Are You a Hardcore SEO?
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Michael Martinez recently posted a list of 20 hardcore SEO tips in his "SEO Theory and Analysis Blog." He doesn't usually give out lists of tips, and as you might expect from someone who focuses on SEO theory and analysis, this is not your typical list of tips. It emphasizes the one constant in the world of SEO: change.
If one takes these tips in the proper spirit and starts putting them into practice, each one is a full course on SEO in its own right. Many of them are counter-intuitive to the practices of "proper" SEO. But using them regularly will make you a better SEO, forcing you to keep learning more about your craft. It's the kind of education that would be hard to get from simply reading SEO forums.
Even so, two of my favorite tips involve heavy use of SEO forums. Those are numbers seven and eight:
- Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month.
- Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step.
This is not a book you're creating to sell to other people or to put on your website for free so you can get an income from the ads placed around it. This book is for your own reference. It's much easier to learn something when you have all of your materials in one place; that's one of the reasons why many offices have procedural manuals, so new employees know where to go when they have questions about how to do something. Indeed, it makes sense to use this tip when you're learning any new thing, whether it's a sport, hobby, or even a different skill set for a whole new career.
So why should you create a new SEO book every year? If you've been in SEO longer than a year, you already know the answer: change. Since the search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, the field changes significantly on a regular basis. The basic principles, like "content is king," tend to remain the same, but many of the details change; what worked one year could get you banned the next. Martinez cites another reason: "Because after a year of using all the advice you put into the previous one you'll have a far better idea of just how much [nonsense] you're getting from SEO blogs and forums. But that also means your next SEO book will be ten times better than the last."
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