NathanBowers.com

It’s too bad that the search engine optimization field is so shady. Most practitioners are ethical consultants providing a valuable service, but the noisy ones are bad apples who promise that if you’ll follow their 247 step plan, and fork over hundreds of dollars a month, they’ll initiate you into their SEO mystery cult.

In other words:

1. Expensive SEO
2. ???
3. Profit! (without working!)

Here’s the thing:

Without a solid back catalog, you have nothing to apply SEO to.

You need to have a few months of blog posts, or a store with worthy products, or a web app that people love. Yes, you should bake in SEO from the beginning, but SEO can’t create a site worth visiting all by itself. Somebody has to do some hard work. Somebody named you.

So, in an attempt to demystify SEO, I’m writing a series of posts on SEO (the first came out yesterday) that may become a whitepaper or ebook.

I started by doing a very long outline of everything I know about SEO, blogging, WordPress, website performance optimization, the works. Then I sent it to a few people, including Micah Calabrese, SEO consultant, web developer, and the creator of MakingTheChain.com.

When I asked him “what three things on my list are the most important?” he said:

I couldn’t stop at three, it was a fun exercise.

1. Relevant, easy to remember domain name
2. Pretty/relevant urls
3. Relevant page titles, site name last (Hint: think about how you’d want the page to appear if you were looking for it in your own del.icio.us bookmarks. That’s why the site name is last.)
4. Register domain long term (more than a year at least)
5. Point www.domain.com to domain.com (or the other way around if you prefer)
6. Robots.txt to exclude duplicate content
   
7. Relevant comments on other blogs linking back to your site (very important but has the lowest amount-of-work/benefit ratio.)

In other words, Google rewards uniqueness, relevance, interconnectedness, and long term quality. The latter, long term quality, is the most important. It’s hard to fake, so it gets rewarded more. That’s why popular bloggers frequently make serious SEO mistakes without suffering.

Think of it this way: Google has a global army of PhDs working on finding and exposing the valuble stuff people are searching for. That army is much better at making search work than you are at screwing up your website.