These ancient Chinese texts contain lessons for anybody wanting to create effective search engine optimization

Perhaps the most applicable passage I’ve read in the translations from Sun Tzu’s  texts on the ‘Art of War’ is the following:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

How does that apply to SEO Tips? Well, obviously your enemy is your competitors and you need to know something about their strategy and their capabilities to effectively compete with them and you need to know your own capabilities and weaknesses – hence you can bring in expertise to help you in areas you are weak in.

But in SEO, there is another party that you have to know, the judge and adjudicator, Google. Completely impartial until you make a move, Google can be your friend or your enemy and as an enemy, it can take you out of the battle completely. It always amazes me the number of SEO experts around who do not know the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines.

Do you know specifically what techniques are going to make Google your enemy and get your site penalized? Find out. Seek out an alliance with Google and you will prosper.  Sun Tzu says: “We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.”

Make it your business to become acquainted with the designs of Google now.

When a client is not making money from their website, the first thing they do is run to you looking for SEO Tips. Quick solutions to drive more traffic to their website, but any astute advisor should always look a bit further than just how many visitors are landing on the page. The real number is what percentage of these visitors are turning into buyers. The conversion rate.

Here are some of the things you might assess:

1. Using Analytics (Presuming you have it installed), look at the average time visitors are spending on your website. I have seen websites that rank in the first five places in Google for highly searched keywords not return a single inquiry simply because the color of the website projected the wrong image. A simple color change increased conversion.
2. Does the website get the message to visitors quickly. Remember you have about 6 seconds to convince a new visitor that your website is worth their time. If it is a flash site, that 6 seconds may be just a load status bar.
3. Is it easy for people to contact you? Remember, there are many distractions online that can take away somebody who is ready to take action – someone may IM them, or an email they have been waiting for may arrive and they are distracted, then never come back to your website. I have seen a simple change on a website increase the conversion rate by 400%. That change was just putting a simple contact form on the top of the right hand column of every page.

Before you invest in a whole lot of SEO work for your site, ask  yourself if you are really making the most of the traffic you’re currently getting. It is much cheaper to convert existing traffic than it is to generate new leads and you’ll cut down on the senseless link and article pollution on the internet. Keep a small, tidy internet footprint and make the most of what you have.

There is a game I like to play often, using my imagination – I call it “If I were Google”, and I do this because Google has the money to buy any expertise it needs to buy and Google’s survival at the top still depends on it returning relevant results to your search queries and they are not necessarily the websites that have put the most money into SEO and link building.

SO, Google came to prominence through having this patented system of counting back-links. I like to call it ‘peer endorsement’, it’s based on the premise that if a website is an authority on a subject and therefore worth listing high in the results, there must be other sites, particularly sites related to that subject endorsing it. This system has worked for Google as it is harder to cheat, but then it has spawned this massive industry called link building who’s sole objective is to cheat it.

I would go as far as to say that ‘Link building’ probably accounts for a visible portion of the annual GDP of countries like India.

But then this link building really is different from genuine peer endorsement in that it is in ‘anchor text’ and genuine peer endorsement usually isn’t.

Anchor text linking means that the keywords themselves are linked to the website using HTML and all SEO people use Anchor text.

Have you ever seen a genuine endorsement of a website linked with anchor text? I don’t think I have and I believe that this is because

1. Most people don’t know how to do it and
2. The point of the endorsement is to tell their readers about that website, not to help it rank higher in Google.

So if I were Google, I would place very little relevance on anchor text links and instead determine the relevant keywords for the link from the nearest sub-heading and the text surrounding the link – and I’m talking about genuine http://www.relevantwebsite.com type links.

And then, I’m one man with an imagination. Google can buy a hundred like me and so they probably did everything I’m suggesting a couple years back. Meanwhile, the SEO industry barrels on like a freight train, impressing traffic hungry business with their ‘secrets’ and churning out millions of links that probably have very little relevance in Google’s algorithms.

What you do off-site with SEO, such as Directory linking, link exchange or even web 2.0 linking will have absolutely no impact on your Search Engine ranking  if your website is not optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank in.

Sounds absurd, but this is a common scenario:  A great set of keywords is identified for a client to rank in. Of course it is a generic phrase that gets some searches, let’s say it is ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the client’s site is about one particular mountain bike accessory called the ‘Warburton testicle protector’ which stops you falling forward on to the frame when you hit a bump. Now the url is testicleprotector.com and the <h1> header is “Warburton Testicle Protector” and so is the page title.

So our SEO guns go out and do a truckload of linking etc. without effect. Because Google wants to rank pages about Mountain Bike Accessories under the keywords ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the Google bot has no idea that the Warburton Testicle Protector is a mountain bike accessory. You need to let it know.

Opinions will vary throughout the SEO community about what Google likes or doesn’t like with on-site SEO, but what I have personally seen work best is URL,  <h1> Title and document title in that order. I have seen a site disappear from Google results simply because a company artist decided graphical headings would look better than ugly HTML <h1> headings.

OK, so does Warburton go out and register mountainbikeaccessories.com? and change his whole website? That would be better, but as a second best option, he could make a page called mountain-bike-accessories.html and optimize that one. The rest is easier, <title> tag or document title should be ‘keywords – company’ or ‘keywords – product’ always keywords first, as should the <h1> header.

And it’s amazing the number of developers who don’t use the <h1> tags, given their importance in the process. They create their own css style called “heading” or “pagehead” – If they have done this to your website, point out to them politely that they could take that same styling and apply it to the <H1> tag, allowing you to do some on-site SEO.

So again, good SEO starts with

1. keyword research and if you are not sure how to go about this, find a good SEO company to help you.
2. Next test these keywords with a PPC campaign to see if they really produce inquiries. Here, I would really suggest you have an experienced Adwords management consultant involved to minimize your click costs.
3. On-site SEO. Tell Google (and the others) what your site is about – especially in terms of what people are searching for.
4. Tell the world about it – directories, link exchanges, web 2.0

If you’re ever in doubt about whether to do something or not, ask yourself  ”is this easy to cheat?” and  ”if Google is trying to find the most relevant sites, would this be important?” and be guided by the answer. Remember, Google’s survival depends on returning the most relevant results for searches and catching out the cheats.

To me, Google sometimes seems like a big crocodile in a pond, sick of eating the same old catfish every day. Whenever it hears a new sound, something new, it snaps it up, only chomping the occasional catfish when there is nothing else around.

Blogs from the old original blogging engines like Google’s own ‘blogger’ and traditional websites are like the catfish – Google is just not interested. They seem to take forever to get indexed and back-links from link exchanges and directories, sometimes I think I’ll be retired before I see them have any real impact on a listing. But throw a fresh video to the crocodile, 8-10 hours. Indexed and showing on page one within 8 to 10 hours. Social Networking or Web 2.0 too. See the back-links from these sites working within days.

Why?  Well you have to go back to what keeps Google at  number 1 and makes it the most valuable piece of real estate on the planet:  relevance. When you do a search with Google you find what you want and if link exchange alone did that, the results page of any search would look like last year’s Newsweek: The same stale old sites that are accumulating more and more back links.

Web 2.0 content is fresh, happening, exciting. The web 2.0 portals also seem to have successfully kept the lid on spammers to the extent that they haven’t destroyed the experience as they were able to do with forums, blogs  and  earlier social networking tools.

There is still a place in the top 10 for the occasional old catfish, but woe betide any seo company who thinks they will keep their clients in the top 10 with back-linking alone. They will go the way of the dinosaurs.

I really worry about having standard one-size-fits-all “SEO Packs” for clients – because Search Engine Optimization is not a product, it’s a competition and the results you get depend on so many factors, it’s not funny. There is no real deliverable in SEO – the result you want is to beat some other people and get to the front page of the search engines at their expense.

The best analogy I can think of is competitive running. Not every runner can come in the top ten in any competition – of the thousands who compete, there are just ten – and in fact with SEO it’s even worse, one competitor can have five of those ten spots, or all ten.

You could think of generic keywords as being the Olympics – score the gold in ‘websites’ or ‘SEO’ or ‘business advisor’ or whatever is the main generic keyword in your business. And like the Olympics, the competition is tough and it takes some real commitment to get to the top or even in the top ten.

But then there are a whole bunch of regional championships, more specific keyword phrases “SEO company in California”, “Web design, Sydney”, “How to choose the right web design company” and so on. You have far more chance of making it in these competitions – often they are dominated by last years winners who are resting on their laurels and sometimes you’ll find winners who didn’t even know they were in the race – They just stumbled onto the field and were running to get away from the stampede.

And often the more targeted keywords bring good quality traffic with a much higher proportion of buyers than generic keywords.

So having a one-size-fits-all SEO pack is like assigning the same caliber trainers and giving the same training program to olympic competitors as you are to regional ones and allowing them to expect good results. The SEO work that clients need really depends on the race they are in and the competition they are up against.

So the best thing clients can get, is a good assessment from an SEO company followed by a pay per click campaign with good adwords management by an experienced campaign manager to identify the best performing keywords for a long term investment in time.