Comments on: Basic SEO Theory

By: Victor Turcin

Victor Turcin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:50:21 +0000

thanks for your advice on customizing content of the website. I hope to have good SE stats following this.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:03:48 +0000

Great article,really informative, thanks for sharing.

By: Mergen, WebGuru Co Ltd

Mergen, WebGuru Co Ltd — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:47:33 +0000

@Ryan I agree with your post about the wide gap between many people’s expectation of SEO results and their willingness to put in the effort or to pay for the effort. This is especially true in Mongolia where many businesses do not really have the money or the need to spend the money to rank higher for certain search results. Furthermore, they don’t really understand why they should rank higher in search results. They often get stuck on wanting to “be the 1st in Google” rather than increasing the number of unique visits by potential clients or business partners.

For us, it’s really been all about just explaining what we can and can’t do as well as explaining how SEO and internet marketing works in general.

BTW, do you find that getting paid for service easier or more difficult in China? I think it is typically much easier to sign service contracts that are decently profitable in US (adjusted for expenses) than in Mongolia or Asia in general. What are your thoughts?

Thanks for the SEOSimple. It’s a neat little product. We use it quite often.

Cheers!
Mergen from Mongolia

By: henrylow

henrylow — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:40:18 +0000

Affiliate Marketing is a performance based sales technique used by companies to expand their reach into the internet at low costs. This commission based program allows affiliate marketers to place ads on their websites or other advertising efforts such as email distribution in exchange for payment of a small commission when a sale results.

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By: Mobile Web Design

Mobile Web Design — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:02:50 +0000

The best search engines tend to match the values of people due to the fact that a search engine is as good as the results it provides per the user. I think the focus on what organic is all about makes this a refreshing article.

By: nikhil

nikhil — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:22:27 +0000

.This is a great post. I just had one of the ‘Doh!’ moments and ran back to correct my own site before publishing my comment. You see my own comment form did not match what I’m about to advise. I get less comments than you, so never noticed any problem. I’ve changed it now anyway so here goes. IT Provider

By: seochampion

seochampion — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:32:19 +0000

Hello. Your content excellent! Thanks for your wise words.

By: Aditya

Aditya — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:56:19 +0000

Perfect Article…

By: Roger

Roger — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:56:40 +0000

All good points and a good post. I agree that meta data alone isnt going to get you rankings but a REAL SEO solution includes carefully crafted content, link baiting, effective use of title tags and Hx tags.

You are right the SEO community is plagued with charlatans but there are lots of legit SEO consultants too I guess is my point.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:31:43 +0000

@Roger: I respectfully disagree. I think this page would rank nearly the same with or without those two meta tags — the keyword tag is near definitely 100% useless. As for the description tag… I concede, it’s not dead, but as you said it isn’t what it once was, and it’s not moving towards being more relevant in search algorithms, but less.

The point of this post was to dispel some thoughts a number of my clients have about the magic of SEO and how many people with only a buzzword knowledge of the industry feel that all it takes to make their SERP ranking jump from 100 to 1 is the perfectly inserted combination of keywords in a meta tag. It’s simply not true. Not even close.

As for why those tags are on this page, and all pages on this blog – it’s because I spent 2 minutes installing the rather awesome All-in-One SEO plugin for WordPress which, among a number of other great features, automatically generates both of those meta tags based on the content of the page. I didn’t spend even a moment of time writing them nor adding them to the source. Which is about the amount of effort I think they’re worth.

I believe if you want a better optimized page, you will get more bang for your time if you spend it carefully crafting your content and titles, or coming up with ways to attract linkbacks. This does assume that you have a well-created Web page to begin with. Namely something CMS-based that has been semantically designed with an eye on SEO (proper Hx tags, use of lists, proper HTML, etc.)