SEO companies aren’t the answer… even if you’re desperate.

I’m going to give away the farm in my opening. This is all you need to know about search engine optimization. Seriously.

Important: Good content, title tags, unreciprocated links, and clean HTML.

Relevant: URL, meta tags, reciprocated links, keyword density in content.

You can stop now and ignore everything else you read about SEO on the web – it’s mostly lies anyway. I’ve bought books, scoured the Internet, and read journals for a couple years now. Guess what? It all boils down to those things I just listed.

Write good content that people want to read and link to, use good title tags (use common terms people are looking for, not a witty turn of phrase), and don’t hide your content in eight layers of tables that a spider can’t read easily. Complicated, huh?

Hiring a company to “boost your ranking” is bogus

All they can legitimately do is clean up your content for you. Anything else they do (submitting it to search engines, using link farms to artificially boost you) is probably negligible or harmful in the long-term. If you’re worried no one knows your site exists, submit a couple articles to Digg.com, del.icio.us, etc. That will let the spiders pick up your scent. Once the engines know your site is there, they’ll be back. Trust in it.

Relying on meta-tags is bogus

They can’t prop up a page. At best, they might help clarify what the page is about for a search engine or even appear on the results page. At worst, they’ll get you penalized for lying about what’s on the page.

I know a guy

If you “have a friend who knows a guy who does search engine optimization” they probably run a link farm. Stay the hell away. Sure, they can jimmy your results for the right price for a little while and then you’ll end up back where you were or worse if you get caught and penalized (or banned).

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it twice

Repeating your keywords a whole bunch won’t help, and it might hurt. Say them when appropriate, then go ahead and use your pronouns.

The landing pad is booby-trapped

Don’t ever make a “special search engine page” or anything like it. Engines track the click-through and the return rate of searchers. If a bunch of people click your site then go right back to the engine to try again, your rank’s going to get hurt. Make it appeal to humans, not spiders.

Reciprocal links only help a little

Wonder why Wikipedia is the top result for, uh, everything? Because everyone links to it in contextual links (e.g. “Ever been tailed by a wombat while on a road trip?” as opposed to “Click here for info” – the linked text matters a bit) and it doesn’t link back to them. If there’s a holy grail of search engine optimization, it’s making content that established sites want to voluntarily link to in that fashion.

The only bad Flash is lonely Flash

Yeah, engines can’t tell what’s in the Flash, so just put it in other content that describes it. Don’t hate on the Flash if it’s what gets the links.

Stop obsessing, get writing

If people spent half as much time writing as they did obsessing about search engine placement, they’d do a lot better. Individual placements are fickle and fluctuate; nothing can substitute for a solid body of content with regular readers.

Final (read: unorganized) thoughts on optimization

The URL matters a little. If you can use Apache (or whatever product you’re using) to make your pages in the form website.com/category/your_title_here instead of website.com/script.php?t=variable&name=dumb you’ll probably get a tiny extra boost from having words in the URL instead of meaningless variables. Clean up your code or grab a free content management system like WordPress, too. Mostly… just write more and write better.

That’s it, your research is over. Now get writing.

Digg it!