In spite of all the advice, the strategic discussions and the conference talks, we Internet marketers are still algorithmic thinkers. That’s obvious when you think of SEO.
Even when we talk about content, we’re algorithmic thinkers. Ask yourself: How many times has a client asked you, “How much content do we need?” How often do you still hear “How unique does this page need to be?”
That’s 100% algorithmic thinking: Produce a certain amount of content, move up a certain number of spaces.
But you and I know it’s complete bullshit.
I’m not suggesting you ignore the algorithm. You should definitely chase it. Understanding a little bit about what goes on in Google’s pointy little head helps. But it’s not enough.
A tale of SEO woe that makes you go "whoa"
I have this friend.
He ranked #10 for "flibbergibbet." He wanted to rank #1.
He compared his site to the #1 site and realized the #1 site had five hundred blog posts.
“That site has five hundred blog posts,” he said, “I must have more.”
So he hired a few writers and cranked out five thousand blogs posts that melted Microsoft Word’s grammar check. He didn’t move up in the rankings. I’m shocked.
“That guy’s spamming,” he decided, “I’ll just report him to Google and hope for the best.”
What happened? Why didn’t adding five thousand blog posts work?
It’s pretty obvious: My, uh, friend added nothing but crap content to a site that was already outranked. Bulk is no longer a ranking tactic. Google’s very aware of that tactic. Lots of smart engineers have put time into updates like Panda to compensate.
He started like this:
And ended up like this:
Alright, yeah, I was Mr. Flood The Site With Content, way back in 2003. Don’t judge me, whippersnappers.
Reality’s never that obvious. You’re scratching and clawing to move up two spots, you’ve got an overtasked IT team pushing back on changes, and you've got a boss who needs to know the implications of every recommendation.
Why fix duplication if rel=canonical can address it? Fixing duplication will take more time and cost more money. It’s easier to paste in one line of code. You and I know it’s better to fix the duplication. But it’s a hard sell.
Why deal with 302 versus 404 response codes and home page redirection? The basic user experience remains the same. Again, we just know that a server should return one home page without any redirects and that it should send a ‘not found’ 404 response if a page is missing. If it’s going to take 3 developer hours to reconfigure the server, though, how do we justify it? There’s no flashing sign reading “Your site has a problem!”
Why change this thing and not that thing?
At the same time, our boss/client sees that the site above theirs has five hundred blog posts and thousands of links from sites selling correspondence MBAs. So they want five thousand blog posts and cheap links as quickly as possible.
Cue crazy music.
SEO lacks clarity
SEO is, in some ways, for the insane. It’s an absurd collection of technical tweaks, content thinking, link building and other little tactics that may or may not work. A novice gets exposed to one piece of crappy information after another, with an occasional bit of useful stuff mixed in. They create sites that repel search engines and piss off users. They get more awful advice. The cycle repeats. Every time it does, best practices get more muddled.
SEO lacks clarity. We can’t easily weigh the value of one change or tactic over another. But we can look at our changes and tactics in context. When we examine the potential of several changes or tactics before we flip the switch, we get a closer balance between algorithm-thinking and actual strategy.
Distance from perfect brings clarity to tactics and strategy
At some point you have to turn that knowledge into practice. You have to take action based on recommendations, your knowledge of SEO, and business considerations.
That’s hard when we can’t even agree on subdomains vs. subfolders.
I know subfolders work better. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Let the flaming comments commence.
To get clarity, take a deep breath and ask yourself:
“All other things being equal, will this change, tactic, or strategy move my site closer to perfect than my competitors?”
Breaking it down:
"Change, tactic, or strategy"
A change takes an existing component or policy and makes it something else. Replatforming is a massive change. Adding a new page is a smaller one. Adding ALT attributes to your images is another example. Changing the way your shopping cart works is yet another.
A tactic is a specific, executable practice. In SEO, that might be fixing broken links, optimizing ALT attributes, optimizing title tags or producing a specific piece of content.
A strategy is a broader decision that’ll cause change or drive tactics. A long-term content policy is the easiest example. Shifting away from asynchronous content and moving to server-generated content is another example.
"Perfect"
No one knows exactly what Google considers "perfect," and "perfect" can't really exist, but you can bet a perfect web page/site would have all of the following:
- Completely visible content that’s perfectly relevant to the audience and query
- A flawless user experience
- Instant load time
- Zero duplicate content
- Every page easily indexed and classified
- No mistakes, broken links, redirects or anything else generally yucky
- Zero reported problems or suggestions in each search engines’ webmaster tools, sorry, "Search Consoles"
- Complete authority through immaculate, organically-generated links
These 8 categories (and any of the other bazillion that probably exist) give you a way to break down "perfect" and help you focus on what’s really going to move you forward. These different areas may involve different facets of your organization.
Your IT team can work on load time and creating an error-free front- and back-end. Link building requires the time and effort of content and outreach teams.
Tactics for relevant, visible content and current best practices in UX are going to be more involved, requiring research and real study of your audience.
What you need and what resources you have are going to impact which tactics are most realistic for you.
But there’s a basic rule: If a website would make Googlebot swoon and present zero obstacles to users, it’s close to perfect.
"All other things being equal"
Assume every competing website is optimized exactly as well as yours.
Now ask: Will this [tactic, change or strategy] move you closer to perfect?
That’s the "all other things being equal" rule. And it’s an incredibly powerful rubric for evaluating potential changes before you act. Pretend you’re in a tie with your competitors. Will this one thing be the tiebreaker? Will it put you ahead? Or will it cause you to fall behind?
"Closer to perfect than my competitors"
Perfect is great, but unattainable. What you really need is to be just a little perfect-er.
Chasing perfect can be dangerous. Perfect is the enemy of the good (I love that quote. Hated Voltaire. But I love that quote). If you wait for the opportunity/resources to reach perfection, you’ll never do anything. And the only way to reduce distance from perfect is to execute.
Instead of aiming for pure perfection, aim for more perfect than your competitors. Beat them feature-by-feature, tactic-by-tactic. Implement strategy that supports long-term superiority.
Don’t slack off. But set priorities and measure your effort. If fixing server response codes will take one hour and fixing duplication will take ten, fix the response codes first. Both move you closer to perfect. Fixing response codes may not move the needle as much, but it’s a lot easier to do. Then move on to fixing duplicates.
Do the 60% that gets you a 90% improvement. Then move on to the next thing and do it again. When you’re done, get to work on that last 40%. Repeat as necessary.
Take advantage of quick wins. That gives you more time to focus on your bigger solutions.
Sites that are "fine" are pretty far from perfect
Google has lots of tweaks, tools and workarounds to help us mitigate sub-optimal sites:
- Rel=canonical lets us guide Google past duplicate content rather than fix it
- HTML snapshots let us reveal content that’s delivered using asynchronous content and JavaScript frameworks
- We can use rel=next and prev to guide search bots through outrageously long pagination tunnels
- And we can use rel=nofollow to hide spammy links and banners
Easy, right? All of these solutions may reduce distance from perfect (the search engines don’t guarantee it). But they don’t reduce it as much as fixing the problems.
The next time you set up rel=canonical, ask yourself:
“All other things being equal, will using rel=canonical to make up for duplication move my site closer to perfect than my competitors?”
Answer: Not if they’re using rel=canonical, too. You’re both using imperfect solutions that force search engines to crawl every page of your site, duplicates included. If you want to pass them on your way to perfect, you need to fix the duplicate content.
When you use Angular.js to deliver regular content pages, ask yourself:
“All other things being equal, will using HTML snapshots instead of actual, visible content move my site closer to perfect than my competitors?”
Answer: No. Just no. Not in your wildest, code-addled dreams. If I’m Google, which site will I prefer? The one that renders for me the same way it renders for users? Or the one that has to deliver two separate versions of every page?
When you spill banner ads all over your site, ask yourself…
You get the idea. Nofollow is better than follow, but banner pollution is still pretty dang far from perfect.
Mitigating SEO issues with search engine-specific tools is "fine." But it’s far, far from perfect. If search engines are forced to choose, they’ll favor the site that just works.
Not just SEO
By the way, distance from perfect absolutely applies to other channels.
I’m focusing on SEO, but think of other Internet marketing disciplines. I hear stuff like “How fast should my site be?” (Faster than it is right now.) Or “I’ve heard you shouldn’t have any content below the fold.” (Maybe in 2001.) Or “I need background video on my home page!” (Why? Do you have a reason?) Or, my favorite: “What’s a good bounce rate?” (Zero is pretty awesome.)
And Internet marketing venues are working to measure distance from perfect. Pay-per-click marketing has the quality score: A codified financial reward applied for seeking distance from perfect in as many elements as possible of your advertising program.
Social media venues are aggressively building their own forms of graphing, scoring and ranking systems designed to separate the good from the bad.
Really, all marketing includes some measure of distance from perfect. But no channel is more influenced by it than SEO. Instead of arguing one rule at a time, ask yourself and your boss or client: Will this move us closer to perfect?
Hell, you might even please a customer or two.
One last note for all of the SEOs in the crowd. Before you start pointing out edge cases, consider this: We spend our days combing Google for embarrassing rankings issues. Every now and then, we find one, point, and start yelling “SEE! SEE!!!! THE GOOGLES MADE MISTAKES!!!!” Google’s got lots of issues. Screwing up the rankings isn’t one of them.
Ian, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with you here (yes, I get the overall point to keep improving everything):
I’m not suggesting you ignore the algorithm. You should definitely chase it.
Each passing month, I think less and less about Google's algorithm directly. Why? Google is an algorithm that wants to think like a human being -- and it's getting better at doing that every day. If you want to rank highly in Google, think more about people and less about the algorithm -- the rankings will come as a by-product.
You want to rank first in Google for "widget software"? Be the first company that people think about when they think of "widget software." And that comes down to the product side -- actually being the best widget software out there. It comes down to doing real marketing and brand building and publicity. It comes down to getting people to talk about you (online) on social media channels and in Gmail and in communities and forums and all of the stuff that Google (usually) reads. It comes down to creating marketing collateral that your audience will love. The rankings will just come as a by-product of doing all that.
Of course, you need to the all of the technical and on-page SEO before all of that. But everything else is just a function of marketing, PR, advertising, and communications -- and doing them well. For my department, I'd hire a PR genius over an "off-page SEO" any day.
You want to avoid a Penguin penalty? Simple -- don't build or even think about links at all. (The best links are just by-products of doing good marketing and PR -- do that by getting people to talk about you naturally.) You want to avoid a Panda penalty? Simple -- don't do any BS with your website content. Very little that changes in Google's algorithm interests me anymore -- if we just do real marketing and stop chasing algorithms, we'll be better off in the long term.
As I often summarize: Build, promote, and publicize a website that delights its target audience. Build a brand, and the rest will fall into place. People need to stop thinking about tricks, hacks, and algorithms in attempts to get high rankings that their brands do not deserve.
Hi Samuel - you're completely correct.
My 'chasing the algorithm' comment was a nod to the idea that understanding how search engines work is important. But the whole idea behind Distance from Perfect is to base tactical decisions on overall site quality and marketing intelligence than the algorithm.
Totally agree with both of you on this, Ian is right about understanding the Algos and how SE work but i only think about the Pandas and Penguins now when the refreshes happen to see if any changes i made actually helped. I find thinking Customer first is the best way to go.
Here's a concrete example just to demonstrate.
I'm in Israel. If you Google "american bar tel aviv," then one certain chain called "Mike's Place" dominates the SERP (English site). Why? Because they have built their brand so much that it is the bar that almost all American tourists visit in Tel Aviv. It's a tourist bar. The bar gives people a great experience so that people talk about them online and refer people and engage with them on social media and so on.
If you look at their on-page stuff, they seemingly aren't even targeting that phrase or any other certain specific keywords. I know some of the owners (but have not done any professional work for them), and they aren't doing anything to do "SEO" or linkbuilding or anything.
They also rank first for "sports bar tel aviv" (in English) because they're known as the place to go to watch sporting events from American, English, Australian, and other English-speaking countries.
They are building a brand among their target audience, and Google picks up on that naturally.
I'm going to jump in and disagree slightly with this. Much of the time, Google does "naturally figure out" which brand/site to associate with a set of keywords because it's the "go-to" place everyone thinks of. However... there's 3 ways this won't work out:
A) You do technical stuff wrong - dup content, thin pages, poor architecture, poor/no KW targeting, UX issues, etc.
B) You're in a sector (as many are) that doesn't passively attract the needed signals for Google to recognize your prominence - in these cases, you need to push to get the signals necessary to rank; user/usage data, links, shares, amplification, online WoM, press & PR, etc.
C) You ARE in a sector where the best/most useful/most well-known brands/products attract the needed signals, but you're not the leader or your competitors are actively pushing hard through their marketing to earn these signals. When you compete against other savvy SEOs/marketers, you'd better be leveraging pro-active marketing nudges and not just sitting back to focus on product. In so many sectors, over so many years, we've all seen the "best" product/company be overtaken by an inferior one with better marketing. My advice is to focus on both (product & marketing).
Hey Rand ... what do you mean by "pro-active marketing nudges"? Can you give some examples?
Sure!
Hope those are helpful examples - definitely not exhaustive, but maybe gives a sense.
"Picks up on that naturally"
To me, that's the algorithm. DFP is a good rubric for getting it in broad terms. But there are still factors examined by the search engines in there somewhere. So I always argue for understanding the algo without letting it control strategy.
Ian,
As I read your post it reminded me of two things:
It's like being in the gym and seeing the guy with the big arms and brick wall-thick chest: he must be doing it right, we seem to assume. In truth, these guys, like the websites we so blindly copy, are often being successful despite their habits, not because of them.
This is why, to my mind, we must foster a culture of experimentation and develop a tolerance for incremental success.
If we can better discern, as a team, what's likely to be successful over the long-term, we'll can bake experimentation into the culture and see continuous improvements over time. But that never happens if everyone unrealistically thinks the only worthwhile efforts are those that move the brand from page 2 to page 1. Some of the best changes are those that result in a consistent moving of the needle, getting you closer to that line of perfect each time.
RS
"Incremental success" is one of the best phrases I've heard in a long time. The guy with the six-pack abs didn't do that in a day. You need to make small steps and understand you don't know the whole story. Well said.
Ronell said it well, and just to add that incremental success doesn't always show up in YoY or MoM, but as SEOs we have to establish a strategy and be honest as possible as to when results might be available and what those results are. Setting SMART Goals is also important.
"We must foster a culture of experimentation and develop a tolerance for incremental success." Well said!
Too many people want all the success right now with no thought about what it would actually take to make that happen. Thus they look for any shortcut, or promise of a shortcut, they can find. Any growth they experience is rarely sustainable.
I wonder what will happen if everybody got the "perfect site." Your thoughts Ian Lurie?
I don't think we have to worry about it :)
OK, now a serious answer: Search engines become more and more precise about measuring 'perfect.' There's always one more thing. If all sites on the Internet started to approach perfect as measured by current factors, search engines would find another way to distinguish.
Ten years ago, you could rank by stuffing a few keywords here and there. "Perfect" had a pretty low bar. Now, your site's structure and UX matter, too. The search engines introduced new ways to measure perfect. As algorithms get more sophisticated, "perfect" becomes more complex.
I will agree +1 and disagree -1 which leaves me at 0. This is why you can not reach perfection. If you do A, B and C it does not guarantee everything will be perfect and you will reach your goals because it is hard to reach SEO perfection when you, your competition and Google is moving at different speeds and in different directions.
I am a big fan of making little improvements every day like cutting the back yard when its 110 outside and not raking up the mess.. At least the grass was cut and it was an improvement lol ...
Thank you Ian, I need to show this article to a few clients, the following thought came to me after I finished reading your article. Getting to 'perfect' is like continuously cutting something in half. At no point can you ever run out of something to cut, it just gets too small to be practical to cut with existing tools.
Keep on Cutting folks!
That's the best analogy I've read. You should write a post about it or something.
This is perhaps the sanest article I've ever read on SEO. Thank you!
That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
Ian,
Hats of for this blog, something unique and interesting. Well, I would be 99% agreed with you that the thing you considering is correct, but can everything be perfect?
If everything will be equal or perfect, then competition would be over. Let me give you one example, Client never get ready to give time and more money for making things perfect, they are just worrying about "We want to beat our competitor, do whatever they did". Sometimes it becomes very tough to explain them about the fact, in that case perfect word becomes formality for marketers and they only give result to their clients rather than perfection.
I hope, you got the point what exactly client looking for and I am trying to explain.
Thanks and keep posting such amazing blogs :)
.
Thanks Shubham! You're totally right.
"Perfect" is very theoretical. And search engines keep getting better at measuring sites' distance from it. That's the algorithm. It's very hard to explain the algorithm to clients, so they focus in on specific tactics they hear about, whether those tactics are correct or not.
Distance from Perfect changes the discussion. They can still think about beating competitors, but we can use DFP to push them towards meaningful improvement.
Yes correct, we can use DFP to push them and that's what i will do next time. Anyway, thanks and keep it up!
Give visitors the information they're looking for! This is SEO. Completely agree with Shubham. Keep sharing such a good knowledge.
Thanks
Hi Ian,
Great post like always. 8 categories you mentioned in "Perfect" section hold me for few minutes. Every one is struggling to achieve all those points. But the difference only exist on the 8th point to win the race(Perfect).
And you don't have to achieve every one. Just keep working towards them faster than your competitors.
Love the analogy and framework for looking at SEO "distance from perfect". Fantastic viewpoint to look at it from.
Thanks, Kurt!
Hey Ian,
I really like this one "Take advantage of quick wins. That gives you more time to focus on your bigger solutions." Being digital marketer, it's very much difficult to explain the importance of perfection to the clients/boss (who didn't aware or much educated about it) they actually don't know that how fixing prior things can make our other effort easy and eventually it will give them result what they are looking for. But they always bother for the 1st page ranking in a month or two even didn't allow us to make a single changes on the website. Just because other people doing this so why we can't?
They actually really need to understand the distance from perfect. It's very important to SEO's or clients to overcome from the trendy things if they want to survive their business. Just because other people are doing something to get the 1st page position in a month or two and they getting it too. But remember that it's not guaranteed that how long you will be there :)
I appreciate Ian to deliver this post and keep me remember that I am on my correct way actually :)
Interesting post Ian!
Do not seek perfection, because we know that is perfect for Google, though its 8 points seem very good to keep in mind to try to approach.
We need to focus on trying to be better than our competitors, as you indicated. This can be achieved with a hard and constant work.
Thank you for sharing this article with us.
Ian, great post. Very recently I've been having similar discussions with my IT team. They like to see things as simple as 1's and 0's, if I do this, then we should see this. I've tried to use your example of "if all thing equal" and it seems to help them understand a bit better. I've not heard or thought of DFP and I really like how you explain it. I put that on a post-it to put on my monitor to help me make better decisions on tactics/strategy. Thanks for the great post!
Incredible article Ian. At the end you mention that this doesn't only apply to SEO but to other channels too. I think it applies equally well to almost all aspects of running a business.
It reminds me of the story of Ben Hunt-Davis' decision to win an Olympic gold medal: Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
Well worth a read: Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
Love that concept. Thanks!
Great post! I've often wished I could get the error messages on sites that I worked on down to zero.
Well Ian, Nice article and i like and agree on some of your points. I am agree on your thinking behind writing this article. The simple formula for getting good ranking position in search engines is to not follow the crowd and prepare your own strategy. However competetor analysis can be helpful for some sort of website But its your own original idea that can keep you in ranking.
Seriously what a great and refreshing article. Not only is this helpful for clients and bosses, this was also a great reminder for myself. Sometimes we do get caught up in tweaking this and that to chase the algorithm. Every once in a while, you need to take a step back and make sure you're looking at the big picture. What is really going to push the needle and make your site better for the business and for the customer.
Thanks Ian.
Since change consists in "taking an existing component or policy and making it something else", would optimising not be a change rather than a tactic?
Example:
- Adding ALT attributes: tactic
- Optimising ALT attributes: change
Well ... adding ALT attributes is essentially a change, since you're putting something in that should technically be there in the first place - in essence you're changing the attribute from nothing to something.
When you're optimising ALT attributes though - yes, fair enough, you are changing them - but your focus is on improving them. So you'd decide that your attributes aren't optimised enough, evaluate them, come up with alternatives, and then implement the new tags, which is why I would see it as a tactic that forms part of your overall strategy.
The line between the two is a bit blurry, maybe, so perhaps I'm not explaining it clearly enough, but that's the way I see it.
I think that's a tough distinction to make. To clients, both are an effort that expends scarce resources. They don't always care whether it's a change or a tactic.
It's a good discussion for us to have in the industry, but for a client's purposes, they're the same thing.
The marketplace is distorted the moment it is represented whether by inference or causal interference. What information there is re any particular search is a result of algorithmic processes that in and of themselves are subjective constructs. Google, along with FB & AZ are all representations of data & for each primacy is paramount. Relevance is what they choose to make it.
Exactly why distance from perfect is the way to go. Don't argue about the algo. Just look and say "Is this better or not?"
I would amend to "Is this better or not & for how long?" As I'm not an SEO professional, the wearying chase is less fascinating for me. I labor in a well defined e-commerce niche where I am very familiar with the ebb & flow of serps for both my manufacturers and competitors. Interestingly enough as far as SEO is concerned, most are frozen in amber as they have not engaged in any major SEO effort as far as I can tell. I also have by far the most complete (i.e. unique) information re my products of any of my competitors and more complete than even my manufacturers as far as what they display on site. The Penguins & Pandas came & went with little or no change and then whatever it was called that focused on url matching hit, I was toast. The thin site broom swept me to the nether regions of 2nd and 3rd page serps while at the same time, pulling from the depths my oldest, in terms of site age and site architecture competitor who it so happens has a more generalized url...that's it, nothing more. Concurrent with this was the resurrection of AZ/eBay/big box results back to essentially what they were when I launched my site 8 years ago. All the social bookmarking, infographic twitterpating in the world, IMHO, changed nothing. I hear you when you advise not arguing...and this is not an argument as much as it is a simple declaration that as far as I'm concerned, Keyser Söze lives.
"A tactic is a specific, executable practice. In SEO, that might be fixing broken links, optimizing ALT attributes, optimizing title tags or producing a specific piece of content."
can u tell me waz tool that be usefull to find broken links my friend?? im a newbie on SEO..
ScreamingFrog is the way to go. Google Webmaster Tools, too.
I think the bottom line would be to stop gaming the system and just focus on creating fresh content and giving the best experience to your users. Gone are the days where more pages + more keywords = higher rankings".
Google is getting better at catching websites with crappy content and poor interface, and it wouldn't take that long before it acts and thinks like a regular internet user.
Ian Lurie,
Firstly, thanks for sharing a wonderful article about the myth of Google ranking.
In first paragraph You discussed about the quantity of number of posting as compared to quality, but I also believe that quality and error free content is beneficial, but Nowadays ranking is also depending on how much social sharing of that blog or that article.
I've gotten so fed up with what works and what doesn't work and beating the competition for rankings that I took a step back and started to learn about marketing. I know how to run a business I've had years of professional training and experience from a financial and SEO prospective. But I've never looked deeply into marketing procedures.
I've now moved onto strategy, having a goal and understanding how I'm going to get there and the time scale. I've nearly got my clients off of their obsession with keyword rankings - YAY - because when it comes down to it, it is all about making money and which channels drive those sales.
This strategy with my clients and their businesses is working far better for both of us now.
Perfect is a relative term and will depend on the criteria being used. I find that the biggest breakdown for small businesses is not just attracting targeted traffic to their site, but building relationships with visitors and prospects. Many entrepreneurs are weak in their relationship skills and this can be deadly for a business,
All business success depends on the ability to connect with people warmly, build rapport and make them feel comfortable so you can start to learn their needs, problems and challenges.
These are the doorways into the sales process. Without these skills and the confidence in making personal connections, all the SEO in the world will not generate a profit.
Fortunately, these relationship skills can be learned but it takes a recognition of their importance and a dedication to acquiring these skills.
Thank you Ian for your proposition to focus on strategy and from there developing tactics focused on what goals a site have and their audience / people.
Over round about 20 years I am doing websites and SEO, I have learned, that a good behaviour is, not to run after the latest changes of Google and take it more easy. Time is a good judgement of what function and what not. Do not over done a specific method,never mind, if Onpage or Offpage and you will be on a good walk.
Google is part of the arrival of Big Data, which scores your ever day life. So the algorithmics know perfectly what you are and what type of website and business you are running. This is real. If you want become big, you must become big in this world. The web / mobile sphere is only an extension of this world.
Take care and greetings from Hamburg, Germany.
Yours,
Thank you for this Nice sharing!!!
great article lan thank you
Yeah. Awesome. Well said, Ian.
Thanks Peter!
That’s hard when we can’t even agree on subdomains vs. subfolders. I am in the subfolder crowd.
Or “I need background video on my home page!” My favorite was "I need one of those skip intro pages"
I love using the wayback machine (1996) to look up websites and seeing the changes in SEO.
In the SEO world the only thing constant is change and change it does.
I guess if everyone had a perfect site we would need to resort to blackhat negative SEO ;) just kidding..
Peace
Funny :)
I think the point here is you have to allow for those differences of opinion . There are other things though that folks try to say are opinion, but really aren't: Duplicate content, for example.
Those are cases where I'm tempted to say "Just f---ing fix it."
I've done that a few times. It doesn't really work.
Actually, "SEO" isn't changing, as so many SEOs state. Rather, all of the old "chasing the algorithm" tactics are dying one by one as Google is getting better at emulating user behavior and thinking like a human being. That's why I say that we should largely stop thinking about the algorithm and think about people.
Agreed when SEO arrived on scene it was people emulating machines ie reverse engineering algo's. Now it is machines emulating humans.
And as a side note Robots "will" kill you/us. I have been saying that before it was trendy...!!
Amazing Article Ian.
But if i want build a website, Should we hire Company and staff to do everything, Right?
It all depends on your in-house talent. If you have a great team available to you at your company you can try to build it yourself. But I have to say, I sometimes hire out-of-house marketers. And I own a marketing agency! Sometimes you need a team that can look at things from the outside.
Yes Ian, They may see something which we can't see!
EXACTLY. And then eventually we figure it out. If we address it from the perspective of DFP, search engines are OK with it. And so on.
Yes, unique and informative content is the key for better ranking. I want to add one more point to that 8 categories which is "Social media sharing buttons".If you have made a great content but if people can't share it then you will not get more visits. Moreover, social media is also an important factor.
I'm agree with you in your 8 gold rules. If you mantain your website performing those rules it logical that your site have a good looking from search engines like Google. It's simply but at the same time sometimes it's not easy to do it!
Thank you! great article
I am totally in agreement, good article