Up-to-date SEO knowledge
How up-to-date does your SEO knowledge need to be?
I frequently talk to people that aren’t convinced that they need to keep their SEO knowledge up-to-date. “Old whitehat knowledge works just fine!” is what they say. And in some cases I think they have a point. Most SEOs don’t need to read all the SEO news everyday. But what changes do you need to check on a regular basis?
Two years ago
If the last time you read SEO blogs or Google press releases was one or two years ago you can still know enough to get good rankings. Not that much has changed in the algorithms for normal websites. The most important changes have been made in spam detection, so optimized whitehat sites shouldn’t be effected that much. But is this entirely the case?
The last two years search engines got better at crawling websites. So if you still obide by the strict crawlability rules of two years ago your website will be perfectly indexed. If you used normal text in the website with extra focus (with repeats, in urls, in titles, in headers and other important places) on the desired search term, not that much has changed either. Placing extra focus on your most important pages with a good internal navigation was as true back then as it is now. Two years ago search engines had already placed more importance on relevant links compared to irrelevant links, but they just got better at determining relevance. So what did change?
- Two years ago search engines had just begun to include time as a factor in ranking and that factor has gotten more important. Many new authority factors make use of time in their calculation. If you’re still used to old SEO, you will need to do alot of reading to grasp how this influences everything.
- Providing robots with extra information how to index and show your website has changed much since then, even during the last couple of months. Google webmaster central, <meta name=”robots” value=”noodp” />, 301 redirects and rel=”nofollow” are just a few changes that improve your communication with the search engines. How would you know this when you have been out of the SEO loop for a while?
- Search engines have gotten better and better at tweaking the search results for specific searchers. Country, language, device accessibility and content type targeting have all dramatically improved during the last two years. Most search engines are now even including personal history and other personal characteristics in their ranking alorithm.
How do I rank in the UK in stead of the US? How do I rank in Google maps or mobile? How does someones search history effect my ranking? These are all plausible questions for someone that doesn’t read much SEO news. - Many new search types have been launched during the last two years. Video, blog search, articles, maps, mobile, code, news, desktop and much more new types of search results have arizen since then. Even a seasoned SEO doesn’t know how to optimize for all of them, but they at least know they exist and they remember where they can find more information when they need it. And that is the most important thing you need to keep up to date.
There are probably many more important changes that I neglected to mention, but for someone that has been out of the loop for some time the specifics aren’t that important. But where do you get the information when you need it?! Someone that was an expert two years ago, may be a layman on all the new aspects. Who do you trust and on what topic? The search landscape constantly changes.
The most important thing you need to keep up-to-date is your network of experts and sources. Without it you have no way to really keep up-to-date SEO knowledge.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Well Peter,
Isn’t this an easy article?
For all the readers, want to keep up-to-seo-date? Insert http://www.vdgraaf.info/feed/ into your rss reader….
It would be enough for the next 6 months….At least, I do, and i’m pretty up-to-date ;-)
March 18th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Well, my conclusion might be an easy one, but the problem is real. Many, once very good SEOs have too much work. Most of them just don’t have the time to keep their knowledge up-to-date. Their succes is sometimes their downfall. This article was written with a few real SEOs in mind and hopefully this is their wake-up call.
And my blog doesn’t cover much news. For old whitehat wizards (clean SEOs) it offers little more than things they will never do or good summaries of things they already knew. But maybe it helps them get a slightly darker shaded hat.
March 21st, 2007 at 8:35 am
I think there’s an extra need to stay up to date: feeling. SEO isn’t an exact science because there are too many unknown variables. You need to keep yourself updated with new cases and your own experiences, to keep the “touch”.
If you ask a good SEO “Will I be able to rank for this and that”, he will probably say “yeah, top 3 is possible, you need some more links and we have to edit your content and internet links a little bit, then in a month or 3 you should see yourself come closer”. The rationale behind that is the SEO’s experience consisting of reading other people’s cases and trying out himself, not a textbook or some set of exact rules.
March 23rd, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Ruben: that feeling needs constant tuning of your ranking sense… With the Google SERPs now being in some sort of everflux, you need to know exactly what’s going on… A few years ago we had PageRank, now we have “authority”, what will we have in a few years? You’ll never know… But we need to as soon as the next phase manifests itself.
The things Dutch SEO’s can do to rank in the Netherlands are very, very different from the things SEO’s in the UK and US can do… We can prepare for that by looking at what they’re doing, and making sure that once we get the same filters, we know what to do. Some people will REALLY have a hard time when that happens…
April 2nd, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I think it really depends on the specific area that you’re looking at. For example, there are certain pretty standard techniques that work as well now as they did five years ago while other things are in a constant state of movement.
Social bookmarking is a great example the latter and ultimately its effect on rankings over the longer term is still a little unclear.
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Agree with FF - most of the top rankings for industrial niches that I work with can be had with knowledge from even a few years before that.
I’d like to see more on your blog about the whole social bookmarking phenom. I’ve been a bit slow getting into it since I can’t seem to crack digg for anything.
I know it brings short bursts of traffic and much link love in some cases, but will this be a fad or something we need to really “get on the bus or be left behind”?
April 4th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I provide education to SEO companies and they do all the day-to-day stuff themselves. When things get too tough they hire me to do their heavy SEO. So for the education part I need to know the basics, and those change slightly over time. For the heavy SEO I need to be cutting edge.
After a two weeks holiday, it takes me at least half a week to get my knowledge up-to-date. When you do SEO for very competitive terms you have to know where the boundries of excepted tactics are and how to steer clear from them.
By knowing details, you can always find loop holes. You can see an SEO as a lawyer. And a lawyer needs to know all new laws (in his specific field of expertise) and keep up to date with precedents. By knowing the laws by heart, he can always interpret them to his own advantage.
You need to stay at least one step ahead of the competition. Especially when you are the first to know a certain penalty is bound to target tactics both you and your competitor use.
But even for normal SEO you need to keep up-to-date. For instance: What implications will personalised search and searcher behaviour have on ranking? Let’s hope good sites will keep scoring as normal, but maybe it is another factor that needs optimization.
August 15th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
I think you have already mentioned all seo basics but it is pretty important to find the right doers.