The mysterious pyramid of SEO

For those of you who read SEOmoz’s blog on a regular basis, you might have seen last week Rand’s SEO Pyramid. Basically, just like the pyramid of human needs we all studied at elementary school, it breaks down into four sections what SEO is really all about.

These sorts of posts are great because they take you back to the essence of the work. Everyday I spend some time on various blogs, reading about what’s new and what not, and get bombarded with tiny URLs on Twitter (yes I’m twitteriing now!) of numerous articles. All those posts make for a fun and informative read, and obviously they’re great to get your SEO practice to evolve. At the same time, they tend to take away my focus from the essentials of SEO. That might be because I’m still fairly new to this field, you tell me (I mean that).

So a pyramid, eh? Here’s what it looks like:

Basically, all is based on great, quality accessible content. You could have all the best SEO tips and tricks applied to a site, but if it doesn’t have quality content that people want, it’s doomed. That makes me question how people choose the SEO projects they will be working on. Would you embark in a project knowing the content is not to par? Do you have control and influence over a site’s content? You can preach SEO as much as you want, but at the end of the day, if you can’t deliver what was promised, it’s your reputation that is on the line.

When your content is established, you can move on to keyword selection. Finding the essence of your page’s content and optimizing the semantics to get your rankings flying is an important and fastidious part of the job, but very rewarding at the same time. Alan Bleiweiss has a neat article on keyword selection on his blog, I suggest you go have a look at it. Justin also taught me to be creative with keywords. Indeed, I’m constantly reminding myself that SEO is about people, not just search engines. When I google words, I use keywords, but also questions, expressions, phrases, locations. You have to bear in mind how people are performing searches, and how they will be able to find your site.

Then comes link building. I’m not going to spend too much time on this as I’m still reading a lot on the subject matter and figuring it out, but as I said in yesterday’s post, link building is the fuel that gets your rocket flying. The more (quality) fuel you’ve got, the further you’ll go. It’s as simple as that. Getting the links is another story altogether.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid there is social media. To me, this is where your site is given back to the community and is experienced by humans. Growing and converting a readership is important and will ensure the vitality of your site and its community – this is where you’ll ensure a form of perenniality to your projects.

Agree? Disagree? Dazed and confused? Share!