I've seen a few articles recently, on YOUmoz and elsewhere, extolling the benefits of originality in SEO. And I think it's time to set the record straight: in the vast majority of cases, if you are doing something none of your competitors are doing, you are wasting your time and your client's money.

The Case Against Originality

SEO is going corporate. Big companies are doing it in-house instead of hiring a consultant; consultants are scaling up, hiring people, and growing into companies in their own right. Meanwhile, the search engines have more or less made their peace with SEOs: there's a lot that's prohibited, and everything else might as well be mandatory.

Don't buy links.

Do use descriptive title tags.

Don't hide links.

Do structure your site so good content is always a few clicks away.

Etc.

If you come up with a novel strategy, it's probably going to find its way into the dos. Or the don'ts. And using a new strategy means betting your results and your reputation on the outcome. There's no particularly easy way to predict what they will decide—there's no reason ten consecutive "Please link to my site" emails should be morally superior to "link to my site and disclose it to your visitors, and I'll give you a dollar." And yet if you do the latter, and get caught, you're in trouble.

Your strategy might not end up in the dos or the don'ts. It might end up in the "what?!"s, instead. Search engines may not care to endorse or ban your strategy because it doesn't have any visible effect.

It's tempting to point to other technology innovator as proof that innovation can be rewarding. But bast amounts of wealth in technology are made with technology products, not services (Ross Perot, one of the few technology service providers to get really rich, also happened to treat employees like gears in a factory—basically a roundabout way of turning a service into a mass-produced product.)

The Case for Unoriginality

Want to know what works in SEO? Just look at the people who outrank you! You'll mimic many of their results if you can build a structure similar to theirs and get the same bloggers and directories to link to you ("I saw your link to Smith's Guide to Skinning a cat. Surely your readers know there's more than one way to skin a cat. You should have them check out Jones's Guide, too!").

If you do this by rote, you'll be #2 at best. So don't. Find the niches they don't target, and get the same links they do get. Your site will outrank them for the terms they don't quite target, which can often convert at a higher rate than broad terms. If one company sells "shirts" and you sell "souvenier t-shirts," you can mimic their success—for a term that leads far more searchers to make a purchase.

Go ahead. A well-blazes trail is an easy one to follow.

And once you've saved yourself the trouble of chasing wild geese and dead ends, you'll have plenty of time to so the other 10% of SEO: coming up with the unique content and unmatchable links that will put you over the top.

The Exceptions

If you're going after a competitive term, you can't afford to do what everyone else is doing. But targeting a hyper-competitive term isn't just business: it's PR, bragging rights, and general obstinance. The competition to own the term [car insurance quotes] must be brutal. It's easier to get a dozen iterations on, say, [car insurance price honor student discount].

If you really, really have to get a tough term, you can experiment. In fact, you have to. You have to get the links your competitors can't get—and you have to keep doing it, because they're doing the same thing to you.

The SEO market is not saturated. Many SEO professionals know the industry's standards and best practices. While most of us would love to come up with the next big linkbaiting technique or gray-hat trick, the fact remains: most of the time, when you're doing SEO, pioneering doesn't pay.