and an afternoon of work could yield some strong long term results
for your site.

------
redorb
After reading some of the responses its funny, I hear "seo's inflating their
vaule" and "Whats canonical issues" ...

1\. Some SEO's do inflate their value, honestly most hackers here don't need
one; our best clients (mutually beneficial) are the ones who have a site, but
its old, out dated and not producing like it should. A lot of people don't
have the time to monitor their back links, check their title and alt tags and
hunt for more links... If you asked anyone I've ever worked SEO for; they
would say I've gave them a great ROI

2\. Canonical Issues: AKA Keyword Cannibalization, when you have more than one
page focused on one keyword. They compete against each other in google, mostly
used in reference to the title tag as most CMS's really mess those up.

(edited: for mistake)

~~~
davidw
I don't doubt that there is value in some of this stuff, but a problem that
seems to be quite frequent is this: the more honest people out there can
easily teach most of their clients most of what they need to know in a day or
two, so unless you can land clients who really just don't want to get their
hands dirty, it's tough to get a recurring revenue stream going.

Anecdote: at the last place I worked, we had a guy come in for an interview.
Bright guy, and came across as being straightforward, but he was really
insistent about having an 'ongoing' type of deal, whereas the boss already had
read a lot of what the guy knew, and so decided against it. I think the boss
might have sprung for a day or two of consulting, but certainly wasn't going
to go for anything more than a one-off.

~~~
redorb
here is my business model,

tell me your keywords, I give price for top 5, bottom 5 in G,Y,MSN add all the
top 5, bottom 5, together (thats total amount) half down, then half when
rankings are achieved for 3 weeks

deliverables

monthly report, (links, on site optimization, off site optimization)

after getting positon the amount due would be the second half of total price,
then if you wanted there would be a maintenance package of $x or $X /mo to
keep gaining links and thus stay on top.

*if your rankings can't be achieved you get your 1/2 down back. \- in this model also includes transparency of links and methods also education of client, no hold barred Q&A anytime phone call etc...

~~~
mrtron
Sounds like you are one of the 'SEO' folks that most people frown upon.

a) charging a different rate for different keywords you want to hit.

b) not providing a service that is going to work in the long term - doing
black hattery to bomb them into the top 5 for a few weeks is going to get them
dropped in rankings in the long term.

c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam.

~~~
redorb
Not bombing, gaining links (there are good ways to do this; linkbait)

\- charging different for different keywords is called capitalism; some
keywords are BMW's and others are Kia's now go tell bmw they can't charge more

I don't pretend to know all coding, don't pretend to know all SEO; don't fear
other's skill sets.

~~~
mrtron
It is called variable pricing - and the service you provide shouldn't change
based on what keywords are relevant. It is not like BMW vs Kia whatsoever.

I don't claim to know all about SEO, but the basics are incredibly simple. I
do know there is an abundance of people offering services like this, and they
like to spread a lot of FUDD.

~~~
redorb
some keywords are harder than others (based on competition) and pretty much
based on their value, so yeah you have to charge more

------
ssharp
I have zero issues with this post.

That said, I'd have a rough time understanding why anyone would do SEO
consulting full-time. Is there that much money in it? It seems like it would
be a good side-project but if you were really good at it, it seems to me that
your time would be better served running e-commerce sites, blogs, whatever,
driving traffic to it, and generating more slightly more passive income.

~~~
bigtoga
I would assume that most people who do SEO also do all the other aspects
related to site design and optimization. SEO would just be one aspect of one's
time. Just guessing though.

------
goodgoblin
What does he mean by 'Canonical Issues'?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
If you don't redirect www. to . or vice versa, then robots can see duplicate
pages, which can be bad for SEO.

~~~
mrtron
It is a bad practice in general. Most of those issues that are 'bad for SEO'
fall under bad practices in general.

There are few tricks, and just common sense concepts of having proper return
codes, redirection and site structure.

