Are You a Hardcore SEO? - Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
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Two of Martinez's most shocking and counter-intuitive tips are numbers four and five:
- Stop using keywords in your URLs.
- Stop using keywords in your titles.
Why would someone advise against a practice that is so basic to SEO? Everyone knows that one of the best ways to make sure you score high in the search engine results pages for your keywords is to position them prominently, and it's hard to get more prominent than your URL and your titles! Indeed, as at least one person who commented on this particular blog entry pointed out, Martinez himself uses "SEO" twice in the URL and three times in the title of his post's page.
Martinez isn't being a hypocrite; remember that the spirit of these tips is to offer an education to those who take them to heart and commit to trying them. He doesn't mean that you should stop using them altogether; he means that you should learn how to optimize without depending on them. To start getting your feet wet with this tip, it is advisable to take several web pages and choose not to use the keyword in their titles or URLs, but lavish everything else you know about SEO on them.
Why should you do this? "Because if you don't know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs...[or] stuffing your title, then you don't know how to optimize a Web page," Martinez insists. "Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something."
There's another reason you should learn how to do this: you become more flexible as an SEO, able to deal with a greater variety of client requests and needs. Martinez elaborates on this point in answer to some of the comments he received on these two tips. An in-house SEO who has control over the page design of the web site can use keywords in URLs and titles with no one to say otherwise, but a consultant or off-site SEO may not have that level of control. "The choice is not always in the SEO's hands," Martinez notes -- so if you already know how to do it, you won't be caught flat-footed when your SEO career puts you in that situation.
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