SEO Advice from Someone Not Selling It (Some Contrarian)

I show data, occasionally. Most people think it is competitively sensitive.

There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)

Your pages do compete against each other in some narrow senses: for any given query, you'll typically be capped at two results in the SERP (results page), so if you had a third best option on your site it gets left out in the cold. However, pages on your website are (and should be treated as) comrades in arms.

The more links my page on, e.g., Jane Austen bingo cards collects, the more trust my domain will have and the more juice that individual page will pass to the literature category its in and the other page it links to. This helps me rank both the other literature pages (which have scant anything to do with Jane Austen) and also the almost wholly unrelated, e.g., Easter bingo.

#13 -- It's all about your SEO goals & priorities. I just have noticed it and wanted people to be aware of it, because it isn't that obvious.

#6 -- sure, case by case it might make sense. I sort of offered an exception in the description. I'm just warning people of the rookie mistake of going after a key phrase without taking into account the likelihood of actually getting ranked for it in any useful manner.

#9: I've installed Google sitemaps on many, many client sites and have never gained anything as a result. I believe Google sitemaps help GOOGLE in some edge cases, so of course they'll recommend them (they're not doing the work!), but on a costs/benefits basis for clients, it's a giant waste of time. Well, a little waste of time, at least.

We know that you get virtually no traffic if you're not in the top 10 in Google. We know that if a term is driving any significant traffic, there are more than 10 websites vying for that term. We know that your page needs link power (PageRank, anchor text) to rank for a competitive term. If your page doesn't have enough link power to even be indexed, it's certainly not going to rank for a competitive term just because you submit it via a sitemap! And if it's already indexed, inclusion in the sitemap doesn't do anything for you.

If there's some problem on your site where Google isn't spidering a significant number of pages, fix the linking structure of the site. Now the missing pages get indexed and, since they're part of the coherent link graph of the site, Google can use linking signals to rate them for SERP placement.

Now, you can use the sitemap to alter the priority with which Google visits your pages, but frankly, instead of spending even a moment's thought on that, hunker down and write more content or research new keywords or obtain backlinks or look for other traffic opportunites. Instead of hassling with a sitemap, I'd ALWAYS rather be doing something more productive.

#13: Well, yeah, this one seems a little confused. There are ways to channel your link power to achieve the effect the author intends.

#6: Totally right. You should waste no specific effort on a term for which you can't get in the top 10.

Let's be clear that we're talking about making hand edits, etc., to increase the rankings for one term, NOT making systemic changes intended to improve the rankings of a broad range of terms. That's a completely different issue.

Traffic increases exponentially with position[1] and if you're not in the top 10 the traffic's essentially zero. In fact, for most terms, if you can't get in the top 3, you're wasting your time by hand optimizing for them.

PS - For the vast majority of people and businesses, #7 is right on the money.

PPS - SEO pros all sound like they really know what they're doing, even when they're saying things that directly contradict what some other SEO courtholder is saying. Be wary of anecdotal information. Be wary of pro SEOs.

[1] With a little googling one can find a position/traffic curve based on leaked search engine data.