How to really learn SEO? (and conduct SEO research)

Do Your Own Research

I figured the best way to ‘obtained’ real experience on doing search engine optimization is do more research. Not simply reading all the guides, books, or tutorial, tips out there. But to do your own research. Build a website and try out various stuff. Try to get sandboxed. Try how to get out from a sandbox. Try how to outrank your competitor. See how authority links can boost your rankings. See how your site can climb or fall on the ranking. That’s right. Try it yourself and you can really learn grow on this.

Research Unto Others, too

Not to miss out on this, researching on others websites are as important. Try to figure out how can this particular site rank so high?

For instance, let’s do a simple case study here. I will search for ..well, let me think…the new cellphone by nokia in which my tv set is showing in front of me now: Nokia N93.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Nokia ranks no.1 and no.2 in this search. No big deal. They deserved it, and you (and I) can safely ignore the top 2 results as there’s nothing about it. Instead, take a look at the 3rd result (which I highlighted with a red box), and dig deeper into it.

side note: of course, you can use aaron walls’ excellent seo for firefox plugin to see what’s behind the curtain directly from Google. But one thing I don’t like about the product is, it lacks.

Before we going into the website, we can notice 2 things here that might affect the ranking: 1) search engine friendly URL , 2) Title Tag. As you can see, for result no.3 ( mobilewhack.com), it has search engine friendly URL, and the search term (Nokia N93) right at the first 2 words of its title; while for result no.4 ( mobilebees.com ), it lacks of search engine friendly URL, and probably lose out on title tag too.

Then we go into this cool little website. Hmm, the first impression wasn’t great. Full of ads. Probably another MFA site. What surprise me is that this site has no sign of authorities, and the site is only more than 1 years old. That’s interesting. What makes this site beats thousands of similar competitors with similar contents?

In this stage, I will utilize SEOMoz’s Page Strength Tool. The reason I prefer this tool because it tells you a lot of ’stories’ about the site simply by 1 click (althought it might take awhile to process). So let’s do it.

After waiting a few minutes ( which is way lot more than 30 seconds as the tools promised), the result shows and, well, wow.

7.5 Page Strength. And among the impressive stats are 2 of them: 1) 130K backlinks 2)370 .edu links (now who’s saying edu links carries the same weight again?) To see what’s the 130K backlinks and 370 .edu links all about, simply use the Yahoo! Site Explorer Tool. Well, to make things short, all I can say is that this site has appeared in Boing Boing, and have backlinks from almost every gadget/tech related sites. In which, inarguably make this site the top result (excluding the 2 nokia authority site, you can’t beat those, most of the times) of the “Nokia N93″ term.

Conclusion

In order to reinforce the things that we learned from the research, you can do another comparison on a similar site (perhaps against the 7th/8th result), and you will see the difference (and learn more from there). So from that simple research ( you can always dig far more deeper than what I just did as a demonstration case), we learned:

1) Put your main keyword at the ‘beginning’ of your title tag
2) Search engine friendly URL is always important. (if you dig deeper a bit, you will even notice the image of that site contains a search engine friendly file name: nokia_n93_cell_phone_final.jpg )
3) You need as many backlinks as possible from : huge amount of niche sites, .edu sites, and authorities sites (boing boing, wikipedia, etc)

This sum up my research demonstration. I hope you benefit from it, and next time instead of just reading up a guide/tips/tutorial or certain post made by an expert in the forum, do your own research. That’s how you can further enhance your seo knowledge.

Cheers ;)