[jonkelly]

It's interesting that in this post about "Simple SEO" he does a bunch of "advanced" things that aren't mentioned -- highly optimized page Title and URL (which appears intentional as it does not match the blog post title), post title optimized for social media sharing and CTR, a version that's too large for most blogs so that bloggers will link to it (with optimized mouse-over text to boot). When he references on-page factors and then says "I used to worry about these above factors" -- well, it feels a little dishonest to me.

[kgtm]

Or, what he is saying is that the "advanced" things you notice pale in comparison to the real value of content.

[bigiain]

+1 - Notice he finishes with this:

"Sure, optimizing page titles and header tags within posts can help your chances of ranking highly. But the biggest boost that you’ll get comes from getting links."

This is something _everybody_ who's spent any time researching SEO knows, but way too many people ignore it - probably because it's time consuming and _hard_. All the on-page stuff is relatively straightforward. Inbound links are at least as important as anything you do on your own site.

Like Ted Dzubya says: "Non-brain-damaged web design and link building are 100% of SEO."[1]

It's much easier to tell your boss/client that you spent 25 hours doing keyword research and tweaking page titles, headings, the body copys keyword density, adding keyword targeted landing pages, and a/b testing the signup button colours, keyword optimising navigation and menu labels - instead of spending 3 days getting overwhelminghy rejected asking other people to put links to your "content" on their site.

That's mostly why it works. "Page rank" is successful precisely because it's harder to game than any of the on-page stuff you can do (anyone remember the keyword meta tag? What a quaint idea! It's quite a nice reminder of what the internet used to be, back before spam was invented...)

[1] http://teddziuba.com/2010/06/seo-is-mostly-quack-science.htm...

[flamingbuffalo]

the file name for the image is along those lines too:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.lifedev.net/media/images/Sho...