Good SEOs
- Immediately try to understand realistic goals
- Don't over-promise
- Over-deliver
- Understand that SEO is not the only way to make money online
- Understand that commercially oriented sites are at a disadvantage
- Understand the power of baiting links with a quality site rather than 1000s of spammy emails
- Build authoritative resources
- Connect relevant and useful content to the query
- Essentially "build" the web, rather than optimize it.
- Have experience
- Are directly connected to successful web sites
- Can estimate fairly accurately where a site will end up
- Understand the power of a community and users
- Are very technical with the web to begin with
- Don't get caught up with tiny and arbitrary on-page factors
- Focus on the user just as much (if not more) than the search engines
- Find ways to innovate and fill needs
- Look for niche areas to work in
- Create extremely well thought-out and organized web sites
- Build their own sites
Bad SEOs
- Don't research keywords
- Don't find areas of advantage in keywords
- Don't pick high traffic keywords
- Don't understand the competition of keywords
- Don't focus on actual traffic
- Don't care about conversions
- Religiously are concerned with Page Rank
- Think alt tags should be "optimized"
- Think it can all be done fast
- Think any keyword is possible to win
- Think there really is a secret formula that applies to every site, despite the category or situation
- Think that because a competitor is doing it and winning it must be right
- Think it’s a numbers game and not a quality game
- Are only concerned with the past and present state of SEO and don't look to the future of where it's heading
- Submit sites over and over to the search engines
- Start off way too big
- Always bite off more than they can chew (and never chew it)
- Only win long tail keywords (and moreover long tail keywords that get NO traffic or conversions)
- Think winning the company name is a great start
- Think keyword density matters
- Think their should be a precise amount of content per page
- Think a sitemap is the answer to all linking and indexing problems
- Don’t even take into account information architecture
- Try to win multiple distinct keywords with one page
- Care about HTML validation, yet still have very invalid pages
- Take on huge search terms with 10 page sites
- Think it’s important to change EVERY image to text as if having one or two new words to index will do anything at all
- Think Flash hurts rankings
- Think they can optimize Flash sites
- Optimize about us pages
- Spend 99% of their time with on-page factors
- Think JavaScript hurts rankings
- Think tables hurt rankings
- Still even mention META tags
- Think they can win "loans" for $1,000
