SEO Is an Art, Not a Science

SEO Art

What makes SEO different from most other professions is that no-one really knows the exact answer and no-one ever will. SEO is mostly based on theory and experimentation much like a lot of science, but the difference is that the theory you once thought was concrete, can change overnight by a simple algorithmic change. There are also many different tactics that can be adopted and the same results will be achieved, a combination of on-page and off-page SEO will achieve great results, but the ratio doesn’t have to be the same every time.

The image below shows how you might be able to achieve the same ranking using different levels of on-page and off-page SEO. This however is not a universal strategy and I would suggest it would not be true for more competitive terms.  An example of how this works is if you take one version of a site that has tons of content on a subject and only a few links pointing to the site, compared to another version with less content but more high authority links pointing to it. Each version has its own merits and it’s up to the search engines to decide where to rank them.

 

Google alone has more than 200 ranking factors with many different variations for each, meaning that it’s not a case of one size fits all for SEO strategies. An SEO consultant could use all manners of different techniques and still get the same results as another SEO consultant that used completely different techniques. What it comes down to is doing what you know works and tweaking things when they don’t. I have had experiences where a tactic would work for one website but have no effect on another, showing that there is no right or wrong answer it’s just a matter of finding what works and what doesn’t on a site by site basis.

Not only are there over 200 ranking factors for Google to contend with, we also have to contend with the fact that these ranking factors change all the time, constantly keeping us on our toes, so we will never know every ranking factor or how effective they are. For example the introduction of Social media into SEO meant that there was now a more complex strategy to be used to achieve ranking.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz confirmed that Google and Bing do use Twitter and Facebook to influence SEO, which gives an extra dimension to SEO that forces us to take a more creative look at SEO than we perhaps would have a couple of years ago.  I now find myself thinking of strategies that would persuade Twitter followers to retweet my message and my links in order to achieve rankings and also create a viral element to the overall marketing strategy.

The influence of social media on SEO is probably not all that well known but what we do know is that by having many people retweet your link you have a strong chance of ranking and ranking fast too! Danny Dover also of SEOMoz created an experiment to see how twitter would compare to conventional linking in gaining raking for “ending hunger in sierra leone”. The results showed that Twitter has a massive impact and as a result the website that was linked to via tweets was ranking very quickly.

This factor alone shows how SEO is going to have to become more and more creative, not to mention the fact that ASA will start investigating paid links which will mean more creative approaches will have to be adopted to avoid any investigations. Rand Fishkin has made the prediction that “We’ll start to move away from the title “SEO” to something more all-inclusive” in his 7 predictions for SEO in 2011 something that I believe has been happening for a while now and so I don’t see the title changing just starting to encompass more broader marketing strategies.