Website SEO is often thought of in highly technical terms, and it’s easy to write a highly technical piece about it — but when you really get into it, there is as much art in the SEO field as there is science. Let’s talk for a little bit about the four non-technical cardinal rules of SEO — the art behind the techniques.

Different Searchers Have Different Needs
The so-called ‘buying keywords’ are used by users that intend to purchase something today, so it makes sense that they’re the first keywords targeted by a website that’s trying to sell something. But if you ignore all of the other keywords, you lose out on potential future customers.

There are four kinds of relevant surfers: those seeking broad, generic information; those seeking brand-specific information; those looking at the terms of a possible transaction; and those looking to perform a specific transaction right now. If your website offers landing pages for all kinds of surfers — — you can take advantage of a much broader diversity of relevant searchers.

Humans Experience, Search Engines Access
This is possibly the most artistic part of the art of organic SEO. In order to maximize a website, you have to please two very different clientele: the humans that are reading the site, and the search engine spiders that are crawling it. The spiders don’t see things like flash banners, fancy graphics, or password-protected content. The humans, meanwhile, don’t see things like inbound links or site speed. Maximizing both angles will lead to the best results, but too many SEO gurus focus on either one or the other.

Internal Links Matter
90% of SEO gurus out there — particularly the freelance kind — are interested in exactly one metric: the number of inbound links from unique root domains to your site. That’s a good metric, but it ignores a very powerful on-site SEO tool: internal links. Internal links are great for telling the search engines what each specific page on your site is all about.

The Best External Links Come On Their Own
Making backlinks appear is the easy part of SEO — but the best backlinks are the ones you don’t have to create on your own. The key to getting unsolicited backlinks from other people’s sites is simple: top-tier content. Unique content that has information you can’t find anywhere else, and that is worthy of outside attention, will get it.

Newbie web business owners have a lot on their plate — figuring out how to turn a decent profit off of their project is only the beginning. At some point, however, they all face a decision about how to drive traffic to their sites. There are all kinds of gurus telling them all kinds of methods of driving traffic, from clever ways to scam CraigsList to dumping buckets of money into unmanaged pay-per-click campaigns.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: none of these stunts holds a candle to the shining light of organic SEO. The reason why is simple: SEO is the most cost-effective method of driving traffic, period. That isn’t to say that there aren’t some downsides — SEO takes some time to kick in — but once it does, you’ll never regret having put that time in.

There’s two parts to doing proper SEO for a web business. You have to make sure that your webpage does everything properly — the on-page SEO — and you have to make sure that other pages link to your webpage in a friendly manner — the off-page SEO. Most on-page SEO is simple enough that a dedicated business owner can learn it and do it themselves, though it’s only really cost-effective if you’re going to be running several websites at once.

Off-page SEO, however, is almost impossible to do cost-effectively within a business. Major corporations often have an in-house SEO department, but many — for example, Travelocity — outsource almost 100% of their SEO, including their content, to outside companies or even teams of freelancers.

If you’re an online business owner and you need traffic that will sustain your business for years to come, you need SEO services. Most times, you’ll be best off forging a long-term relationship with a respectable, affordable SEO company. The work that you do together might take a while to take effect, so have faith. Once it does, you’ll see that what you’ve created together is a pump — a beating heart that drives traffic like bright red blood into the veins of your web business.

Let’s assume that you have a website, and you’ve also got a list of keywords that you’re trying to get your website to rank for. You may or may not realize this, but it’s much easier to get each page on your website to rank for a few keywords than it is to get your entire site to rank for an entire list of keywords. That’s where the power of internal linking — specifically, organized on-page blog posting — comes in.

People assume (correctly) that getting a link from Page A on Site A to Page B on Site A doesn’t do a thing to help Page B’s authority in the eyes of the search engines. No amount of internal linking is going to make your page rank for a keyword if your site doesn’t also have solid incoming keywords from as many different root domains as possible.

But what people don’t realize is that the total authority of your site can be manipulated so that Page A ranks for different keywords than Page B — through the power of internal linking. This is the deepest levels of organic SEO, but it’s worth learning.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a site that’s all about nutrition. You’ve got a bunch of solid incoming links from a bunch of other root domains, but right now your site is all over the place in terms of what page is showing up under what keyword. If you have a blog in a subfolder or subdomain of your main page, you can easily produce a bunch of content that is strongly bound up in a small cluster of related keywords. Then, you link each content page to the specific page of your site that you want to rank for those keywords.

For instance, you might write a blog post all about low-carb dieting, and pack in keywords like “Atkins”, “South Beach”, “low-carb”, “low carbohydrate”, “Gary Taubes”, and so forth. Then, you link the blog article to your site’s page about the effects of low-carb dieting and how it works.

Essentially, what you’ve done is to tell Google that, while your whole site is about dieting, that specific page is really all about low-carb dieting. As your site builds authority as a whole, your individual page about low-carb dieting will score higher than the rest of them will regarding those chosen keywords, and the searchers will go to the page most relevant to the terms they are actually searching for.

That gives you a boost in conversions as well as a small overall boost in rankings (because each page on your site is specific to a certain cluster of related keywords, it will rank more highly on those keywords than an identical site without the solid internal linking structure that your on-site blog provides.) As if there weren’t already enough great reasons to have a custom blog created for your website!

Imagine that it’s a decade ago. In early 2001, the Verizon Kyocera 6035 powered by the Palm OS was released to the public — the first smartphone ever to have limited web surfing capability. But that vaunted capacity quickly turned out to be…a bit less than what Verizon and Palm had hoped it would be. The Kyocera couldn’t handle pictures, it couldn’t see much of a webpage at a time, and it basically kind of sucked.

But, it’s what we had, and major companies wasted absolutely no time developing a new programming language and several protocols to deal with mobile website design. The theory was simple: KISS. Very basic websites with text, links, and little else, designed to let the mobile surfer do what they needed to without wasting a single byte of data transfer.

Since then, however, we’ve taken massive strides down the path of mobile web browsing. Today, we have 5G networks springing up across the country, mobile devices that don’t have download limits, and offer download speeds to rival most home computers’ internet connections. Furthermore, the graphical abilities of smartphones have exploded as well, with even low-end models able to download and play games that make the GameBoy Advance and the PSP1 jealous.

So what purpose does mobile website design have in a world of wireless gizmos that aren’t limited to the features that mobile website design supports? Why bother creating an entirely new site that will need it’s own support and even it’s own organic SEO if you expect it to get any traffic? The answer, quite simply, is that smartphone penetration is at less than 10%.

What that means is that, of the 300 million people in America, less than 30 million have smartphones. That means that leaving mobile website design this early in the game is basically telling those other 290 million people that you don’t need their money. That’s not the kind of message you want to be saying.

Even today, I meet people who can’t even be bothered to get one of those cheap one-purpose or even pay-per-minute cellphones. These are people who will probably one day give in and purchase a webphone, but they’re not going to shell out for a smartphone in their lifetimes. Don’t give up mobile website design just yet, or you’ll be leaving all of their money on the table.