There is a lot of things that fly around about SEO but all of them can be easily summed up in three specific optimization areas:
1. Technical and Server Side
2. Content Development
3. Promotion and Link Development
Within each of these three areas are opportunities and limitations, but to have a great site, you will need to address concerns in each of these areas to ensure your website is performing well and it is easily understood by both search engines and users.
One of the most important things about performing well in any competitive space (no matter if it’s ones and zeros, the track or on an athletic field) is knowing how each part of your team is performing and what you can expect to happen given any circumstance. I am known for giving analogies but the stool relationship is more valid than others that come to mind, namely because if you fail to consider the one or more of these three competency areas you don’t have a really great product (if you are lacking all three, forgive the pun, you might not have a leg to stand on). Back to the understanding of your team, you may be counting on one or more of these items from your website and not knowing that you are being outclassed by your competitors and rightfully so not showing up in the top positions in the search results.
There are a number of tools that can help you assess the level or lack of performance in each of these areas and I leverage a number of them myself to find out what the server response codes are, how much content is actually present on a particular page or the anchor text of the links pointed to my website, but ideally these are tactical concerns and you may be focused on one tree while the rest of the forest might not be doing so hot either. Having a balanced or holistic approach is one of the most important ways to effectively compete and continually grow.
All too often, SEOs look at a particular area of opportunity, whether if be a new technical piece (example: canonical tagging) but miss the real opportunity (example: correcting your URL structure to only publish one URL per unique page). The core best practices that have remained relatively consistent during my tenure in online optimization (some ten years) are still the best practices today. Yes, there are new aspects that have cropped up (XML sitemaps, social networking, blogging, microformats, etc.) but these are all just flavors of the same core best practices (page identification, link development, content publication, content type identification).
In my last post (yes, it was a long, long time ago), I identified a tactical approach to correcting specific concerns, but before you can really delve into the details, it is important to get the full picture of your site. Review your technical, content and link development efforts, if you feel you are over your head, look for someone you can trust whether it be a interactive or SEO agency, a friend, colleague or even a community. Your website is more than just a group of electronic pages that can be read online, it is pretty close to a person needing direction and attention to grow.
I have always said SEO is not a destination but a journey, if you agree, I have a question for you, where was your last stop?
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice to find your blog Pittfall. I like your writing style and of course the way you explain “things” related to SEO for each ones I have a particular interest. If I have to talk from my perspective there are 2 SEO areas: on-site and off-site optimization, the latest one referring of course to link building, search engine submission, DMOZ listing, etc.
As you already said, if you fail in any of these subdivisions there is a chance to do not achieve your goals. Yet I believe that keywords and link building are the biggest challenges and the things that pay off for any website, anytime.
@SEO Bever,
Thanks for the comment, don’t forget about the technical aspect, especially if you are using CMS to manage your content. The technical aspects including server response codes all the way to page templates can really have a direct impact on the performance of your site. For page template concerns, find my post measuring the value of page elements.
Cheers!
Sure, those are things keeping the technical part but reffer to the on-site optimization – I didn’t mean on-page only but all keeping off website from the kw level to server side.
By the way, a good friend of mine installed Varnish on server and now the website is riding the lightning – extreme speed
did you know about Varnish?
@SEO Bever
The reason that I try to separate design and technical aspects from content is the because they are extremely different in complexity and I have found that the best in breed websites have great writers, guys that are good in good with the coding and server stuff aren’t always great writers. They may be able to incorporate keywords into the copy and help the page rank, but that doesn’t mean that customers will convert, and that is why we are all here, isn’t it?
No, unfortunately I am not familiar with Varnish.
That’s true! My friends around are very technical guys with no talent for writing, maybe just some ideas and with no or less knowledge when is coming to SEO part.
I am kind of mixed since I’m doing front-end web development for a couple of years. Also I’ve learned (in a hard way) the magic of web usability which sometimes is a pain combined with SEO
I really like stool analogy, it makes the SEO task easier to understand. The separate tasks that you undertake are never really that separate, everything is relevant.
As for on-site and off-site, that is still applicable. It’s just a different way of grouping together activities surely?
@Pure 360
Thanks for the comment. Agreed, I like to break them up because of the wide differences between quality content and quality code is quite different.
I would like to point out that if you have really good content on your site it will show up in the backlinks to your site. When people see superb content they are eager to link to your site in order to give their readers more useful information. Many Internet Marketers underestimate the power of High Quality Content. It is clear that you have to do some initial promotion but after some time your site can spread like wildfire. You also will have users bookmarked your site so that they can visit you for new information. So never forget to build new content. This will almost guarantee your sucess.
I too like the analogy of using a stool. With so much going on in our industry the technology side doesn’t get any near the attention it deserves. Most of the marketing articles that are put out there on SEO don’t speak to the tech side of it and some people need to be reminded of it every once in awhile.