Taking a browse through certain webmaster forums you would be forgiven for thinking that SEO is the online equivalent of rocket science. Thousands of apparently intelligent people spend countless hours trying desperately to figure out how to get better Google rankings for their websites using just about any method imaginable.
Lets take a trip back in time 7 years to an era before most webmasters had even started to think about building websites. There were no blogs and the BBC website was one of the most popular destinations. I distinctly remember trying to access news.bbc.co.uk on September 11th 2001 knowing that it would have the most accurate and up to date information from New York.
The first thing somebody new to SEO should do is take a long look at sites that rank highly in Google to figure out what they are doing so lets look at the BBC website back in the year 2000.
As you can see from this page the news section of bbc.co.uk has had unique titles, short urls and unique meta descriptions for over 6 years now. Why is it taking so long for everybody else to catch up? It’s no coincidence that the BBC probably gets more traffic from Google.co.uk than any other site, they have had a perfectly optimised website since Google began.
Why are thousands of people, 7 years down the line, still figuring out that adding unique titles is a good idea? How can web designers be churning out websites with the same title on every page? Surely even somebody without any knowledge of SEO can see that copying the way the BBC structures pages would be a good roadmap for success.
Of course on site SEO is only a very small percentage of the equation for most sites, off site SEO is the hard bit and that really is rocket science.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
Read some similar posts
- SEO in the Past: Fun with Overture Bidding
- Making friends just got very easy on Digg
- Online File & Folder Sync Between Windows XP/Vista PC’s With Syncplicity
- Digg redesign means more buries and more videos
- Easy Google Profit Scam, Google Biz Kit / Treasure Chest / Money Tree Scams
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
I totally agree about the seo being easy it should be like css, or plain HTML.
My Guess is people in the SEO world want it to be difficult in perception so that high dividends can be demanded. Well what do I know I am just learning
BBC’s probably not a good example mate. Even though they have got the whole onsite SEO thing in hand – more than anything, they’ve got their SERPs more due to their authority.
But seven years ago when Google was wondering how they could make their search results better they would have been looking at the BBC and putting extra weight on whatever the BBC was doing just to get them to rank higher.
My point is that if sites like the BBC have been doing perfect SEO for years why do web designers still struggle?
I absolutely agree! Although I feel like I have been about it for some time now, I still don’t see anything very different from what everyone is considering “Beginners SEO”. So I am starting to believe there is nothing more to it than this. There seems to be a lot of people who want to read about this topic, so if there really was some hardcore SEO, for the very skilled ones, why don’t anybody write about it? I think Vijay has a good point. People working with SEO are trying to keep it up on a level which does not exist, in order to make everyone else think this really if difficult, thus being able to charge crazy prices for the work they provide…
Leave a Comment (registration is optional)