Top Three SEO Tips
I am not a guru of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). My sites' traffic is so small you would fall asleep watching visitors pass. And yet you may have arrived here because a Google search on SEO suggested this site. Why did Google do that? Because Google is stupid (claim #1). As a result, SEO sucks (claim #2). And I make this extraordinary claim: understanding why SEO sucks is the best way to learn SEO (claim #3). In other words, you have to understand why you may dislike what "good SEO" would have you do. And why? Because if you understand what you dislike about SEO, you may understand what you resist doing. And when you understand what you are resisting, you may stop resisting it.
Google Sucks
One of these days I will write a page to develop this claim. In recent years, I have found that Google has gotten worse and worse. More often than not, the top ten results are stuffed with irrelevant commercial offers while the good content that normal humans want to read about lies deeply buried in the caves of the world wide web. It is taking more and more effort to get relevant results out of Google. Why? Largely, because Google shows you SEO-optimized pages.SEO Sucks
I hate SEO. Why? Because Search Engine Optimization (SEO) forces you to write your site in ways that works with Google. In other words, it forces you to make your site as stupid as Google. And that may not happen to be your taste. Let me give you two examples.Pompous Titles
Look at the title of this page, all the way at the top of the browser bar. It is "Top 3 SEO Tips - Top 5 SEO Tricks - Top 10 SEO Secrets". And look at the first title on this page. It is "Top Three SEO Tips". Now if it was up to my taste, I would never write this kind of title. It makes the pages sound pompous. I used not to write such titles, and my rankings sucked. On this page, I went a little overboard to make the point. These pompous titles repeated over the page are there to tell Google what this page is about, because if you write tasteful titles, short and to the point—such as "Tips", "Tutorials", "Links"—Google won't get it that you're talking about the top 3 SEO tips.
Furthermore, you may not want to talk about the top 3 SEO tips at all. My ideal title for this page would be something understated like "SEO Tips". But if I did that, Google would never show my page as it would not stand out among the thousands of pages claiming to be offering SEO tips. And now, here is where it really hurts. A lot of users do type things like "Top 3 SEO tips" or "Cheapest Room Vegas" in Google. In a way, they're trusting Google to display the pages that do have the top tips and the cheapest room. But what does Google display? The pages that are stuffed with the keywords you searched for, i.e., "Top 3 SEO Tips" or "Cheapest Room Vegas". And these pages may not have the top 5 SEO tricks or the cheapest room. Ouch. And the pages that do have the top ten SEO secrets may not stuff their pages with the keywords, so they will not get picked up by Google. Ouch again. This is why SEO sucks, and this is why Google sucks, and this is why ultimately this has to change or Google will fail.
Short Pages
Another problem of SEO is that pages work well when the keywords they are optimized for (on this page, "top 3 SEO tips") are densely present on the page. What this means is if you write a page about three different topics, you dilute your keywords, and your page loses in Google. What does this mean? It means that to optimize your pages, you have to break them into smaller pages, each optimized for a number of keywords. I hate that. For instance, when I do a page on SEO, my taste would be to have everything I know about SEO on that page. I would like to have not only my best SEO tips, but also the SEO traps I am aware of. That is how this page started, and that is how I do most of my pages, because that's how I like it. For the purpose of this page, I have done things according to the "SEO book", breaking off the section about the worst SEO traps.
The Top 5 SEO Tricks
Notice this title? Yeah... For Google, it is like the word "S E X" written across a t-shirt. But I have already given you my number one SEO tip: learn what you hate about SEO. Then decide what you can live with.I don't plan to make the rest of this page a grand course on SEO. For the moment, it will serve as a placeholder for SEO resources I come across.
The Very Best SEO Tutorials Ever
Very best... Yeah, yeah... :)SEO success in 12 months. A great primer, I think. But what would I know?
SEO for the Big Threes. Another primer.
Top 16 SEO tips. Good tutorial.
Page Rank Checker and Other Top 3 SEO Tools
Is someone stealing your content? That can wreck your Google rankings. Check Copyscape.To check a page's official page rank, you can install the Google toolbar. Or you can use a number of websites, such as this Page Rank checker.
To check a pages's SERP, I like the SERP checker on SEO Analytic. If you don't want to register, you can use this SERP checking service.
Ranks NL has some great SEO tools to check your keyword density.
Building Backlinks
Some people recommend posting press releases from high-PR PR sites. Here's a list of the best PR sites for SEO.If you enjoy writing, you can write articles. But why spend your precious writing juice creating content for a site other than your own? Perhaps this approach is best if you can hire writers who can deliver decent (not stellar) articles for cheap. Can you smell the curry yet? Here's a list of article websites with a high page rank.
Social Media
Social media buttons slow down your page, so you could say that they are negative from an SEO standpoint.However, they help build traffic.
I played with various configurations of AddThis for about a year. I found that it brought me one share per 500 visitors. At the moment, I am experimenting with Facebook and Retweet buttons. I saw a cool implementation of those on Mashable.
Top SEO Forums
WebmasterWorldSEO Chat
Building Traffic Without the Top 5 SEO Tricks
Google is not the only way to get traffic. Some people swear by Yahoo Answers: by establishing yourself as an expert, you draw traffic to your site. Some even try to automatically receive questions they can answer by using software such as Answer Sniper or Answer Eye.From the reviews I've read, both of these programs are fairly buggy. There's a free version of AnswerEye around that you'll find if you Google answereye.zip. I have not tried it. If you are curious about these kinds of tools, you can search the Black Hat SEO forum at www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo.
By the way, why didn't I link to Answer Sniper and the above forum directly? It would be poor SEO as these sites are (i) probably located in bad web neighbourhoods, (ii) unrelated to the keywords this page is optimized for, the top three SEO tips. Another bad thing about SEO: you can't build your links the way you really want, because links have to be relevant to your keywords.
More Top 3 SEO Tips
Briefly, other topics.Are articles a top 3 SEO tip? Some people swear that submitting articles to article directories will help your Google rankings. My experience is the opposite. I submitted an article to the top two article submission machines. Initially, my SERP rose. Then the site that the article was linking to got picked up by a million useless link farms. The site's ranking promptly tumbled way below anywhere it had ever been. Not one of my top 5 SEO tricks.
What about PR Newswire for SEO? I have read that submitting a national press release with PR Newswire will have good effects on Google. I have not yet tried that, though I plan to do so soon for a site I help with that has a budget. As of September 2009, it costs $195 to become a "member" or PR Newswire. You have to be a member to send a press release. Once you're a member, you are free to send as many national press releases (called US1 releases) as you want, for $680 a shot. I don't think this will become one of my top 3 SEO tips.
Smiles,
Andy
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