Image via Wikipedia1st Law of SEO

Link Building isn’t SEO it’s a destructive addiction! Link efficiently not profusely and in disregard to the Search Engine Guidelines.

A recent member of an Internet Marketing Forum Posted the following survey. I’ll just reproduce the poll question without having the check box. His question follows:

In Terms Of SEO, In Your Opinion, Is The MOST Important Thing You Can Do To Rank High In Google?

1. Inbound 1 way links

2. Inbound keyword varied 1 way links

3. Quality inbound keyword varied 1 way links

4. H1 and H2 Tags

5. Keyword Meta Tags

6. Description Meta Tag with Keyword embedded

7. Have Good PageRank

8. Link Exhanges

Here’s a redactification of my reply.

The two most important factors (IMHO) aren’t even on this list. Just mostly “link building is SEO” mythology. Hey I’m all for inbound links that are generated naturally. Everything else link wise If you are ever going to head down this path, you must be aware this IS against Google’s Guidelines.

1. OK sure, I’ll take a naturally generated inbound link.

2. I’m assuming your talking about “Anchor Text” yes if you can get keyword related links with varied Anchor Text that would be a good thing. If your paying for them not a good thing.

3. See #2

4. Hx tags with keywords are good on-page SEO. All the search engines look at Hx headers and consider them equivalent to Bold and a Large Font Size. It doesn’t matter if you use Bold, Italics, Large Fonts, the emphasis tag, underline, score through, with respect to how search engines value them. The greater the emphasis you place on keywords the greater the search engine relevancy score for that query word/phrase becomes. Just remember Divs and Spans are not substitutes for Hx or any other method you deploy to emphasis your keywords on-page.

5. Only relevant to Yahoo and Ask. Only use a few per page cramming dozens only reduces your relevancy with those engines.

6. Excellent and writing your description as a subtle call to action also helps. Use the robot text commands. By default the search engines use robot values “index, follow, archive” for all pages but include them anyway. Don’t use “noarchive” until the page is included in the Main Index or it will never get included. Yahoo doesn’t use your meta description unless you tell them not to use DMOZ or their own snippets. Include “noodp, noydir” in your robot text and Yahoo will use your description. In general search engines will include your description (a subtle call to action right) if you use these values in the robot meta tag.

7. PageRank (Toolbar) is irrelevant in the search engine algorithms. Internal PageRank (every page on a site is ranked separately including the index/home page) is 1 of 200 or so variables used by the engines when displaying query results. Internal PageRank is not a number between 0-10 it is rather a number between 0-1. It is never published and made available for any site. From a reply I made to another post recently.

“Is this number (Internal PageRank) updated every time your site is spidered? Every 30 Days? 60 Days? Every year? You have no way of knowing what that number is or when it changes, so you have zero data and neither does anyone else. It’s a fallacy! Sites pass their “rank” regardless of what they do. You can’t set up a “no follow” barrier and tell the Search Engines “Don’t pass my PageRank to other sites”! Even if you could it would only serve to reduce your sites ability to present more relevancy to the search engines and why would a marketer want to do that? If you want to do something productive build your internal navigation properly because “Internal PageRank” flows within your site as well so you might as well take advantage of that fact.”

8. Link Exchanges are bad for your sites life expectancy. If you have a throw away domain be my guest use them. It’s a legitimate Marketing tactic but it isn’t “Good SEO”. If you have long term plans for your domain restrain yourself and don’t use them.

In the next post I’ll cover what I consider to be the best answer to this gentleman’s survey.

All The Best

Tags: Ask, Google, Internet marketing, Microsoft, MSN, Search engine optimization, SEO, United States, Web search engine, Yahoo