SEO Archive

Lately when I read most of the seo blogs in my feed reader I’ve been entirely underwhelmed. Too many posts seem to be written more with sensationalism in mind than actual quality. The usual regurgitation of the same old ideas is ever present as well.

In fairness if you read enough blogs you’re going to see the same topics covered again and again and we know those sensationalized titles do work to get clicks. But after awhile what you get from reading seo blogs isn’t quite worth the effort involved reading them. There’s a saturation point where you aren’t learning, but you wish there was a place where you could.

The good news is that place exists.
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The following guest post is from Nicole White from Web Design Schools Guide.

If you own a website, you know that SEO is an inherent part of the design process, a very important part that determines your position in the search engine rankings and one that can make or break your success on the Internet.
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Doing well in the search engines basically comes down to one thing: being perceived as an important source of information.

You might be wondering how the design of your blog or website could have anything to do with your placement in the search results. Afterall, you’ve probably been told on numerous occassions that the only thing that matters are things like links and keywords. The fact of the matter is that most amateur SEO professionals don’t have the slightest clue about why design matters. Most of them assume that it doesn’t. And you can tell by looking at the kind of content they promote.
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My gypsy friend Dave has some exciting news and I wanted to share. If you’re an active reader of seo blogs you might notice that after awhile it seems to be just a rehash of the same old. That’s perfectly fine when you’re new and it’s not meant to criticize any of the blogs out there. I’ve certainly rehashed many of the same old ideas myself over the years. But at some point you want something more and it can be hard to find. Dave is looking to provide a little of that something more.
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords.
—Wikipedia

A few months ago Shoemoney posted to declare that SEO has no future. While the post was most likely nothing more than an attempt at linkbait, the reaction was interesting. Your view of whether Shoe’s post was right or wrong probably had a lot more to do with your definition of SEO than anything Jeremy said in the post.

The post takes a narrow view of SEO and in doing so is generally correct. The SEO Shoe is talking about is going away, but most SEOs would define what they do in much broader terms and when you consider the more liberal definition, SEO isn’t going anywhere.
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photo credit: Christina Snyder

How do you define SEO? If you are an SEO, where does your work begin and end? What parts of the overall business process are under your control and what parts belong to the domain of another industry?

Last week Dave wrote a post on the evolution of SEO, which aimed to clear up some myths like the SEO is dead conversation that pops up all the time. Good stuff from Dave as usual.

The post caused a little dissension at Sphinn mostly revolving around this statement.

When did conversions become the domain of the SEO puzzle? Sure, it is the end goal of the client and we obviously want to get targeted traffic, but it IS NOT the responsibility of the optimizer.

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Holy optimization Batman! Are search geeks no longer relevant in the world of SEO? Nothing of the sort my caped companion in ranking. Search geeks are still highly relevant and likely will be as long as search engines exist. You might even say without them all your optimization efforts could fail entirely.
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Riddle me this… If I asked you to imagine a picture of a stereotypical SEO what would they look like…? Glasses, buck teeth, bald, badly dressed… with suspenders holding up their pants…? Perhaps not quite. But the words ‘search’ and ‘geek’ have become somewhat synonymous over the past 10 years.
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You’re most likely aware that keyword research is a very important part of the SEO process. You can’t really optimize a page without knowing what you’re optimizing that page for. This morning I learned that WordTracker is currently offering a free 7 day trial to the full version of their Keyword Research tools.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of seo standards since my last post on the subject. Initially I was set completely against standards, thinking them both impossible to enact and basically unnecessary. I’m still not sure if a standards body is feasible, but I am beginning to rethink my stance somewhat or at least I’ve begun to see cases where standards could prove useful.
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