June 2007

The relevant link myth

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 18, 2007 in Seo Myths

Relevance only counts in search engine results.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the search engine optimization community came to the misguided conclusion that relevance is important for links. Many SEO experts now routinely advise people to get only “relevant links from relevant pages”, and wherever possible those links should only come from pages that themselves [...]

Manage PageRank by managing link flow

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 15, 2007 in Link Theory, SEO Theory, Supplemental Pages

Do you understand what I mean by “link flow”? I see link flow problems on Web sites all the time, which is a bit ironic given that nearly every SEO blog and forum is telling you to go out and build links. You build links for anchor text and PageRank, you build links [...]

High Quality Links: How to make high quality links

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 14, 2007 in Link Theory, SEO Theory

Everyone wants to know how to get high quality links, but no one seems to be interested in discussing how to make high quality links. If you’re going to follow my advice and link out to other sites liberally, then it behooves me to share some pointers on how to decide whom you should [...]

Define:”SEO Method”

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 14, 2007 in SEO Theory

The SEO Method is easy to remember: experiment, evaluate, adjust. The adjusting part seems to be the easiest for most people. They just read about the latest techniques in blogs and forums and start changing their Web sites.
SEO experiments are not really that hard to do, but for some strange reason a lot [...]

The Algorithm - People want to know about ‘The Algorithm’

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 13, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

There is an old SEO myth that says something like, “If you can put your keywords into your title tag three times, that’s just right”. I don’t know who comes up with this nonsense, but it does get passed around a lot.
The magic number for search engine optimization for many years was three (3). [...]

More answers to SEO questions

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 12, 2007 in SEO Theory, Search Engine Optimization, Supplemental Pages

I don’t really have time (or the inclination) to do 101 questions today, but it seems a lot of interesting queries have brought people to SEO Theory in June. So let’s dip into the mailbag — er, the query referral bag, and see what people want to know today.

ask algorithm

Oddly enough, the Ask algorithm [...]

Build your own Web neighborhood

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 12, 2007 in SEO Theory

Many people now have some understanding of the concept of a “Web neighborhood”. We each visualize Web neighborhoods somewhat uniquely but we have some common ground when speaking about them. The problem is that most people segregate their own Web sites from the majority of sites they are safe to associate with.
That is, [...]

The Great Reciprocal Linking Myth

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 11, 2007 in Link Theory, Seo Myths, Web spam

There are three kinds of Web sites people are most likely to link to:

Their own sites (the “sister” sites linking syndrome)
Their friends’ and relatives’ sites (the “buddy network” syndrome)
The sites that rank first on search engines for related topics

People do occasionally link to very well-qualified sources of information, but such links are rare [...]

Ranking SEO Knowledge: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 8, 2007 in SEO Theory

One comment I heard frequently at SMX Advanced 2007 (on Monday) was that the presentations were not really covering advanced material. In fact, several bloggers have said as much in their reviews of the conference, too.
The challenge for SEO presenters and conference organizers is determining what is basic and what is advanced. Many [...]

Website optimization and Web links

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 7, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization, Supplemental Pages

There is no magic formula for fixing your SEO problems. But most optimization problems arise from two widespread human characteristics: laziness and tunnel vision.
Lax Web site optimization costs most Web sites (and that includes most so-called SEO’d Web sites) a lot of value in the search engines.
Tunnel vision causes many so-called SEOs to ignore [...]

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