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| Every day new people start learning search engine optimization. They will be misled by fakers. Here are mistakes you should avoid. |
How do you separate the wheat from the chaff when you're learning about search engine optimization?
I think the place to begin is to understand there are three major kinds of search engines.
Web search engines like Baidu, Bing, Google, Qwant, and Yandex crawl billions of sites and build huge indexes. They let you search these indexes from their Websites. Most people in America and Europe concentrate on Google but Bing is also important in North America. Baidu is the Chinese search giant. Yandex is the Google of Russia. Qwant is a European search engine.
There are dozens - maybe hundreds - of smaller search engines. These companies buy their data from the big boys. If you're familiar with DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yahoo, and Amazon's Alexa search engine you should know they get their data from Bing. I think Bing has the most search partners of all these guys. If you're using one of the smaller search engines out there you're probably searching on Bing data.
Social media search engines are run by their respective platforms. Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter all have their own search engines. People who promote their sites on social media should study these search engines and learn what they need from you.
There are dozens of social media services. They'll each have their own search engines. The importance of a social media search engine depends on how many people use the service.
Site search engines are those little boxes you see on blogs and Internet stores. Every time you search a site for a product or an article you're using their specialized search engine. A lot of blogs use Google site search but most blogs use a native search engine. Blog and forum search engines are run against SQL databases and they are not as sophisticated as the other types of search engines.
If you have your own site and you don't like the way your site search works you should look for an alternative solution.
Don't Ignore the Search Engine Guidelines
I know a lot of marketers who never read search engine guidelines. Some of them are spammers who don't care about the guidelines.
Search engine guidelines tell you what helps the search engine. They also tell you what the search engine doesn't like. If you violate search engine guidelines you may be penalized and thrown out of their index.
Here are the official guidelines for the major search engines. You may have to use a translator to read these sites. I know a few people who build sites outside of their native languages.
There are other search engines like Coc Coc (for Vietnamese) and Seznam (for Czech) but I don't know anything about them other than they exist.
Russia has other search engines too. These include Mail.ru, QIP.ru and Rambler. I don't know anything about them.
China's other major search engines are Qihoo360 and Sogou.
If you are serious about these parts of the Web you should learn more about the search engines that serve them.
Don't Ignore the Search Engine Dashboards
Many people use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, and SimilarWeb. These tools are okay for keyword and backlink research but they are bad tools for seeing search engine traffic.
The only reliable source of information about how much traffic a Website gets from any search engine is the search engine itself. The major search engines allow you to create accounts with dashboards where you can study reports.
These tools tell you exactly what you need to know about how often your site appears in search and how often people click on your listings. If you're not satisfied with this data you need to improve your site. Don't substitute fake data for real data.
And don't pay anyone for your search traffic data. It's free. Get it straight from the source.
Here are articles that tell you how to use these dashboards. You may have to use a translator for the Yandex guide but the Baidu guide is written in English. It is not the official Baidu guide.
There is no reason not to use these dashboards. I know people who spam the search engines who are afraid they will be found out if these register their sites. I think that is a mistake but I don't argue with spammers.
Here is a great article that explains why these are the best analytics tools for marketers.
Don't be Afraid to Use Subdomains
This is one of the dumbest arguments in SEO circles. Some people believe that subfolders work better than subdomains. Here is a good article that explains the subfolders versus subdomains debate.
I use a Blogspot subdomain for this site because it's free and I made a bet with someone that I could publish a nice-looking site on Blogger. I made $100 when I showed him this site.
The brouhaha over subdomains and subfolders was started by a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about SEO. They never took the time to look at how they had hurt their Websites. Instead of fixing the problems they created by following using bad SEO strategies they moved their sites and started over fresh.
You run into this kind of ignorance every day. I have friends who run SEO groups and they are always correcting the dumb ideas people share in those groups.
You don't have to use subdomains or subfolders. Use whatever you want. It makes no difference. I saw an argument about subdomains on Twitter and someone mentioned that Wikipedia publishes everything on subdomains.
It's true. Their main page is on a subdomain. If subdomains aren't hurting Wikipedia then they aren't hurting anyone else.
Don't Worry about Duplicate Content
Many people still worry about being penalized for duplicate content. No one is penalized for creating 5 copies of the same blog post on their site.
That's not a great experience for users and that is why I like to use excerpts. I always insert jump breaks on this blog.
Search engines have to pick just 1 out of several URLs if they find duplicate content on your site. If you're canonicalizing your posts you will be okay.
And as this article explains if you create duplicate content on your site then the PageRank follows the navigation. You're not splitting or wasting anything.
Duplicate content is only an SEO problem if someone steals your content and outranks you with it. You're not being penalized by Google; you're being robbed by a spammer. Know the difference and learn how to deal with it.
Don't Block Search Engines from Parts of Your Site
This has become popular thanks to WordPress plugins that promise to do all your SEO for you. These plugins add "noindex" tags to your category and other archive pages.
Don't do this. You want those category pages to be crawled an indexed. The PageRank formula follows their links. And they can also be used by search engines in sitelinks, which are show below your main URL in the search results.
If you decide to use an SEO plugin on any site you should check everything it is doing and understand what that means. If you only have 1 author on the site then it doesn't make any sense to keep the author category indexed. It would be better to redirect it to the main index.
That's true for categories. If you're only publishing in "Uncategorized" then redirect that category to the main index.
This way the search engines follow your links and have someplace to go. Their PageRank formulas will follow the links too.
Don't Follow SEO Advice Blindly
If someone teaches an SEO strategy that goes against the search engine's guidelines or advice it's probably a bad strategy. Spammers are willing to take risks because they replace their sites at the drop of a hat.
If you want to build a single brand and not change your Website every six months then don't follow advice that contradicts what the search engines are telling you. Even if it looks like the trick might work you don't want to have to start over every few months.
Search engine optimization begins with creating a good, interesting Website. If you don't have that you might as well give it up. No one will want to visit your site anyway. They'll just close the browser window in disgust after you trick them into visiting.
Be the guy you admire. Make the Website you enjoy visiting every day because that should be the kind of site other people want to visit.
