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Decoding SEO

July 15th, 2009 by Romy Misra in Search Engine Optimization

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Sniffing out the next Google algorithm

Sniffing out the next Google algorithm

It’s been my first week of work (already!) and I am still learning the ropes of web analytics. Here are my first words of wisdom:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another fancy way of saying you are trying to beat Google. Yes, that’s what everyone tries to do constantly: Guess what the Google algorithm is.
2. There is no real expert out there, some people just make better guesses and use a lot of jargon.
3. All SEO self declared experts are self educated. To learn SEO all you have to do is stop being lazy and read a lot.
4. Google’s problem: Trying to beat all these people and get people the best content irrespective of those people who do SEO magic and get their site structure right.
5. Granted the people at Google are smarter than us, but they have a lot of people to try and beat with a search tool that crawls over pages. Can’t be easy work, although we make it easy for them by constantly telling them what we are doing.

Would love to hear your take on SEO as well.

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4 Responses

  1. Matt
    July 15th, 2009 at 3:38 pm

    SEO is not some mystical black box…if you are educated on SEO and take a methodical approach you can drive real results. I would say there are “experts”….I’ve worked with several who have proven results through ‘white glove’ methodologies. If you are “trying to beat Google” you are by definition not optimizing for search :-)

  2. Ryan Kelly
    July 15th, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    I like to equate SEO to 3 main elements: popularity, relevancy and site structure. If you have a static site you haven’t touched in two years, or a blog you update once a month, chances are you won’t be in the top search results.

    If you page is not relevant, or you have spammy links pointing to you because you bought them from somewhere, chances are you are not going to be in the top search results.

    And if your site’s plumbing and architecture is hindering the crawlers from finding what you have, again, you likely will not be showing up in the top listings.

    This is the basic methodology of how our Website Analyzer works in trying to uncover some of the more common mistakes made when optimizing for search engines.

  3. Romy Misra
    July 16th, 2009 at 11:28 am

    Matt, thanks for your comment.

    SEO does involve quite a bit of guesswork. There are some basic we can get right like the site structure( lack of flash content, sitemaps, headings etc) but the exact combination of what works for a site does involve guesswork and intuition.

    We have only past results to validate what we do, and what we know and do changes if Google does an algorithm change. Which is why there is no true expert :)

    PS: Thanks Vid!

  4. dropship companies
    August 17th, 2009 at 10:03 pm

    Good ideas there. Congrats on getting linked from ProBlogger! Keep up the good work.

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