SEO Best Practices - What ARE the best practices for SEO?
On a lark I did some quick query research about the term “best seo practices”. Did you know that hardly anyone seems to be searching for the expression? What does that say about the people look for search engine optimization guidance, help, and expertise? A lot of blog posts and tutorials have been published about “best SEO practices”. YouTube hosts a fair number of best practices SEO videos. Just scanning the top of the list, as best I can tell, I have not watched any of those videos. Nor have I heard of any of those people (and I would be surprised to learn if many of them had heard of me).
I wonder what a good definition for the Theory of SEO Best Practices might be (I don’t have one that I favor). I know some people insist that “best practices” SEO requires that you adhere to search engine guidelines. Other people say that isn’t necessary as long as you disclose to your clients what you are doing, or explain the risks to them.
A client recently asked us to give them a proposal for some work that violated search engine guidelines. I told my team to explain the risks in the proposal in as fair and balanced a way as possible. Upon reading that risks section, the client decided not to ask us to do the work.
Was that a “best practice” or was it shooting ourselves in the foot?
Disclosure is very important to best practices, in my opinion. But three very highly ranked Web sites (for “best seo practices”) do not even mention the need for frank discussions and disclosure between SEO provider and client.
Only one of those three example sites even uses the word “risk”.
Instead, we see fairly detailed lists of technical stuff — mostly just on-page optimization tips, maybe some server optimization tips. But how is that “best practices SEO”?
In search engine optimization, whose practices are best? Is simply following the fundamental steps of optimization sufficient to qualify as a “best practice”? Suppose we were attorneys. What would be expected of us in terms of “best practices”? What if we were engineers? What would be expected of us?
I’d love to see Ian McAnerin (an attorney-turned-SEO) share his thoughts on “SEO best practices”. He did write about search standards earlier this year in two blog posts about search standards.
There is a fine line between what I would deem to be “best practices” and what Ian outlined as professional standards for the SEO industry. In my view, it’s not the technique that is a best practice, it’s the protection of the client’s interest that constitutes the best practice.
Would I want to say to a client, “Hey, we can write a little program that drops links on blogs and forums to your site?” Nope. That’s not good for the client’s reputation, much less for his search engine rankings. Maybe I could pump up his anchor text-based relevance for a while. So what? A lot of people would see those links and think nasty things about him. Some might report him to a search engine or two or three for link spam. The search engines might filter or penalize his site.
On the other hand, if a client comes to me and says, “I want links. I don’t care how you get them, just me links,” then I have to stop and say, “Well, there are risks involved.”
If the client doesn’t want to hear the risks, then in my opinion I should (as a best practice) make a good effort to share those risks. If I cannot get the client to make an informed choice, then I have to decide whether to accept the business or to walk away.
But what if I decide to accept the business? Have I stepped over the boundaries of best practices if I’m doing something that may get the client’s site banned, penalized, or filtered (with the client’s full knowledge and endorsement)? Keep in mind that no laws would be broken in this hypothetical arrangement.
No fraud would be committed. No theft of services would occur. I might buy links or find some way to inflate PageRank or something.
What does that have to do with “best practices” or “worst practices” or “bad practices”? The client demands that the risk be taken.
It’s not so much a question of morals or ethics as of professional values, perhaps professional standards. When you place the client in an adversarial position toward the search engine, you don’t owe the search engine anything.
However, if you have more than one client, you do owe them something. In 2006, Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that Google had penalized Traffic Power and domains promoted by Traffic Power.
Google did not say that any domain you promote will be banned or penalized if they catch you doing something scarfy for one domain. In fact, there are people who have gone on record as saying they violated Google’s guidelines with one site that was caught but another squeaky clean site suffered no harm.
As a search optimization provider you have no way of knowing how much of your activity is being monitored by a search engine. You may think you’re under the radar but as Matt Cutts has shown from time to time, that isn’t always the case. The search engines may only penalize sites that violate guidelines, but what about sites owned by people who violate guidelines often? I’ve been present when Matt Cutts has said, “If you have 200 spammy domains, we may take a closer look if you launch a 201st domain”.
The more guidelines you violate for clients, the greater the chance you will develop a dangerous reputation with one or more search engines. Is that fair to those of your clients who have not asked you to violate any guidelines? How safe are their sites with your business?
It’s a question I cannot answer and I seriously doubt anyone else can provide a correct answer. Your editorially placed links should not violate anyone’s guidelines as long as you’re playing by everyone’s rules, but someone may not like where you put your links and start making a fuss.
Putting an H1 header element on a page is not, in my book, an “SEO best practice”. That’s a design decision that may or may not affect search engine rankings. It may in fact be a “Web design best practice” but it really has nothing to do with whether the search engine optimization provider is providing a safe, reliable service.
On the other hand, some people argue that best practices refer to the most efficient methodologies, the most cost-effective techniques. The “best practice” in SEO would be the one that works better than others.
Okay. You tell me which one that is. You’re wrong if you say anything in particular.
Then there are the people who suggest that best practices really have to do with quality. So how do you judge the quality of service? If I’m gauging the quality of service in a restaurant or car wash, I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. But does the average Web site operator have a good idea of what to expect from a search engine optimization consultant?
If our best practices can be laid out in terms of deciding whether to use tables or divs, H1s or something else, bulleted lists, strong tags, and obtaining links, then nobody needs us. The answers are all right there on the Web, free for the taking, and there is no value in whatever service a search engine optimization specialist can provide.
That is, if there is a clearly identified best way of doing things, then search engine optimization is about the mechanics and not about the process. SEOmoz has argued that search engine optimization is a service, not a (patentable) process. Contrary to the legal arguments that have been filed, nearly every SEO blog and tutorial that has attempted to teach people about SEO has defined a process to follow.
And that process is fairly well agreed upon:
- You begin with keyword research
- You create or modify content to be relevant to the keywords
- You ensure that the content is crawlable and indexable
- You obtain some links to the content to help get it crawled, to validate it, and to increase its visibility
- You monitor the search results
- You make adjustments as required
- You report the results (and adjustments, if any) to the client on a periodic basis
That’s a process, it’s a process that is widely documented, and it’s a process that is generally agreed upon.
But it is NOT a “best practice” because, frankly, it’s too broad to be a practice. The “best practice” for keyword research might be something no one has disclosed. But if it’s not a known practice, how can we say it’s a “best” practice? Who determines or rates the quality of our techniques?
There is no way that an SEO best practice can be a specific technique or approach — no one in this industry has the credentials to make such a judgement call (because no one in this industry has any credible credentials — we have no industry standards).
Maybe if we had some industry standards we could start figuring out which practices are best — or maybe not. After all, the search engines continually updte the way they do things. Whatever works best today may not work well in a year, if at all. It’s sort of a crap shoot.
Even link building has not been very efficient for several years. Why? Because most links don’t appear to pass value in Google’s search index. A lot of link builders go on volume because they don’t have a refined method for determining which linking resources can pass value.
Don’t even hope you can persuade me to believe that such a blunt, brute force method of influencing search results is a best practice. There are people who do better than that.
The bottom line here is that we cannot even agree on what constitute best practices. If the majority of people in our industry feel that best practices include how you markup a page, then the majority of the people in our industry are wrong as far as I am concerned (and what else is new in SEO?). I’ve certainly championed on-page optimization techniques for a long time, but every Web site is different (or should be), every campaign has unique challenges and resources (hopefully).
One formula doesn’t fix everything. One technique is generally no better than any other technique.
You could argue that some collections of techniques work better than other collections of techniques, but even there you get into murkey semantic waters. We don’t really have much agreement on anything that has been labelled a best practice, except that I have seen some of the most vehement best practices advocates argue that you should never put a client’s site at risk.
That, I think, is where our best practices have to start. It’s better to NOT put a client site at risk than to do so.
We can argue over efficiencies from now until doomsday, but I think everyone can agree that it’s not too efficient if get a site banned or penalized.
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published @ September 3, 2008