is seo simple?

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Originally Posted by epidemic

but isnt SEO just making a website that applies to the www standards?

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Nopes! It's much more than that. It's not difficult when you know what you want to do and when you know what you're doing. It involves updating your knowledge all the time, noticing what your competition is doing, noticing the behavior of Google and many more things. It's much more than making a website :) :)

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Originally Posted by epidemic

what else than good programming skills are needed for SEO?

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Having programming skills is not required in order to rank #1 and for SEO. But yea, progamming knowledge won't harm - rather it will be a +1.

You need to be able to understand the behavior of Google - the way it's using metrics to rank websites. You need to be analytical enough to analyze your competition and see where can you beat it. Above all, you need to be open to accept changes required to optimize website effectively. If you can think out of the box, and have useful skills then it will be a lot easier to optimize, promote website and make it big.

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Originally Posted by Shawn

Read my post here http://www.netbuilders.org/site-prom...where-761.html

Is that the black magic you are talking about? I can pm you the url, but since it is my son's design on the main page I would be embarrassed to publicly show the site until it has been updated.
:D

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Your information is kinda vague so its really hard to guess what is at work here. However, I've found that a lot of customer sites over the years ranked because they were hosted on a common server that was crawled from the root level up. That said, many sites were found in the form of "servername/~customer" regardless of the domain and or path to the directory. I've found sites that link to no where, and have no incoming links get indexed just because they were on a server that did have sites indexed.

I'm not saying that is what is at work here. However, I will say that there is no black magic at work. The black magic I was referring to is involved in the voodoo ritual or rubbing of the monitor prior to optimizing a site that might occur. Everything from praying, to summoning the demons in hell to insure your site ranks above all else.

You'd be surprised how much seo occurs by complete accident.

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Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

SEO is pretty simple, in that it's mostly just link building.

But figuring out how to convince people to link to my sites is a mental exercise that has kept me awake for many nights.

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Very true, and I think we all have those same sleepless nights. It's easy to get massive numbers of backlinks, just do a bunch of directory submits, but getting relevant and sometimes competitive sites to link to you is a nightmare, I think this is why so many people end up creating networks.

Personally that's the approach I'm taking now, trying to build my own network in the travel niche, and not just profiles on travel review sites, I'm actually trying to build a bunch of sites within the travel niche that link to each other, but at the moment my half dozen sites just aren't enough to compete for my own sites although they do wonders for my clients who have few backlinks at all.

Staying on top of SEO is the big challenge, or rather correcting previous efforts at SEO. I'm forever removing keywords from pages I set up years ago and now look like spam, rewriting titles to be more natural etc - based on monitoring the competition and google algorithms

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trying to build my own network in the travel niche

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this is good, and I do the same, but it's way easier if at least one of the sites genuinely attract links naturally from outside - it takes ages and lots of hard work to achieve but it is a very happy day when you can leave a site to its own devices because people are just linking to it naturally and you can forget link-building, directory submissions etc.

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Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

SEO is pretty simple, in that it's mostly just link building.

But figuring out how to convince people to link to my sites is a mental exercise that has kept me awake for many nights.

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I hear you mate, getting 'partners' is hard :s

Understanding is simple, implementing is not :)

SEO is nothing related to web standards. Every search engine have their algorithm and you need to follow them in order to produce better results and get good rank in search engines.

Algorithms do get change on regular interval, algorithms can be even change in a day two times and none of the web standards change so frequently. They are updated but not varied.

Yeah, seo is easy buy you should be aware about the tips and tricks. You've done the basics or even below that(don't know, am not sure about it still) of seo. It's wide..very wide topic.