On Media Bullseye, Sarah Wurrey blogged about a search engine optimization (SEO) discussion at the Boston Social Media Club where, apparently, some of the assembled SEO experts were "less than willing to share many tips on how their business works."
Come on guys, get over yourselves.
I'm no "expert" but I have been giving talks on basic SEO for a few years now, and the fundamentals still hold. There are essentially only two things you need to think about to maximize your rank on search engines:
- The quality of the text and code of your pages
- The quantity and quality of the links pointing your site
That's it. Honest!
A short post on e-Consultancy.com this week about the Google juice wielded by Wikipedia has it dead right. It contains some terrific points about how a clean, clear, simple site with proper HTML formatting and text content, as well as a lot of in-bound links, will always rule in Google no matter how their mythic algorithm changes.
This is not to say SEO experts or expertise doesn't exist. Fine tuning sites to optimize links and traffic from search engines is definitely an art. But it's not black magic.
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