Thanks for dropping by!

To all new SEOs (and amateurs): spend less time trying to figure out the “tricks” for gaining rankings in Google. Nothing is a substitute for good quality content and markup. Make sure you have unique title tags, and a user-friendly navigation experience.

Google is shutting doors on the tricks and tweaks SEOs talk about daily. So don’t waste your time and resources. Instead, focus on making a great site and the rankings will come. Almost all of the sites that rank well today do so by offering more content, richer content, and clean code.

I can’t stress enough to just follow the fundamentals Google outlines in their webmaster guidelines and forget about gaming the engines. Google employs tens of thousands of the smartest people on earth, so the chances of the rest of us figuring out back doors that won’t be shut within a matter of weeks is slim, at best.

As a beginner SEO, focus on the fundamentals and adhere to white hat SEO (and avoid gimmicks) as much as possible.

Submitting articles is good if it’s good for your users. But backlinks from these directories are weak and the engines are wise to this tactic. Probably a waste of time.

Write another article, instead!

Best of luck.

You’re right that links are important, but I’m going to have to recommend to most people that going out and getting links is not the first thing to do – you need something worth linking to! Focus on creating good, high-quality content, and the links will come. The quality of the links is much more important than the quantity, and the only way to attract quality links is to have a quality site.

Nice article. My background/bias is more on the technical side of analytics. I agree that you need a strong SEO, but if the people with the task of tagging the site, implementing the tracking code, and ensuring that all is working well. You would not be able to get the data needed to have a truly effective analysis.

A lot of emphasis is put on the business side of analytics, but the folks in cubes coding away are often overlooked for their role in the process.

-Rudi