Just follow these simple tips for SEO Beginners and you could see your site ranked as #1 in every search engine in the world for every term you could want!* (*Results not guaranteed. Your results may vary. No animals were harmed in the making of this claim.)
And thus begins just about every SEO article ever. Ever since search engines started to dominate how we use the internet and people started figuring out how to game the system boost their ranking, the SEO industry has churned out blog after blog after blog from “SEO Experts” and “ninjas” and “gurus” and the like. And they all tell us the same thing.
Here, let me try. Here’s what pretty much every post for SEO beginners looks like:
- You should write good content!
- You should make sure your site has good keywords!
- Buy a good domain name!
- Make sure your important content is in text! When you use images, use the
altattribute to assign it text! - Use clean, readable URLs!
- Get people to link to your site!
I’m sure I missed a few, but doesn’t that look familiar? Know why it looks familiar? Because it’s the exact same advice every time. It’s common-sense web development advice. Well-done web development already does most of these things as a matter of principle. So really it comes down to “write good content and write it often.” Write good content, and people will link to it.
So how many times does that need to be said? Google claims to have 226,000 results for the search phrase “seo for beginners” just in the last 24 hours. SearchEngineLand.com posted an article titled “Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet“:
It’s becoming more important that you be sure your site is optimized for Bing. So what does Bing look for? Here’s a cheat sheet you can use to optimize your site for Bing.
They then go on to list all the same points that matter for every search engine in existence. None of it was actually Bing-specific. (And fortunately, several of the commenters pointed this out.) There was no reason for that article to exist – everything it covered had already been covered ad nauseum by other sites, better.
What’s even better is that for website owners that are legitimately beginners looking for advice, many of these tips aren’t going to mean much. They’re probably not going to be familiarity with the details of writing code, they’re probably not going to be manually writing URL structures, etc. Hopefully they’re going to be working with a web developer that understands these things and how to set up their clients to be successful without having to get their hands dirty.
Yesterday on Twitter, Rachel tweeted that she was posting a new article on beginner SEO tips, and I immediately asked why. Why add another article to the pile? She responded that news stations report the news every day, why shouldn’t the same apply to SEO articles? Except, the news changes every day. SEO articles are a dime a dozen, and 99% of them cover the same material over and over. (Probably including this one of my own.)
So, please. No more. The world doesn’t need any more blogs discussing tips for SEO beginners, unless you’ve discovered some new groundbreaking SEO tricks techniques that will skyrocket your site to the first result. As Derek Powazek said in his Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists post:
The One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:
Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.
That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.
That’s all there is to it. Now go forth, and make great stuff.
First, thanks for the Twitter link. Secondly, I disagree with most of your post.
You’re right, there are many SEO articles out there. And maybe there are a ton of “SEO beginner tips” articles too.
Every blog has its own audience and unique tips and views on how to help its readers. I believe you’re also under the assumption that everyone knows what you know. If you’ve ever worked with a prospective client, many of them don’t understand(or have time to understand) what you may think is simple, or a no-brainer in the world of SEO.
But at least there’s something useful that comes out of the Beginner SEO Tip articles (even if was said a million times) than the article I’m commenting on right now.
I agree that many blogs have unique audiences with unique needs, and that catering specifically to those audiences is a good thing. Different users in different industries with different levels of experience will need to know different things. No argument from me there.
What I do take issue with is the proliferation of lists of the most basic tips, like I laid out above. There’s really no need to keep regurgitating the same set of “use title tags! alt text is good!” guidelines. These things have been hashed to death already, and anyone who’s seen a search engine can easily find one of the million or so articles that already exist with such tips.
Even beginners will be able to get the information they need from one of the existing articles dealing with this. So my question is, why do people keep writing new articles with old information? Why beat a horse that’s already practically disintegrated?
Sure, new information that comes along definitely deserves a new look, and I’m sure there’s always going to be something new happening. But the “beginner SEO tips” aren’t changing. Ever, really.