Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in my experience is 5% smartness, 95% work. Being smart involves having a strategy, basically a goal and a set of principles or rules about how to best achieve the goal. I try to implement the least time consuming and most important rules first, and then to do the more demanding tasks later. Regardless of all the books written on the subject and all the advertisements by consultants claiming to have more or less scientific knowledge about SEO, I do not view SEO as a science. Search engines are based on science, but SEO is mostly art. The reaon, of course, is that the search engines don’t want us (or their competitors) to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore, there is far too much uncertainty and far too many unpredictable elements involved for anyone to know anything with much certainty when it comes to SEO.
Consequently, I think, I examine, I formulate rules, and I implement them, and I study the results. Then I try to learn from my mistakes and build on what seems to work. So far, from what I can see using my site statistics, is that using page titles with the most important keywords in them works well. The same is the case for the use of semantic URLs – that is, URLs for my web pages that use natural language and contain keywords. For example, a page saved as www.mydomain.com/bk1xxx1222.htm does not get as many hits as one called www.mydomain.com/nokia9920.htm
So for the moment I am spending at least an hour, sometimes 2 hours, each day implementing these simple rules on my web sites. And it does help. Over the last month or so, I have observed considerable increases in the number of hits, both from Google and other search engines, on the pages that I have worked with. But it takes time to do the work, and it takes time before I begin to see the results as well.
– Peter
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