The Art of Search - SEO Blog

17. Please Do NOT Feed The Robots - Thank You

Search businesses send-out crawlers and robots to learn from the Web, to find and feast upon fresh, meaningful, helpful, insightful, lean and nutritious content. Google's mission is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. A core and critical component of that mission is to identify real food and ignore artificial junk food.…

Steve Whiting - 8th December 2023

16. What Is The Best Pole Hedge Trimmer?

The best pole hedge trimmer is, in fact, not a hedge trimmer but a domestic tower. Let's assume you own a website that sells domestic towers - having an understanding how you'll sell many more domestic towers by offering reviews of the best hedge trimmers on your website, is what we know to be The Art of Search.…

Steve Whiting - 1st November 2023

15. Layman's Thinking

A Customer emailed me a question this morning, asking if it was easy to buy a handful of domain names and point them to their website. I answered yes and yes. I also said they should save their hard earned pennies because buying multiple domain names would make as much difference to their business as buying Boris Johnson a round of ice cream.…

Steve Whiting - 16th August 2023

14. It's Only Words

There are just three areas of influence available to a Search Commander effecting change to a website through SEO: content, links and traffic. Change just one of these enough and you'll notice a change in your website's rank. However, these tactics are not weighted evenly and none of the SEO tactics may be regarded as quick and easy wins. This post surfaces the experience of a Customer whose website design vision didn't include too many words.…

Steve Whiting - 12th May 2020

13. You Are Not Alone

A key message of The Art of Search is to listen to the voice of the Customer. I want to share with you the text of some DMs between me and a person who tweeted with request for a little SEO help. The framing of their question was a joy to read because their SEO questions succinctly mirrored the mental process that I routinely hear people (maybe you too?) put themselves through as they start-out getting to grips with SEO. So, in this blog, I take a sip of my own medicine and listen carefully to the voice inside their head.…

Steve Whiting - 3rd April 2020

12. You May Be On Lockdown But Your Website Isn't

Before the time of The Buddha, before what we now know as the Bible or the Quran were written or translated - one man laid down the definitive text upon how to wage warfare. That advice has now been translated from the theatre of war to the theatre of business and, during this time of lockdown, you need to know that every business owns a fighter. You need to know that you can push your website to go where you cannot - beyond the front door, beyond the frontline of your business and out into the minds of your Customers.…

Steve Whiting - 31st March 2020

11. This Is What It's All About

Imagine, for just one minute, that you are Googlebot. Your task is to crawl a webpage, to understand what it is all about, to appraise it, to see how well it is connected and, ultimately, to rank it against others. Think you can do it? Great! Got for it!…

Steve Whiting - 8th July 2019

10. Hey! Music Lover

People think they can fox Google and engineer a better search engine ranking by doing something as simple as making a change to their home page. Don't be so silly. Do you really think that a company (Google) that's making cars driverless is so dumb that it is incapable of telling a spectacular website from a lame one? Let me show you what artificial intelligence (AI) looks like as it's presently smashing-through your everyday life.…

Steve Whiting - 13th December 2018

9. Passive Aggressive

Is your website an effective online digital salesperson for your business? Most businesses would probably argue that theirs is, yet all it would take is a quick look at the website's conversion rate to either confirm or reject this notion.…

Steve Whiting - 1st May 2018

8. The Cupertino Shuffle

Listening to a six year old podcast this morning I was thrilled to learn an anecdote that proves the validity of a thought experiment I wrote about in The Art of Search.…

Steve Whiting - 28th July 2017