SEO experts left and right are telling you that the so called on-page factors are dead. In a weird sense they are right, but also utterly wrong. Admittedly, on first glance meta tags don’t count for much. It’s all about links and their anchor text today. Yes it’s true you can’t manipulate SE rankings with meta tags much.
But here comes the shocking truth, and it’s getting more true every day:
Modern SEs use very sophisticated algorithms. They are not fooled anymore by reciprocal link dumps. They are not fooled by blog comment spam. Nearly all the black- und white-hat pure SEO techniques fail. Yes there are still some black-hat techniques that just work but they come with a cost and I won’t talk about them here and they will only work for a limited time.
Yes you’ve heard that quite a few times but I’ll say it again cause it’s more relevant than ever: High quality content people will want to link! That, and marketing your content, is all you have to do to be successful, and it’s the only thing you can do.
You can’t emulate thousands of quality backlinks from thousands of different class-C IP addresses on pages belonging to unique sites. It ain’t gonna happen.
Today, SEO is more than ever Internet Marketing in its purest form. Producing excellent content and then marketing it, to show your content to as many people as possible. And search engines will follow.
And here the circle closes and we are back to on-page factors. They are more important than ever. Because good content is reflected in content structure and good meta tags. Someone who produces good content will take care of a good title tag and well-defined structure (reflected by carefully chosen hx tags). Oh, and the author who cares about what she writes will know what to put in the meta description. And know the keywords this content is about.
Tags: internet marketing, seo
February 26th, 2008 at 2:05 am
That’s true. Great content is a way to achieve more persons interested in your site and hence garner more links. Today most experts speak about creating content that will be a “linkbait”.
I feel though that the SEs look at off-page factors (such as backlinks) much more than on-page factors (ex. keywords,metatags), because it tells them which website is more entrenched within the internet. More and more people concentrate on off-page factors because there is no limit to the score you can get for those off-page optimization attempts whereas on-page factors will have a set limit. Unless of course you change the main content of your site to show more keyword prominence and relevancy.
Which of course goes back to the point you made about creating content and marketing it.
…J.J.
March 1st, 2008 at 8:44 am
At this moment in time only a handful of people understand this. SEO is a state of mined understanding the kneads of the people who search its not about traffic its about conventions.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:57 pm
As one of my friends said, content is king! As long as you write interesting things that makes visitors coming back and link to your site you will be in top
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:30 pm
I think Google makes things very difficult. The majority of people play by the rules and work hard at creating good content on their websites, woking with good web developers etc. But every now and again Google either move the goalposts or penalise sites without notification. For example if you do a search for pagerank drop then you will get an idea of problems people face.
If you spend months building your page rank / web profile, only to suddenly have lots of your backlinks dissappear from Google searches and your page rank drop then there should be warnings put in place before being penalised and a right to appeal before the action takes place.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
It’s not about page rank or backlinks display. Both are deceiving, if useful at all. If your site looses SE traffic so what? You have built quality content and great links, so this will only effect you to a small degree. Google can change their algo anytime (and they do that regularly), and it’s their right to do so. In the end they’re just trying to measure popularity and mirror that in their results.
March 5th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I am new at SEO.
I hired a web developer to develop my website. He advised me to concentrate on content and google will do the rest due to keywords and metatag. From the conversation on this Blog, it seems that google has changed its criteria for a high ranking page. It appears, it is more about linking to other websites and having other websites link to mine. Is that analysis correct?
March 5th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Google has always been about links. But it’s gotten harder and harder to manipulate that, so you could as well just forget about that and build high quality content and market it, while keeping on-page SEO in mind.
March 8th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Well, google has a weird way to look for data sometimes. Does anyone know how MSN gathers the data? (links or text?)
I’m trying to cope up with quality content, well since I recently started spiders are still crawling so I haven’t had much of an index. I still have a lot of talk and a few reviews, I think if people can keep the “niche” on their subjects, people will eventually come, of course with a bit of help of uberdose’s plugins
March 11th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Thanks for your no-nonsense approach. It fits really well with my SEO philosophy. Unfortunately, people don’t want to hear about constant work, no magic . . . I love your plugins and wordpress. Thanks so much for your unbelievable work. Hope it pays off BIG!
March 20th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Hi guys, I’m also new to deep seo problem (i’m content expert). I have a crucial question about the all in one seo plug in. Are u sure that noindex for categouris is really a smart idea? wherever i see i see that google prefer category to post in the serp. Really a lot! Why so go in the other direction?
(sorry for the partial ot)
btw
write good and a lot: the only seo that counts.
March 20th, 2008 at 8:29 am
By including categories you create duplicate content. Just google for “wordpress duplicate content” to see some problems that can arise.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
aberdose #11 > wow i got the problem!
“Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.(http://www.seoresearcher.com/how-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-duplicate-content-safe.htm)”
So if your blog is an heavy output post industry you should not worry about that (why should engadget use no index when he is in first page with the categoury iphone for ex?).
But if u are a normal blogger better u use no index.
isn’t it?
March 20th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
IMO it’s best to avoid letting your categories get indexed in the first place. If they already rank it’s too late.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
i’m still far in understanding. Keeping the example: why engadet should prefer to have a single (maybe old) post in first serp, then the category that updadtes itself when they post something new on iphone?
March 21st, 2008 at 9:44 am
It’s usually easier to let one page rank than two with identical content, given the same amount of incoming links. Because trying to rank two pages diverts your links. But as you said, if you post often, a category page or tag page can really be attractive for google because it changes so often and has a tight focus. Can you please give the iphone example for engadget?
March 21st, 2008 at 12:34 pm
yep (i ment Gizomodo btw, not Engadget). This is it: http://tinyurl.com/23ql9z . It’s very interesting to notice that Gizomdo is with the categoury and Engadget with the post (I have the feeling that this depends to the amount of web traffic on the single post).
March 25th, 2008 at 7:01 am
I like to start out organically with a site concept and just begin creating content with little SEO in place other than the basics. And once I’ve got a good amount of content, I can start looking at fine tuning everything to improve rankings. I think people can be a bit obsessed and cripple growth and ideas if they concern themselves too much with it all. As everyone always says, quality content will get you to the top…
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm
This is really great info both from you and the other commentors
April 6th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I read that if you can’t write down 10 reasons why people shouldn’t use your website, then it’s unlikely that there are sufficient reasons for people to come and use it.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Recently I’ve seen Google displaying description meta tag content in the SERPS (black text in results pages) instead of body content, even if body content is ‘better’. Here’s a discussion at WMW about Google using description meta tags again:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3618039.htm
So, from this it’s easy to see that you should have a well written description meta tag - and one that sells. Search google for ‘wedding favors’ and check out the description meta tag being displayed for myweddingfavors.com - it’s also a great way to get people to click your listing!
April 10th, 2008 at 8:57 am
By including categories you create duplicate content. I like for better search engine ranking.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
great content helps, but to stand out from millions of others websites can’t be done by just sitting back, you still need to push your site upwards yourself..
April 13th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Good content is the definite means to get top rankings in the long run. The more informative the content is to the visitor, the more often they will come back to your site. Your content needs to be written with the end user (your visitors) in mind. If you answer their most sought after questions, you will gain incoming links naturally over time. The meta title and description tags are a means to gain keyword ranking but also should support your content with an “abstract” of your page content. I find it amazing that so many webmasters ignore researching keywords for the best title and description tags that fit their webpages. I’m also amazed at how many webmasters ignore these tags completely. I have made websites that have dominated their niche or industry just by researching the competitors pages and tags to find that they have no clue on how to properly SEO their pages. Great for me, sad for them.
April 15th, 2008 at 1:54 am
When I started my blog, I didn’t know anything about meta tags or keywords or anything like that. It took a LONG time for the search engines to even pick up my blog. Now I get ranked solely on content on my blogs. I’m here to learn more about SEO so keep the great info coming.
~Roxanne~
April 15th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
It’s all very well saying ‘Content is king’ over and over again but realistically what is content without design? Anyone can write articles, tutorials, guides, witty and informative blogs etc but at the end of the day the only use this has without good design is bot food. Yes you’ll get the pages listed in the SERP’s but ‘if’ a user visits the site and it looks like generic spam they’ll be off like a shot.
Basically if Content is King, Design is Queen and you should ideally have them both if you want to do well with SEO.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Dave has a point about visitors running scared or bored as the case may be. On the other hand one must be very careful in the use of graphics especially in the beginning of page code. Since I started using a theme that put my categories before anything else and minimizing graphics I have doubled and tripled my daily search engine hits on those two blogs. The graphics are still there and I am making some more tweaks to colors but the site still is readable with a more original feel
April 15th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Content is King agreeded but it does not have to be your creation. You can go to an article directory and pick-up some articles to post on your blog.
Of course there’s a back-link and more than likely two, sometimes three. These back-links have substance. That’s the trade-off, you get the content to use while the author gets more links pointing to his site.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Brad - Very good point! In an ideal world your main page content will be as close to the body tag as possible! Floating your navigation/columns etc is perfect in this situation and as you mentioned it does wonders for your ranking.
Michael - I have to say I disagree with you I’m afraid… Engines will actually penalise people with duplicate content. Back-linking to the original author’s site helps him out fine if your site’s PR is good enough but from the perspective of the content ‘borrower’ you’ll be no better off if the engine knocks you down a few places for being a clone. That’s why a lot of internet marketers don’t bother with PLR stuff any more. Getting an idea together and then eLancing it out etc could work though as your content would be unique… Up until someone clones it
April 15th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Dave makes a point I made on my blogging blog last night about duplicate content. There are a couple of ways to reduce it with some plugs I have just become aware of. Excerpt Editor and Nofollow Dupes. Excerpt editor is a fine way to quickly do post excerpts and has host of options when it comes to what to display. Nofollow Dupes will nofollow duplicate links on your home page.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
But you NEED links you can´t survive on on good text only you need both. The competition today is so tuff that you really have to work hard on both…
April 26th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Peter, I do agree that good SEO is a mix of factors but you need to make sure that your links are high standard links from high PR sites where possible. By all means start off with low PR links to get yourself regular traffic and/or users but as soon as you can get the high PR links do so.
High PR sites get to be high PR because they have regular content, regular high traffic, good quality backlinks and relevant content, keywords, meta tags etc. If engines class them as high PR and they’re linking to you it means your site importance also increases and THAT is when things start snowballing for you.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:05 am
On page factors are far from dead in SEO. In fact, it is the first step in the optimization process and something that is continuously revisited. Changing a title tag on 1 client’s page last month made her site jump 4 spots in Google.
True, it isn’t the biggest element anymore, and is likely to decline in the distant future to very little, but today, it is a crucial part of the optimization process that can have staggering results.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:11 am
I found a quick way to get Goggle to index my New web site over night. My old web site had a PR 2 what I did was to simply change my web site name and keep the same webhost. My old web site had Google visit just about every day. With Goggle searching my web site the next day giving me ” 200 Status OK ” for all of my pages. Goggle still find’s some of my old files and giving me 404 pages less and less each day from my old site.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:33 am
It’s always a pleasure to find professionals who decides to share their SEO knowledge, thanks a lot
May 7th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
So true! Its really frustrating to see the vast number of ’seo’ experts that actually think that semantic html and good content is some kind of a rocket science. If all websites were designed by smart and qualified web designers there would be no need for any kind of optimization because good content is what brings readers/customers.
May 11th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Yeah, good content is great for natural linking and therefore getting a great link diversity. Especially with Linkbaits it’s awesome if you know how to get the snowball rolling. Still, a very new blog or website with great content always needs the marketing part and that again comes down to placing links on other websites through bookmarking, social marketing, reciprocial linking etc.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Yeah.. great post. SEO is really quite simple, you just need to get some backlinks, get some quality content and your good to go!
May 15th, 2008 at 9:31 am
I agree with James. SEO is not that hard. Even though Google does change alot if you have good content that is RELEVENT you should have no problems.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Not to sound argumentative here but if SEO is as easy as you say every site would rank fantastically for the terms they optimise for… Granted there are a few sure-fire ways to increase your SERPs positions but the real art of SEO is to try new things, observe and modify as necessary; basic testing theory…
Imagine you optimise for certain terms and end up with a nice first place rank for those terms. Then someone else comes along and optimises for those same terms and pushes you down the rankings… Do you just think ‘oh well, I tried!’ and leave it there or do you analyse their site, try to see how they have the edge and then implement your own counter-measures to try and get back your ranking? It could be something as simple as you renaming your image files to relevant names but equally it could be somethig far more difficult.
The basics of SEO are easy, it’s the ‘game’ of SEO that can be difficult and that game is what big corps pay SEO’s to do well.
And no, I’m not an SEO and I’m not justifying the amount of money some SEO’s think they can charge; I’m just stating what I believe to be true based on many years of web design.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:19 am
I know pagerank, the little bar that shows up on the Firefox toolbar, isn’t that important. Still, when it changes drastically in just one day, I’m concerned about what’s going on the cause the shift. I’ve had a PR of 4 for over a year. Suddenly, my traffic increased, people with PRs of 5 started to link to my site, and then poof, my PR dropped to 2. Yet, Google is still sending me quite a bit of SE traffic. What could cause such a sudden drop? Could it be something as simple as using categories?
May 28th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Exactly! Creating quality content is key to generating the traffic you need to become successful. With the hordes of people now starting with Internet Marketing, this can become a godsend because many of these new marketers haven’t the capability to code. For those of us able to code, even if it is at a novice level, we have a chance to further optimize our sites for SE.
BTW, Great plugins uberdose. Thanks for your work.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[…] Michael Torbert, AKA hallsofmontezuma, in: “All In One SEO To Go”, 11 October 2008. Podcast. “WordPress Weekly episode 24”. 32:15–32:36. weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/10/11/all-in-one-seo-to-go — Also interesting reading, from the original author of All in One SEO Pack: Modern Day SEO - What Really Counts […]
November 27th, 2008 at 12:45 am
[…] Modern Day SEO - What Really Counts […]