The Hokie Pokie: What SEO Is All About

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 7 of October , 2007 at 8:19 am

I loved this article by Jill Whalen at Search Engine Land:

Sometimes I think SEOs have lost the plot. Not all SEOs, mind you, but many, especially the newbies. It’s like they don’t understand the reason for doing the SEO things that they know they need to do. I think many walk around with a checklist of SEO-type duties and set off to do them, yet they have no clue as to why.

Yes, I often feel that way about my colleagues as well.

But without knowing the ultimate reason for doing the things they do, they don’t get it done correctly. You don’t create titles for titles’ sake. You don’t get links for links’ sake. Everything that we teach people to do in SEO has a purpose, and that purpose is not to make the search engines think our site is better than it is. The purpose is to actually make the site better than it is.

Amen, sister!

This is often forgotten by the SEO community. A lot of the new SEOs entering the market seem to think that if they just put that keyword in the right place then all will be fine. Make this word a link and Google will love me. It’s really more about what you shouldn’t do than what you should. I mean, there is a lot of room for maneuver in the SEO realm and sometimes there is no right answer; just a bunch of wrong ones. SEO is about being creative and many times you can be effective just with the content on your page.

I can just see the Google engineers now: “So how about we make the last word on the page be the most important factor in determining the relevancy of the page. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

Everyone would soon be placing keyword phrases as the last words on their page. Except they would be doing it only because somebody told them to. Even though it defied all reason as to why it should boost rankings. The average SEO wouldn’t have the wherewithal to test it to know for sure that it worked. They would simply do it because others said it worked. Certainly, if it actually were a factor then it would help to boost rankings, and more and more people would jump on the bandwagon, because they would assume that those words at the end of the page were the crowning glory.

Is this the way you see SEO? “If I can just jump through enough hoops then I’ll be the SEO king.”

Keyword in title tag, h2 and h3 tags all over the place, bold text here, italics there, bulleted list, anchor text (oh, I need that three times - once for all three of my key phrases) …

Does that sound like you? If so, then you might be need to take a step back and ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish with your website because if your goal is to please Google then you may be doing it for the wrong reason.

Of course, Google engineers would never have that conversation, nor would they ever make the last words on the page a huge factor in determining relevancy. Why? Because it doesn’t make any sense. Relevancy formulas are not based on whims (although it’s sometimes hard to tell when looking at Yahoo results!). Algorithms are determined by what the average person who knows nothing about SEO would naturally do on their website when putting it together.

This is the essence of SEO. What comes naturally?

As an SEO, my job is not to second guess Google, but to second guess you. Customers often come to me with a little background knowledge about what makes good SEO. They don’t come because they want someone who knows more than they do; they come because they haven’t achieved the rankings that they expect based on what they have learned and they think that I, as an SEO professional, can work some kind of miracle for them. Let’s be honest. There are no miracles in SEO. No accidents. Just clear, honest thinking; or, in some cases, muddy thinking that goes astray.

SEO was not invented. It was not some development in a vacuum. It was a natural migration for the entire global Internet community based on natural human behavior. That’s why semantic search is such a popular topic today. There are so many people trying to game the system that real SEO must take place in a dance hall. Instead of working with your partner, the SEO has to push his partner to follow him. That’s not real dancing.

SEO is all about using certain tools that are available to increase your chances of getting ranked for your key terms. There are no guarantees. Many, many factors, some of them controllable, influence the rankings. Things like what your competitors are doing. And you can’t control that. You can study it. You can imitate it. You can mock it and write about it on your blog, but your competitors control their site and you control yours. Now let’s get down to the brass tacks of SEO.

Joe doesn’t have to know SEO to do a great job with his harmonica cleaning. Nor should he have to. In fact, if he did know SEO (or thought he did), he might go messing up a good thing.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Many website owners might actually get better results without SEO. We study and learn SEO so we can make our websites better, not so we can fool the search engines into thinking we are worthy of their attention. And that’s where many site owners go wrong. They’re in it for the wrong reasons.

It’s not a bad thing to think about SEO when designing your site. In fact, it’s a great thing. But only if you use your brain and your common sense at the same time. Always think about the reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing. When you do that, you’ll find it much easier to know exactly what to put on your site and where to put it.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. My job is not to show you some magic formula that will work in every situation. My job is to help you do your job better. And when we both do our jobs well, good SEO takes place naturally.

                      Category: SEO