Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization

isharq writes to tell us that SEOmoz has an interesting writeup regarding search engine optimization. The article has quite a bit of info and is geared so that even the inexperienced used can learn the basics of search engine optimization. From the article: "It is our goal to improve your ability to drive search traffic to your site and debunk major myths about SEO. We share this knowledge to help businesses, government, educational and non-profit organizations benefit from being listed in the major search engines."

Comments

Re:fundamental

[SpecBear]

Absolutely correct.

You don't have to optimize if you're relevant, and if you're not relevant then you're fighting a losing battle. Google employs thousands of people and spends assloads of money to make sure the search engine continues to give good results. Google wants to be the top choice for search, and to do that they need to make sure that when somebody searches for "widget," they get sites most relevant to "widget."

If you've got the spiffiest widget site on the net, then you don't have to optimize for Google because Google is optimizing for you. And they're better at it than you are. It's their business to make sure people get to your site when they're looking for info on widgets.

If your widget site sucks and you manage to optimize your page to get a higher search ranking, then people are going to be annoyed when they search for widgets and your crappy site comes up. Google will see this as a bug in the search engine, and eventually it'll be fixed. Now you're working against Google's dev team. Good luck with that.

Re:SEO is BSEO

[flood6]

Anybody can rank #1 in Google for "purple flying widgets", but it doesn't matter because no one searches for that. Getting clients to rank well for things like "home stereo" or "linux webhost" is where the challenge is; hardly "bullshit".

I didn't RTFA, but from the comments it sounds like I've read hundreds like it and it's preaching the "content is king" dogma. And that's pretty true. All you have to do is build a good site that people want to visit and you're halfway there. Unfortunately people just try to build a site with the "coolest" flash and spend time and money on the latest SE spam techniques.

So I agree with rakerman in that building a site on a topic you enjoy with interesting content is half the battle. You keep up with it, update it, and people will naturally link to it (links being the other half).

SEO actually seems to be getting easier in a sense. The complicated cloaking and doorway pages are much less effective on the major keyphrases than they used to be. You'll still see plenty of scrapper sites rank high in the major SEs, but the trend is against them.