PLEASE DO NOT READ THAT ARTICLE - it is bad for you and your business.
SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different.
just pick a few examples:
> A web crawler has to crawl your site (and every other site on the web)
> Indexes all the pages ..
> Organizes the indexed collection and stores ...
this one misses on of the most important steps of the google site processing pipe: Discovery is the process of discovering URLs to crawl. It is fueled by the sitemap.xml and crawling.
sadly google parses and to some degree renders JS ... badly. this tip is good, but leads to the false conclusion that google does not parse/render/"see" JS.
> you should also pay attention to how you construct links and anchor text to internal pages on your site.
internal link anchor text is mostly irrelevant.
>your own internal links use relevant keywords in the anchor text.
it's also some of the worst things, as the impact in minimal to not measurable.
>So if you load a bunch of text dynamically with Ajax, or JavaScript, create a non-JavaScript version that will show the same information.
outdated, google now even does onload-triggered POST requests if necessary. js is still bad, but the story above is only half the story.
>Put them in the URL (and even better if your domain name has your keywords)
oh god, not again. these are the SEO URL rules
#### landingpage url rules
all URLs on an a webproperty must be according to these rules
listed in priority!
1. unique (1 URL == 1 resource, 1 resource == 1 URL)
2. permanent (they do not change, no dependencies)
3. manageable (1 logic per site section, no complicated exceptions)
4. easily scalable logic
5. short
6. with a targeted keyword phrase
further down she says something about 404s and it sounds like they are bad. 404 are great. when pages are gone, they are gone - 404 or 410. if the move then 301. but do not redirect gone pages to friendly 200 pages. keep your site simple and your redirects rules as well.
>Additionally you want as many links to contain appropriate alt text.
links don't have alt text, images have alt text. in an image is linked, that alt text substitutes the anchor text.
>But SEO isn’t just about building a great site that is crawlable and has the right content – it is also about converting users.
no, that is the job of the product, onpage marketing, conversion optimization. SEO is really just about getting - targeted - visitors. (she has clearly read too much SEOmoz)
>the most defensible SEO strategy is links,
no, it's not. that is just something that SEO agencies tell you to sell you their services and useless tools.
disclaimer: i work as an SEO - i hate SEOs. my biggest success is 62 M visitors a month. i don't read SEO blogs.
You just took five minutes of my time telling me how bad something was and not one second offering an alternative. For all the bad things your critique basically just boiled down to "not it's not" without offering proof or links.
Do you see something wrong with this picture? As a reader all I've got from your comment is angry guy doesn't like SEO and thinks all SEO blogging is for shit.
I apologize for being so blunt, but this is not a very useful comment. Perhaps the goal here is to establish how much you know, but even then it really fails to convince the reader. It'd been great if it had been a bit more constructive. Obviously you believe you know what you're talking about.
everything is measurable, if you can't measure it, don't do it.
>on technology that changes on a monthly basis?
if you don't have a model of how SEO works, you can not improve on this model, even with new information. that books provides a - sustainable, working, applicable, employable - model.
>That's the reason nobody reads books on SEO. It's the same for web development.
Not sure why this article offended you so much. It was all rehashed info but it wasn't that bad.
Just because Google can somewhat crawl and parse certain JavaScript doesn't mean it's good for SEO. I think you would be doing a disservice to your company to act like you can just load your site with client-side loading content and act like Google is going to retain your content. I've countless anecdotal examples of content hidden behind JavaScript not being found by search engines. In fact, it's a celebration whenever Google announces they managed to crawl a common piece of JS (Disqus, FaceBook)
Internal links are not irrelevant...What on earth would make you think this? It's not hard to prove that internal anchor text passes the relevance to the linked-to page by using a made up word to link to an otherwise orphaned' page to rank.
Regarding 404's....Let's pretend I have a great piece of content that has amassed hundreds of links. Marketing has deemed that the content is no longer worthy of being present on the site and has removed the page without consulting you. You have the option of letting it sit there dead with hundreds of links pointing to it, or you can 301 redirect it somewhere to pass the amassed link equity. Yeah, you go ahead and keep your 404.
Finally, links are just something that agencies tell you to sell their services??? Are you suggesting that gaining good links will do nothing for your site's natural search traffic? Ok. Sure.
ad ">Just because Google can somewhat crawl" see my response above "this tip is good, but leads to the false conclusion that google does not parse/render/"see" JS."
for the other points: i have a very special niche, i deal with companies that go through 1,2,3,...x SEO consultant, agencies, companies that spend an unbelievable amount of resources, dev time, money just to get SEO right - and their traffic still sucks. they have the most optimized internal link anchor text you can imagine, tens of thousands hardcoded redirects (no joke, i have seen the .htaccess) to "funnel that linkjuice to the most valuable page" and spend a huge monthly budget for linkbuilding and the most "sophisticated SEO tools" you can imagine. their URLs were just "keyword optimized" and now they are working with a company "to keyword optimize our content". after five sentences with their CEO he starts talking about PageRank.
i have to cut through all of that bullshit and establish a manageable, scaleable site that consists of
* a startpage
* sitemap.xml
* (interlinked) landingpages
and sadly from a SEO point of view: yes, you need links - but not the links SEO agencies tell you you need, and not with the methods SEO blogs recommend.
I don't think you read SEOmoz with statements like that.
"disclaimer: i work as an SEO - i hate SEOs. my biggest success is 62 M visitors a month. i don't read SEO blogs."
Blogs are a great resource (especially for SEO). I would also be interested to see what your spending budget is (with enough money, it doesn't take that much skill to bring lots of users to your site) and how you are getting traffic to your sites.
If it's all organic (IE: not paid), then I will be impressed.
i only do organic/unpaid unbranded. i mostly only work with the companies internal resources.
>Blogs are a great resource (especially for SEO).
blogs yes, SEO blogs, no (with about 80% probability) - if you want to justify a bad decision that did cost your company thousands and thousands of revenue, just google it. there is a very high possibility that a ("high reputable") SEO blog recommended it at one point.
SEO is a bullshit industry. this means that 80% of everything that is written about SEO actually reduces your knowledge of SEO, that article is in no way different.
just pick a few examples:
this one misses on of the most important steps of the google site processing pipe: Discovery is the process of discovering URLs to crawl. It is fueled by the sitemap.xml and crawling.PageRank - is not - "another important part of authority" - pagerank is thoughtcancer. don't ever say that word, don't ever think that word. see my TC article here http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your-co...
sadly google parses and to some degree renders JS ... badly. this tip is good, but leads to the false conclusion that google does not parse/render/"see" JS. internal link anchor text is mostly irrelevant. it's also some of the worst things, as the impact in minimal to not measurable. outdated, google now even does onload-triggered POST requests if necessary. js is still bad, but the story above is only half the story. oh god, not again. these are the SEO URL rules further down she says something about 404s and it sounds like they are bad. 404 are great. when pages are gone, they are gone - 404 or 410. if the move then 301. but do not redirect gone pages to friendly 200 pages. keep your site simple and your redirects rules as well. links don't have alt text, images have alt text. in an image is linked, that alt text substitutes the anchor text. no, that is the job of the product, onpage marketing, conversion optimization. SEO is really just about getting - targeted - visitors. (she has clearly read too much SEOmoz) no, it's not. that is just something that SEO agencies tell you to sell you their services and useless tools.disclaimer: i work as an SEO - i hate SEOs. my biggest success is 62 M visitors a month. i don't read SEO blogs.