Think For Yourself

Quite often I meet people in the SEO industry who blindly follow what a certain ‘guru’ says, or believe everything that Google says to be gospel.

But as I told you earlier – there is no one way of doing SEO, and there definitely is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. It is all about what tactic is most effective in taking you to the top of the SERPs, and that is all that you should be really focused on.

Blind faith in Google’s idea of SEO, or some guru’s idea of SEO, is usually a bad idea. Listen to all sides of the argument, see the results for yourself and if possible, carry out your own experiments if you have to.

One such example involves paid links. Google has explicitly said that paid links for ranking purposes are not acceptable and will be penalized, where as paid links for traffic purposes are fine. This has caused a lot of debates in the SEO industry on whether paid links are right or wrong vis-à-vis.

Don’t be a slave to Google or what other people tell you about SEO – there is no set pattern on doing SEO and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ either.

The most successful SEOs I know of publicly question some of Google’s policies and ‘preaching’ when it comes to Search Marketing. That’s not to say that you should go against Google, but that you should keep an open mind and focus on what works and what is guaranteed to be successful in the long run.

Everything else, whether told to you by Google or the SEO gods or me, is irrelevant. Stay on top of the ball as far as developments in the SEO world are concerned; focus on what works, and what your experience tells you works.

Create A System

Having a ‘system’ to accomplish goals is a natural progression for anyone that has to do one type of project more than once. Web designers who put together 10-20 sites every year have a system, programmers working on large projects swear by their ‘system’ of doing things, and so on.

If you do not already, it is time to think of SEO in terms of developing an effective system of activities and processes that will help you bring in targeted traffic to your website from the search engines.

A system is only effective if it can help you achieve your targets each time you do a similar project.

And as I said earlier, makes sure that continue doing that which is most effective in the long run, not what is easy or cheap to do, or what saves time, or what the search engines tell you to do.

Do what works now, and what will work in the future.

Prioritize Your Work

Once you have a basic system to do your SEO activities, you will find it much easier to prioritize which task gets done first.

In SEO, as in real life, there are some key activities that take less time and effort but have a large impact on search engine rankings. Remember the 80-20 rule (the Pareto principle) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_
principle) ? It works quite well in SEO, thank you very much, and it certainly makes life easier for us SEOs.

The most important SEO tasks will take roughly 15-25% of your time, and will yield 70-85% of the benefits associated with search marketing. For example:

• Optimizing your blog’s Title tags takes less than 2 minutes, but it has a major impact on how your web
pages are ranked in SEs.
• Paying for (and submitting) a directory listing in Yahoo takes 5 minutes, but that link is more valuable
than submitting to 100 free directories that have been spammed to death.

Make it a habit to ask yourself the importance of any SEO task before you do it – it will help you save time as
well as refocus you on the more important things in SEO.

Rankings Are NOT Everything!

The hard truth about search engine marketing is that sheer traffic (achieved from page 1 or #1 rankings) does
little good to you if you have no way to use it.

If you have set specific goals for your website, you will also have a clear idea of what audience you are targeting and what exactly they are supposed to do when they arrive at your website.

This could be asking for signups, selling them a product or service, getting them to click on ads, getting RSS
subscriptions, etc.

And if your website is not doing this part of its job properly, those rankings and all that traffic will be wasted.

Bottom line – Search Engine Optimization is great when it works well, but you also need to know how to make best use of that traffic.