The First Piece of The SEO Puzzle
I‘ve never questioned the relevance of textbook SEO practices, but evidently there are others in the search engine optimization world who are curious about whether are not they should concern themselves with basic textbook SEO.
A recent thread on the Cre8site forum poses the question, “Is Textbook SEO dead?â€, and most of the participants in the discussion seem to agree that the dynamic state of SEO has made on page factors less critical.
My response to this question would have to be a definite, no. Textbook SEO is not, and never will be dead. The power of textbook SEO (spider friendly code, etc…) is relative to your level of competition. Naturally, high levels of competition will lower the effectiveness of your on page factors but that doesn’t suggest bypassing this step in the optimization formula. The goal of most search engines is to rank websites based on content validity and user engagement (Google can measure user engagement!). This would, of course, dictate a focus primarily on content rather than code, but the content still has to be easily crawled.
Frequently, I get SEO clients who are in markets with relatively low levels of competition (micro niche markets or local search) and usually textbook SEO, alone, will improve their rankings.
Then there are the clients, who have mature websites with a respectable amount of backlinks that cannot figure out why they rank poorly on the SERP’s. For these clients, I always look at their code first before analyzing any other part of their website. It only takes a glance to determine if they have failed to address basic SEO coding practices. Only after the code is analyzed, do I look for other areas where they may be getting penalized (duplicate content, hidden text, sharing an IP address with spammers, etc…).
Think of textbook SEO as the first piece of the puzzle. It may not be as important, but it is a piece nonetheless.
Anyone interested in textbook SEO should check out Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. It is a great SEO resource.