It’s never best with Best Practice

SEO is an exact science, anyone who says otherwise is wrong. However, the environment changes at such a pace that it can be difficult to conduct proper studies that are up-to-date, which makes things a bit fuzzier. It’s also often the case that you find yourself in situations where one advantage or disadvantage is weighed against another. That’s why a rulebook is rarely useful.

It’s not particularly complicated to learn basic SEO. Many are the twenty-year-olds who step out of their parents’ basement with a handful of rules under their arm and can push a site a little higher in search results. It’s not that hard to learn that you should have the keyword in the title and write more articles. Sure, it will work – at least sometimes and at least for a while.

It’s a quick job to download a Best Practice PDF, memorize it, and then start selling SEO or why not lecture at one of the many “tech conferences” held in the country. My, highly personal, view of the SEO climate in Sweden today is that a frighteningly large part of it is still like this. Someone who has read in a blog that it’s important to have the keyword in H1 quickly becomes an expert who can lecture on search engine optimization. Sure, you want the keyword in H1, but it’s not a given. It’s a stance. The problem is that someone has already made that stance, and neither the buyer nor the expert knows how that decision was made.

It depends on what you want with your SEO

Sure, there are things in search engine optimization that are never good to do. Putting Noindex on a site you want to rank well in image search is never a good idea because it simply means that Google shouldn’t index the site at all. However, most things in SEO are not something you can set rules for, at least not when it becomes more complex than the simplest beginner tasks.

A very simple example of this is that for a long time, WordPress themes circulated that used the same noindex tag on tag and category pages. This meant that these pages wouldn’t be indexed, and the reason was that the content was seen as duplicated from the posts. A reasonable conclusion if you’re not aiming to rank with the categories. However, it’s rarely the best approach, because you can of course rewrite the intros displayed on category pages. You can add static text and an image even on tag pages. You can very well rank well with category pages, so why sabotage that with a noindex tag? Of course, that’s true unless you instead want to rank those positions with a dedicated post for it.

It depends on your conditions

• How many links should you have in your navigation?
• Should you link to all important pages or just the most important ones?
• Should you perhaps link to all pages?

There used to be a hard limit, no more than a hundred links, because Google would simply stop reading beyond that. That limit no longer exists. How many links you should have depends on several factors, and the one I find most interesting is what your baseline conditions are like. A strong site with high trust can handle a much larger load of internal links than a newer, weaker site. It also depends on the competition for the keywords you want to rank for. If you want to rank for a lot of keywords with very low competition, you can have more links.

It’s different if you’re the strongest brand in the industry or the smallest.

Forget Best Practice for SEO

Sure, there are rules of thumb that make life much easier, and not all of them should be discarded. We use them too — we don’t write overly long titles, we think more text on a page is better than less (almost always), but it’s when everything becomes “best practice” that things go wrong. You need to learn to understand SEO in order to get good at it.