If I were an SEO Jedi and had to pass along five words of wisdom to my SEO padawan, this is what they would be:
1. Think objectively and filter out 99% of what you read as complete nonsense. Maybe it’s SEO gold to someone out there to know that the blood pressure of their users while viewing Tentacle Porn dictates their bounce rate on your site, but as for me, I consider that type of knowledge about as useful as knowing the molecular makeup of a donkey’s fart.
2. Pay attention to what’s going on in the industry. Reading about how real time search works today vs. yesterday will be of much more use than reading yet another keyword density post that makes as much sense as a Charlotte Church cameo in a Lady Gaga video.
3. Intentionally do stuff the ‘wrong way.’ If there’s one thing that drives me mad about SEOs, it’s that they are so often afraid to break the rules. ‘ZOMG that title isn’t in an H1 tag the world will explode in a fiery ball of google wrath.’ How about you ask yourself this: where did all these rules come from? I’ll tell you where they came from.1997. Sure, there is such a thing as good form. But there’s also such a thing as blindly following without trying out alternatives for yourself. Break stuff. Learn from it. Make awesomeness.
4. Don’t confine yourself to the internet when link building. Want to know my most successful link building campaign ever? A 5 minute interview on ESPN radio (that I initiated with a simple email to one of the hosts). Within 24 hours I had links coming from The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Sun, BBC, and a juicy link in an AP article syndicated across thousands of news sites. Not bad for five minutes of time, eh? Now, how are those link exchange emails coming along?
5. Learn to program. The language doesn’t matter, and you don’t have be MIT good at it. You don’t even have to be local community college computer science 301 good at it. All you need to do is understand how a basic algorithm is constructed. One thing goes in and another thing comes out — what would have to happen in the middle for that to happen? If you don’t know how algorithms work, figuring out what happens in the middle would be just as baffling as determining a monkey’s diet based on the coloration of the poo it’s flinging at you.
