SEO 102

john | March 6, 2021, 9:54 p.m.

This is a article expanding on SEO 101 which is a short list written by grindstone, an old friend of mine.  I mean that in the most literal sense, he is in fact ancient.

Either way, he writes a few things, I'll write them out, but the list is as follows:

Study SERPs
Test everything
Even/Especially things that seem moronic
Combine elements that move the needle
Track results
Scale as fast as you can before it doesn't work anymore
Don't show it to anybody
Ignore blogs (except Eli)
Ignore speakers (nobody worth listening to is sharing their shit for cred/job opportunities)
A shovel is terrible for mowing your lawn but great for digging holes. Most of the things that SEOs say don't work follow that analogy.
Smile more
Train hard
Fin

This blog post will basically simply expand on each of these subjects, in a sense the long form version of SEO 101.

Study SERPs

You would think this is common sense, but sense is no so common.  Take for example dog snuggie, it is only logical to assume that anyone would want to put a snuggie on their dog, but alas there was moments in history where this was seen as a travesty to humanity so it never happened.  So instead what happened is what you expect, you had to study the serps.  If you want to rank for say "cars" you would first go to the search engine of your choice, and type in cars. 

From there you would look at the top ten results that are not paid, and you would go to each site, specifically the page that is ranking.  See their content, see their back link profile, load time.  There are other factors, but you get the idea.

Test Everything

The test of all knowledge is experiment.  Experiment is the judge of scientific "truth" - Feynman

Even/Especially things that seem moronic

Morons stumble into greatness, be a moron if you must.  I prefer the things that seem odd, so put your spin on it.

Combine elements that move the needle

In this example he is saying you should have multiple experiments going at any one time.  And if there is success with them, combine what works with each.  For example if you where to change the <title> tag of your website's inner page that is about SEO from "domain.com" to "SEO" and you notice that that after a week, or when the site gets reindiexed you rank for on page 200 for SEO, that was something that moved the needle.

Track results

There are many free serp tracking tools out there, there are also some paid ones.  Find one that works for you, you do not need a lot of data to start.  The tools allow you to put in your websites domain or url and then it scans googles top 100 or 200 results to see if your site or any of it's inner pages rank for that term.

Scale as fast as you can before it doesn't work anymore

This is where programming knowledge comes in handy.  It allows you to exponentially scale your project.  On the contrary if you don't have that, manpower works as well.  Since most things that are done in the SEO field only have a half-life of how ever long the search engine you are experimenting on keeps it's algorithm relatively the same, what works today could not tomorrow.

Don't show it to anybody

I disagree with this, you need to PM grindstone.

Ignore blogs (except Eli)

He is referring to the great SEO blog from the retired SEO pioneer, Eli, from BlueHatSEO, you can find the original at original.bluehatseo.com

Ignore speakers (nobody worth listening to is sharing their shit for cred/job opportunities)

This is generally true, although the paradox of this statement is what was shared in SEO 101 is in fact worth listening too.  So not all things have to be taken at face value, but at times they must be believed.

A shovel is terrible for mowing your lawn but great for digging holes. Most of the things that SEOs say don't work follow that analogy.

This is generally true, in the exception where you are able to use the shovel as the head of a lawnmower.  In which case I would highly advise you just go buy a push mower.  The engineering required to get the shovel to fit on the lawnmower seems excessive.

Smile more

This could potentially be interpreted as a statement that has a mixed tone implying smiling will make rankings go up.  Although I must say that this is more of a causation of the effect of applying the other things in the list.  Either way, if one does not smile, that implies one is not happy.  So be happy, even if you can't, or more simply smile more.

Train hard

Smiling requires less muscles than frowning.  Since you should be smiling more, that means you will be using less muscles in general, so you must hold your smile longer to maintain the gains.

Fin

This is called grindstones last theorem.  We can only assume he was overtaken by the power of publishing before he was able to properly finish.