Today felt like a complete waste of time when I stopped for a moment and thought about what I was working on. Most of the day was spent tending to little items that should take less than 5 minutes to do. I had about 20 or 30 of these and each one took a bit longer. In some cases, I had to do some research or follow up on something else before I could complete what I started. In one case I had to upgrade some software. It’s annoying to say the least. I did manage to plan and develop an Adwords campaign for a client and pretty well finished one of the landing pages for the same. 2 more to go.
When I look at the day in aggregate, I feel like I did a lot but I have little to show for it. My job is funny that way. I work on things that most people don’t know about. Even my clients often don’t know about the mundane peculiarities such as htaccess files, duplicate content issues, or domaining. For some reason I care even though I may have a hard time explaining to the client what I was working on. These little things count.
Take search engine optimization for example. A successfully optimized page relies on a blend of smart coding, great copy writing, choice links, and a solid topic. And under each of those topics is a myriad of sub-topics. Many, many, many little things all adding up to one well indexed page. Does it really matter if I use an H1 tag instead of an H2 tag? Short answer is yes. Long answer is it really depends upon the rest of the little things. I mean, if a site is not in the top 10 out 20,000 then it’s likely that it has some other more important issues. But if you’re in the top 10 and 1 below your competition, it might make the difference. Is it a silver bullet? Definitely not. No one item is. But it does influence the final result.
So what is the secret of SEO? We don’t have the formulas the search engines use to rank pages. They won’t share them with us for obvious reasons. But they have told us in narrative what they are looking for: lots of keyword rich, on topic content and quality inbound links from relevant sites (similar link neighborhoods). Do this and you will be rewarded.
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