SEO or Voodoo Science?

[Oman]

I want to believe. I want to understand. I really want to believe that I can optimize a page and see my page position improve. But I'm increasingly becoming a sceptic as to the merits of SEO.

I took some time today to look at my page postion for numerous pages and topics in Google. My intent was to review all the pages that placed better than mine, analyze key words and groom my key words thereby improving my placement. What a surprise. What I found was that many of the sites listed ahead of mine had key words that were completely irrelevant to the topic of the search. I mean way off. Sure, key words may facilitate ease of search by a spider. But for all the time, energy and effort placed on key words in the SEO industry, what I saw today certainly invalidated their importance.

Sure, there's more to SEO; the number of key words/page, the length of the page, succint titles, titles with key words at the beginning of the title...the list goes on.

I'm ready for you all to throw a couple rotten tomatoes at me here. I know I'm stepping on toes. I know there's a lot of bright folks on this forum and in the SEO industry. Most of these folks have sincere intentions regarding SEO. I've learned a lot by simply keeping up with the WPW Forums.

But isn't all of this SEO 'science' anecdotal? How many anecdotes does it take to make legitimate science in SEO?


Oman

[janeth]

Google does not tell anyone what they do or gives very little information
You need to work on a well rounded marketing strategy and worry less about trying to optimize your site for Google.
When it comes to information, it is great for your customers, and it is great for the easy to get key words, but it will not get you ranked for the popular key words. If you go to Google and do a search for the most popular key words you will find this text over and over "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page".

Why is that? Because optimizing your site only helps on the easy to get key words.

If you want to compete for the major key words you need links coming to your site. The more pages you have on your site the better. Each page is another link back to your home page. But even if your site has 1,000 pages you still need links from other sites.

But there is more to it then just getting links. You also have to have your key words in the link. For example href="http://www.geeksonsteroids.com">web site design</a>. This would give me the key word web site design. The would counts just like it was on my page.
Now you can not put the word on the page 1,000 times but you can get 1,000 links coming into your site using that key word.
So build your site for your customers and work on links to get the ball rolling.

[minstrel]

I took some time today to look at my page postion for numerous pages and topics in Google. My intent was to review all the pages that placed better than mine, analyze key words and groom my key words thereby improving my placement. What a surprise. What I found was that many of the sites listed ahead of mine had key words that were completely irrelevant to the topic of the search. I mean way off. Sure, key words may facilitate ease of search by a spider. But for all the time, energy and effort placed on key words in the SEO industry, what I saw today certainly invalidated their importance.
Don't worry, Oman - I don't think asking a question is stepping on anyone's toes...

However, although I personally still think that keywords have some value and factor into the way some of the search engines rank sites, it does seem to be somewhat low on the list for Google. Based on what I've seen, the TITLE tage, the URL (i.e., domain name), possibly ALT tags, and definitely links pointing to your site are more important.

I try to optimize my site for local rankings rather than gloabl, and my page outranks the competition for most important keywords - however, there are two sites that for two (different) specific keyphrases beat me out on Google all the time - BOTH sites have that keyphrase in their URL. In both cases, these sites have minimal content and only a small number of pages and very limited incoming links.

[janeth]

Until everything calms down it may take a little while to figure out where Google has put the weight on everything now.

[rlrouse]

The SEO battles are best fought using a "multiple front" approach.

Are keywords important? Yes.

Is the proper use of header tags important? Somewhat.

Is keyword density important? Yes.

Is link popularity important? Extremely.

Among other factors...

Will a massive effort applied to any one or two of these factors get a page at the top of the SERPS for a highly competitive search term? No.

With a non-competitve search term, proper use of any one of these factors can get a page a high ranking.

With a more competitive term, it takes better SEO in one or more areas.

To rank well for the extremely competitive terms, every possible SEO technique that you can think of (and maybe a few that you can't) has to be used in the best possible manner. Anything less in any one area will leave your page buried in the SERPS.

For example, while using header tags isn't the most important SEO tactic in terms of effective SEO, using them and using them correctly just might mean the difference between coming up #7 out of 1.5 million results and coming up #207.

SEO is an incremental thing. All the SEO tactics work together to get pages ranked highly.

All of that being said, if someone were to ask what's the single most effective SEO tactic that one can use (at least for the time being), it would be getting lots of inbound links with your target keywords/phrases in he anchor text. Nothing else comes close.

[Oman]

I agree with all you say Janeth. And David, you hit the target with the key words in the URL. Here's an example; (my world is feet, so bear with the subject content) A search for athlete's foot on Google results in the #1 ranking as The Athlete's Foot - a shoe store. Nothing to do with fungal infections.

One of the consistent findings I saw was that many of the higher ranked pages had either a high corporate identity or a national identity such as The American College Of ER Physicians, etc. Are these sites optimized more effectively? Didn't seem to be. More links...probably. But there seemed to be a credibility factor of some sort based upon their corporate or professional status. A little like the mom and pop drug store going up against CVS. I'm not quite sure how to define this and duplicate it.

Thanks for not heaving that big rotten tomatoe at me.

Oman
myfootshop.com (http://www.myfootshop.com)

[rlrouse]

A little like the mom and pop drug store going up against CVS. I'm not quite sure how to define this and duplicate it.

I don't think you can. Google has placed so much emphasis on inbound links that it's nearly impossible to compete with sites that have thousands more links than you.

But what you can do is try to find relevant keywords that all those links to The Athletes Foot don't have in their anchor text. On those you can compete and do well if the rest of the SEO is up to par.

[minstrel]

what you can do is try to find relevant keywords that all those links to The Athletes Foot don't have in their anchor text. On those you can compete and do well if the rest of the SEO is up to par.
Good point - if you need to compete with "The Big Guys", think about this: what will those people do when they search for "athlete's foot" and get the shoe store? add keywords or try a different set of keywords - try to guess or find out what those words are going to be and see if you can optimize on those.