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The alchemy of SEO magic

Posted by admin on February 20, 2007 in SEO Theory

Arthur C. Clark coined the expression “any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic”. Las Vegas entertainers, however, know that any quick movement of the hand — combined with a bit of tacit redirection from the illusionist’s eyes — also seems like magic.

Search engine optimization seems like magic because you mix a few ingredients together, set them in a pot to boil, and watch for portents that something wonderful is about to happen.

If you combine all the personal and work-related keywords for which I am placing content these days, I am managing between 1,000 and 2,000 SEO campaigns. If I had to hang my hat on a number, I would say that 1,500 SEO campaigns is about as good as any. So I officially claim to be managing about 1,500 SEO campaigns today.

Any SEO campaign, regardless of how “competitive” it may be, begins with keyword research. Even people who don’t know the first thing about search engine optimization understand they want their pages to show up for certain keywords. And this is where SEO magic begins.

Beginners and amateurs don’t really understand that most people use different keywords than those usually chosen by Webmasters. It’s a natural consequence of our unique experiences and influences: we each develop slightly different, very unique vocabularies and idioms throughout our lives. Most people learn to misuse words more easily than they learn to use them (especially in English — many SEOs, for example, don’t know how to use the pronoun “myself” correctly).

A professional search engine optimization specialist knows you have to look at what people are actually searching for to understand which keywords should be targeted for optimization. But people naturally assume they are always doing things according to “common sense”. There is really nothing like common sense, just the illusion that all reasonable people reach similar conclusions.

It may not seem like magic when you produce a list of alternative keywords the client hasn’t suggested, but if you prove those keywords produce traffic, it’s the kind of flourish a magician can use to build credibility. You whip out the viable keywords the way the magician pulls a dove out of his hat. His real trick is to make the audience think he’ll chop the dove into pieces and then reassemble it.

After you do your keyword research, you need to build your content. I can produce an optimized Web page on any topic in about 30 minutes, give or take. It won’t look very nice, but if I have to have an attractive Web page I work with a designer and make sure my copy is empashized the way it needs to be.

Content may look ordinary or glitzy, but once it’s put up on the Web the client starts watching the clock. Somehow, that content is supposed to magically attract visitors like fresh meat attracts flies. We know it doesn’t work that way, but when your optimized copy is indexed it should magically move up through the search results in a period of about 2-3 weeks.

Of course, Web copy doesn’t gain position in a vaccuum. You need a handful of links to ensure the page is crawled. Maybe another handful of links will ensure the page has enough trust to actually rank. A typical Web page should need no more than 10 inbound links to be crawled, indexed, and ranked for moderately competitive expressions.

That’s where we do our magic. Although you may be telling yourself, “Yeah, you need quality links if you’re only relying on 10″, the truth is that the optimized copy probably has little competition. Most SEOs don’t know how to fully optimize Web copy. Of the 10-20% who do know how to do it right, most appear to no longer spend much time with on-page optimization.

There are a lot of commercially viable queries out there for which there is relativey little relevant content. Depending on the query, search engines may throw several million raw hits into the mix. You should know by the time you pull up the second page of results whether anyone is really optimizing for the query.

Remember the three rules of search engine optimization: experiment, evaluate, adjust.

There is no formula of Web copy keyword density or inbound links ratio that works for all queries. Most queries don’t need much optimization. Less than 25% of all commercial queries are competitive enough that you should really have to go after links. Most links don’t count anyway, so you can actually use links as a flourish.

That is, you can set your value-passing links in place at first and then mask them with non-value passing links. Will other SEOs be fooled? The vast majority usually fall for the deception because they are gullible enough to believe that you must use links to achieve high rankings in search results. Remember that they are probably doing “backlink competitive analysis” to see where your SEO’d pages get their link juice.

If you’re concerned that a competitive SEO may track down your value-passing links and either get links on those pages or similar links, then you can use the fine art of misdirection to show your competitor worthless links. But by “worthless” I don’t mean links from obviously spammy sites. You can easily get worthless links through reciprocation, link brokers, and other easy-link sources. But that isn’t what I mean.

A link may be worthless for any number of reasons. The true art is to set up non-value passing links on static HTML pages without using rel=’nofollow’ or Javascript or some other method where the Webmaster devalues links. This kind of propaganda requires a bit of thought and some experience.

You know: experiment, evaluate, adjust.

Other elements of illusion that SEOs can practice include inserting the wrong keywords into your keywords meta tag, including one or more fluff keywords in titles and headers, using fluff keywords in internal navigation.

SEO magic is not simply the art of achieving great results faster than other people expect. It’s also the art of covering your tracks by making people believe you did one thing while actually doing another.

Does that sound familiar? Does it sound like it may violate a search engine’s Webmaster guidelines? It should sound familiar, but that’s not what I’m proposing. Stage illusion is geared toward allowing people’s imaginations to lead them to the wrong conclusions.

You want to be honest with the visitors to your site while allowing competitive SEOs to trust their misguided assumptions and values. After all, most SEOs learn their techniques from popular Web forums and blogs. They have been taught that you have to rank on the basis of links, that Toolbar PageRank means something, and that you can engage in effective competitive analysis — particularly by looking at backlinks.

When you manage 1,500 SEO campaigns, you don’t have time to engage in that kind of ridiculous backwater superstitious search optimization. You have to achieve results quickly, efficiently, and for the long-term.

Because they adhere to flawed assumptions to begin with, the majority of SEOs are stuck in the equivalent of the Stone Age. You can adopt much more advanced, robust methodologies if you free yourself from the primitive nonsense that most SEOs believe.

And as everyone knows, any sufficiently advanced methodology seems like magic.