Website SEO is often thought of in highly technical terms, and it’s easy to write a highly technical piece about it — but when you really get into it, there is as much art in the SEO field as there is science. Let’s talk for a little bit about the four non-technical cardinal rules of SEO — the art behind the techniques.
Different Searchers Have Different Needs
The so-called ‘buying keywords’ are used by users that intend to purchase something today, so it makes sense that they’re the first keywords targeted by a website that’s trying to sell something. But if you ignore all of the other keywords, you lose out on potential future customers.
There are four kinds of relevant surfers: those seeking broad, generic information; those seeking brand-specific information; those looking at the terms of a possible transaction; and those looking to perform a specific transaction right now. If your website offers landing pages for all kinds of surfers — — you can take advantage of a much broader diversity of relevant searchers.
Humans Experience, Search Engines Access
This is possibly the most artistic part of the art of two very different clientele: the humans that are reading the site, and the search engine spiders that are crawling it. The spiders don’t see things like flash banners, fancy graphics, or password-protected content. The humans, meanwhile, don’t see things like inbound links or site speed. Maximizing both angles will lead to the best results, but too many SEO gurus focus on either one or the other.
Internal Links Matter
90% of SEO gurus out there — particularly the freelance kind — are interested in exactly one metric: the number of inbound links from unique root domains to your site. That’s a good metric, but it ignores a very powerful on-site SEO tool: internal links. Internal links are great for telling the search engines what each specific page on your site is all about.
The Best External Links Come On Their Own
Making backlinks appear is the easy part of SEO — but the best backlinks are the ones you don’t have to create on your own. The key to getting unsolicited backlinks from other people’s sites is simple: top-tier content. Unique content that has information you can’t find anywhere else, and that is worthy of outside attention, will get it.
