Article by Jill Whalen

Last month I attended the SMX West session in Santa Clara entitled Is it Time for Search Marketing Standards? It was an interesting session, but I wasn’t really sure where I stood on the issue at the time. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that not only would it be impossible to come up with standards that most would be happy with, I strongly believe that we don’t need them at all.

I have long been a proponent of performing SEO in such a way that satisfies all stakeholders, i.e., the client, the search engines, and the internet as a whole. My feeling is that the better we make websites, the better it will be for everyone. Through the years I have developed SEO methods that not only meet that criteria, they also work wonderfully to increase targeted search engine traffic. In fact, the techniques I developed and refined over the years have been adopted by tens of thousands of others who share my belief that SEO is about making websites better, not about tricking the search engines.

So you’d think I’d be a big proponent of standards… but I’m not.

Here are the top 4 reasons why I believe we don’t need SEO standards:

1. There are too many ways of skinning the SEO cat.
2. We can’t even agree on the definition of search engine optimization.
3. There are already laws to protect people from SEO scams.
4. There’s no such thing as “cheating” in SEO.

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In 1996, two thirds of all people online (66 percent) lived in the U.S. By last October, that had completely flipped, with 77 percent of the online population living in the rest of the world and only 23 percent in the U.S. The U.S. still has the largest total number of Web surfers (162 million a month), but China is catching up fast (with 96 million):

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Before investing time and effort in search rankings, and even before setting client expectations, it makes sense to gather whatever intelligence you can about the keywords you’d like to rank for. SEOs and webmasters have few reliable sources of information about the relationship between rankings and traffic. But Wikipedia’s traffic stats can help, offering some surprisingly detailed data.

Have you been searching for Jesus? On Google, Wikipedia ranks first for that search. How much is that first place ranking worth? According to Wikipedia’s public traffic stats, about 14k page views on a typical day, and 19.3k on Christmas. The redirect Jesus Christ, which points to the same page, gets about 25% as much traffic, and Christ adds another 10%.

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