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How to rehabilitate SEO advice that has lost focus

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 12, 2008 in SEO Theory

When good Web sites go bad, there’s one man who is their best friend. Michael Martinez.
No Web site is too much for me to handle. I rehabilitate Web sites. I train people. I am…the Site Whisperer.

Three blog posts caught my attention today. Justilien Gaspard touts the benefits of obtaining links from new Web sites. Loren Baker advises people to avoid using the Blogger and Wordpress services (not the software, just the free blogging sites).

I could not help but think of Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer when I read these columns. Both Justilien and Loren are respected in the SEO community and I’ve enjoyed reading their posts for years, but these two posts underscored for me just how disjointed and uncoordinated the SEO industry’s messages tend to be.

Tamar Weinberg posted a brief note about the latest twist in the ongoing debate over on-site SEO. Some people feel it’s dying and some people are defending it. Frankly, on-site SEO has never looked healthier in my opinion, and I’ll explain why below.

I read Tamar’s post on SE Roundtable first and immediately asked myself, “Why would people conclude that on-site SEO is dying? It’s almost the centerpiece of every SEO tutorial and training program now.” On-site SEO is generally considered to be one of the fundamental principles of optimization. Before you go searching for links, you need to make sure your site is well-organized.

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Do not attempt these techniques without consulting a professional

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On-site SEO should be addressed in these areas:

1. Topicality - every page should focus on 1-3 topics (with one being the primary topic)
2. Organization - this includes HTML design and content placement
3. Architecture - this includes page placement (folders, sub-domains, dynamic URLs), primary and secondary navigation, HTML and XML site mapping, site search, and cross-promotional link placements
4. Presentation - this includes calls to action, page elements used to emphasize keywords, and selection of styles or themes

In search engine optimization your goal is to be the pack leader. You want other people’s Web sites to assume calm, submissive states. That is, you want to surge to the top of search results without being chased by a pack of aggressive competitors who will rip you apart. You minimize the competition through natural intimidation — you literally become the pace setter, the pack leader. You’re not the pack leader if you’re letting SEO principles make your marketing decisions for you.

Search engine optimization works best when it complements the marketing objective. If you primary goal is to rank first for keyword X you’re doing it wrong. It’s not all about ranking first for keywords. It’s about obtaining optimal benefit from search engine results. That more often means ranking 2nd and 3rd for many expressions rather than ranking 1st for a few.

So on-site SEO will always have its place in our industry but as it becomes more standardized I would expect to see people paying less attention to the fundamentals. Many people in the SEO industry ignored fundamental principles in their constant link building campaigns. Focusing on links is like allowing your dog to lead you. It will yank and pull on the leash, bark and snarl at passers-by, and challenge other dogs.

In other words, link building is an extremely competitive practice and it’s provably unnecessary in more than 95% of all SEO campaigns. You do not need to be constantly obtaining new links. Most sites need fewer than 50 links. SEOs just cannot get their heads around the facts on this issue. Once you hit the top there is nowhere else to go.

Link building should be treated like an aggressive dog breed (hunting and racing breeds especially). With dogs Cesar advises people to use exercise, discipline, and affection in that order. With link building you absolutely need to use exercise, discipline, and affection in that order. Too many people in our industry have fallen in love with link building and they have created tons of problems by sharing their love freely.

Link building should be exercised for every Web site. Every site needs some links. They just don’t need constant lnking and that is where discipline comes into the picture. If you’ve exercised your link building properly you need to cut it off at around 50 links. You can fall in love with link building if that’s your business but otherwise you only need to obtain rare occasional new links for new content. If you don’t expand your Web site you don’t need more links.

Love the link building you have done. Appreciate your accomplishments for what they are. But get a life and move on after you’ve built a few dozen links. After that point you’re not practicing search engine optimization, you’re just overfeeding the dog.

Which brings me to Justilien’s article about obtaining links from new sites. My first thought was, “He’s right. I’ve always trusted links from new sites and have done great by them.” But then I realized that Justilien made no effort to frame his advice within the larger picture of SEO. His article is just a piece of flotsam bobbing in the dirty waters of muddled SEO advice. It’s another link-chasing tip that provides no real value to search engine optimization because it doesn’t explain why people should look to new Web sites for links.

If you’re having problems getting links, it makes sense to turn to new sites because they are more likely to link out to content they feel is worthy. Justilien gives you a good run-down of criteria to evaluate when pursuing links from new sites. There are other criteria you could consider (don’t be afraid to set your own rules — only you can discipline your link building). But if you’ve obtain 100 links from new sites, why are you looking for more links? That just makes no sense.

SEOs have fallen into the link trap: they write articles about linking in the hope of obtaining links. SEOs don’t write articles about search engine optimization. They just want links. They don’t have a clue what to do with those links but they want them.

Which leads me to Loren’s article. Note that I said if your Web site doesn’t grow you don’t need to keep building links. Well, there is no need to deduce the obvious: I’ll state it for you. If you keep adding content to your site, you need to obtain new links because as Matt Cutts has said “you get only so much PageRank for your site”. If you want to maintain a healthy, happy, pack-leading Web site you need to obtain new links as you create new content (although the necessary links-to-content-pages ratio is much less than most of you would expect it to be).

You don’t have to worry about spreading your peanut butter too thinly so much as you need to be concerned about where you spread it. Nonetheless, when you’re just launching a blog you don’t have many options for capturing a reading audience. You should definitely consider launching the blog on a free hosting service like Blogger or Wordpress and then moving it to your own domain later.

Free hosting services will send random visitors to your blog. They’ll also help get it indexed quickly. Now, it’s true that simply turning on pinging helps most blogs, but I find that the vast majority of SEO blogs rarely appear in blog search results. Why is that? Because SEO bloggers spend so much time writing about how to get links they don’t exercise their blogs enough to create any real value. When you have to find SEO blogs through comment links on other SEO blog posts, you can be reasonably sure that the SEOs with the invisible blogs are not practicing good on-site SEO.

Worse, they may be relying upon Wordpress plug-ins to do their SEO for them. You won’t have any problem finding SEO Theory in the Web search and Blog search tools because I focus on the on-site SEO. But I launched this blog through Blogger to help build quick visibility. It didn’t take that much work to move the content from Blogger to this domain when we were ready to make the move (all you need is a Wordpress plug-in).

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Do not attempt these techniques without consulting a professional

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Search engine optimization should be only part of your marketing plan. Link building should be handled separately from search engine optimization. That is, if you’re convinced you’ll create more visibility through links than through organic content, then you need to structure your links without search engines in mind. Non-SEO link building tends to be more powerful and effective than SEO link building. You get a much better return on investment when you focus on the total value that the link can deliver, rather than just obsess about PageRank and anchor text.

Non-SEO link building can help you by:

1. Obtaining brand-value links on high traffic Web sites
2. Obtaining endorsement links on highly respected Web sites
3. Obtaining context-identifying links on very informative Web sites

With today’s current search technology these types of links won’t help the typical SEO campaign very much. They may not even pass PageRank since they could be nofollowed, embedded in Javascript, or otherwise prevented from passing PageRank. But these types of links create visibility and pass traffic, both of which are vital to the marketing health of any Web site. If you are exercising your link building then at some point you need to discipline yourself to switch from PageRank/Anchor text to Visibility/Traffic and you’ll LOVE the results.

Understanding from the outset that you’ll build visibility for a Web site faster through a free hosting service helps you plan for the transition. You’ll lose some of your inbound link value when you move the blog (you want to keep the old blog account active for as long as possible so that it can tell people where your new blog is and so that no one else can capture the value you created). However, you’ll achieve more in the long run by strategically investing your time and effort in creating a blog brand and identity that is independent of the domain name.

The most important part of search engine optimization will always be the on-site factors. If you’re trying to compensate for poor on-site SEO through link building you’ll never be a pack leader. No one has any reason to trust or follow a site that cannot get its act together. But getting your act together doesn’t mean conforming to someone else’s expectations. You have to set the marketing goal. You have to decide what you’re trying to do with your site.

Many people have asked why SEO Theory looks the way it does. I don’t install SEO plug-ins or do other goofy things to “fix” the canonical URL issues that Wordpress inherently imposes on a blog. Nonetheless, this blog dominates hundreds of active search queries.

I don’t build many links for this blog. I certainly don’t plant links for it on Sphinn, DIGG, and other social media sites the way SEOs do for their own invisible blogs. Plenty of people read this blog. This blog demonstrates the power of true search engine optimization. It picks an eclectic mix of topics and provides relevant content for them. The process of discovery is enhanced by the contributions other people make on SEO Theory’s behalf through StumbleUpon, Sphinn, DIGG, and their own blogs. That’s naturaly visibility and I have never asked anyone to link to SEO Theory with specific anchor text.

In fact, some of the anchor text people use to point to SEO Theory has been very unflattering or misleading. It doesn’t matter. It’s not necessary. It’s not important to search engine optimization.

That is the lesson to be learned from SEO Theory. When you look at the whole picture, you understand you don’t have to try everything, that not everything is necessary. And you free yourself from the sick obsession with links that has hurt many people in the SEO industry.

After all, if their linking policies were really so effective for search engine optimization, I’d be able to find them in the search results rather than on self-promotional social media sites. Content sculpting pays off much more in the end than PageRank sculpting and mindless link building.

With apologies to Cesar Milan (I love the show).