Typically, traditional “SEO best practices” are a set of guidelines that you can follow to help you create very focused “topic specific” pages which then appear in top search results.
Some of the very basic influences include instances of your researched keyword phrase used in a variety of places such as:
– Title tag
– Keyword META tag
– Header tags
– Body text
– Link text
– Keyword Density
– Keyword prominence
– Keyword relevancy
– Keyword proximity
– Link popularity (off-page factor)
– Link reputation (off-page factor)
– Etc..etc
Of course none of this is new. These are by no means, the entire list. Google currently has about 200 different factors that contribute to relevancy of a Web page.
So then, what’s the challenge?
The search engine optimizers challenge, tends to be to focus on these types of things in general, but then try to determine the degree elements vary and how they should apply them.
As you know, all of these influences can vary tremendously.
Traditionally, various tools have been used to try to identify the important factors “by percentage.”
Sometimes, newsletters and other resources will try to tell you how the algorithm is working “this month” or changing next month.
For example, you might read somewhere that your Keyword Density must be 2% and your Title Tag needs a certain percentage keyword weight and you must have so many characters include and dozens of other snippets of factors. Of course each month, the resource may tell you how MUCH things have changed and therefore you can easily get caught in the trap of “algorithm chasing.”
But as hard as you may try, it just never seems to work for you. (Don’t waste your time algorithm chasing.)
Have you ever wondered where all the conflict comes from in SEO?
Often, you’ll find many conflicting views between various newsletters, reports and resources. And this is most often for exceptionally good reasons.
The primary reason is NOT because people are all trying to be hard to get along with or NOT because they are attempting to be deceptive. Many of them really believe the results of their own research and yet, very few have actually learned how to measure these truths accurately. They can forget that search engines grade everything on a curve (even for the same identical keyword phrase.)
So then often, SEOs work for days or sometimes weeks and even months
– making tiny changes and fine tuning and “tweaking the source code” until the pages would move higher and higher.
Of course, there are plenty of success stories for businesses that have operated in this traditional fashion and done very well increasing their traffic, conversions and sales.
But back to the “traditional challenge”
Where the challenge is in this traditional SEO process, (which is still the way many optimization companies still work today) is that you have a huge “wasted time” element. Time is money, they say, and with SEO skills, it’s true too.