Comments on: Up-to-date SEO knowledge

by: elias kai

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:19:11 +0000

I think you have already mentioned all seo basics but it is pretty important to find the right doers.

by: Peter van der Graaf

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:42:31 +0000

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.

by: Matt Larson

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:53:03 +0000

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”?

by: Firefox Community Edition

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:05:23 +0000

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.

by: Joost de Valk

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:58:47 +0000

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…

by: Ruben

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:35:19 +0000

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.

by: Peter van der Graaf

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:36:46 +0000

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.

by: Gerben

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 23:58:17 +0000

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 ;-)