One of SEOmoz's former regular blog contributors, Michael Martinez, posted his "Thoughtful SEO's Manifesto" this week. After reading it, I thought it would be fun to highlight some of the differences in how he and I think about, write about, and perform SEO for our clients. Let me just preface this by first saying I'm NOT claiming Michael's wrong or I'm right - I just think it's useful to see different sides of the proverbial SEO coin. As readers and as search marketers, you'll have to decide which pieces of advice and information serve your campaigns best - don't just take our word for everything.

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Let's run through his Manifesto step-by-step:

When you create a Web site, build a site you want to read and use. If it’s not useful to you, it’s not worth creating.

I'd think about this very differently, actually, and say, instead, build a website that your target market will want to read and use. If it's not useful to them, it's not worth creating. I can't enumerate the times I've seen a site built the way the CEO or the CTO thought it should be built, only to find that no one else on the planet shared their opinion. Usability, content foci, design, information architecture, and user experience should be governed by the user, not by the creator.

Instead of thinking about where you can get links, ask yourself how you can make your linking more useful to others.

I'm a little confused by what he means there, but I think Michael's suggesting that you should worry about how you link to others and not on how they link to you. In my opinion, that's a very noble and karmic way to approach things, but not particularly strategic. Instead, I'd suggest thinking very hard about where you can get links - make it a backbone of your business concept. If you're launching a website, why are you interesting? Who are you interesting to? Who among those that are interested will link to you? No one? Better go find some content you can target towards a link-savvy audience.

Dropping links in forums tells other people you don’t know enough about search engine optimization to be doing it. Using software to drop links in forums tells other people you don’t care how much you fail at search engine optimization.

I disagree  - in part. Dropping links in forums, especially in your signature, is a great way to leverage an existing social community to draw people to your site. SEOmoz's blog was literally built on this principle (from about 2003 to early 2005), so I can say firsthand that it works. As for software to drop forum links, I don't think it shows that you don't care, it just shows that you're invested in a very different methodology... a black hat one, to be specific. It does show that you don't have a lot of respect for forum owners or participants.

If you’re going to create content in volume, create it to last. Which would you prefer: to make $1000 in a month or $12,000 per year?

Damn straight!

If you think you need more links, the first thing you should do is create the content that provides those links. The second thing you should do is force yourself to NOT tell people how you got your links.

Agree on the first part - if you need links, you'd better have content or promotion strategies that will attract those links. The second piece sounds bizarre - first off, it's pretty hard to hide your link strategies from an SEO-savvy competitor, and second, who shares their linking strategies publicly? Besides me, of course :-)

If you’re using Yahoo! Site Explorer to do link research, you’re telling people you don’t know enough about search engine optimization to do link research. If you install an SEO toolbar in your Mozilla browser to check Yahoo! links for you, you’re telling people you’re too lazy to learn how to do link research right.

We strongly differ in opinions here. I think Yahoo! Site Explorer is one of the best competitive link research tools on the web today. I also like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, and Google brand and domain name searches. Using an SEO toolbar is a great idea, too - I personally use bookmarklets for all sorts of things. I can't understand why Michael doesn't like them and especially can't understand why he would take that stance and give no background - if you disagree strongly with conventional thinking, wouldn't it make sense to talk about or link to the reasons why? Then you could earn a link from this post about you :-)

There is nothing wrong with snapshot SEO analysis unless that is the only kind or the majority of analysis you do.

I'm not sure what Michael means by "snapshot SEO analysis," but if it has anything to do with this system of metasearch saturation analysis, I'm not personally a fan of it (to be honest, I've never tried it and only seen one report from another SEO firm like it that looked virtually useless to me). I really like using visitor analytics as my main form of analysis, along with link, domain name and brand name mentions across the various engines.

There is nothing wrong with creating large volumes of content as long as it’s unique, informative, and useful.

Agreed.

Blackhat spammers burn out the usefulness of about 10% of all SEO tips, tricks, and techniques that are openly or semi-openly shared on blogs and forums in about 12 months. White hat SEOs, newbies, and SEO gurus burn out the other 90% in 6 months or less.

I think I'm misunderstanding him here, because he can't be suggesting what I think he's suggesting. From reading this, I get that blackhats use up (which is to say, abuse and eventually eliminate the value of) 10% of the SEO tactics discussed in public in a year. That part's reasonable - I think I agree. It's this next bit that bugs me - I think he's saying that whitehats use up and invalidate the usefulness of the remaining 90% in 6 months... I disagree wholeheartedly . If he's right, it would mean that linkbaiting, a 3-year old tactic (at least), would have fallen out of fashion years ago. Putting important keywords in title tags is an age-old SEO tactic, and yet I still see great value there, as well. He must mean something else, but I just don't know what it is.

It takes about 2 years for a very useful aspect of search engine optimization theory to become accepted by mainstream SEOs and their followings.

Hmmm... My opinion is "not necessarily." I think that tactics like badges, quizzes, linkbait, widgets, long tail keyword research tactics, social media marketing, and local search targeting (to name just a few) all were picked up within 3-6 months of being mentioned publicly and had widespread use even in that short time period. There's a lot of early adopters on the web and on the consulting side - I've been in meetings with clients where they're espousing strategies that we both first heard about just a few weeks prior - SEO is a remarkably well-connected ecosphere.

Keywords in domain names don’t matter. Keywords in URLs do.

You're joking, right? Keywords in the domain name certainly aren't critical to doing good SEO, but if you own an exact match domain for a particular keyword, the quest for rankings (at least on that singular term) are going to be considerably easier. Saying that they categorically have no value is extremely perplexing.

Every time an SEO community leader tells you to ignore the keywords meta tag, just ignore them and go back to adding relevant content that Ask and Yahoo! still index to your pages until Ask and Yahoo! stop indexing the keywords meta tag.

I'd strongly disagree. Keyword meta tags are best for competitive intelligence, so yeah, keep putting them on your pages. Your SEO friends will appreciate it more than Yahoo! or Ask ever will. Besides that, I ran an A/B test a few years ago (and obviously, things might have changed) showing that while Yahoo! would index a nonsense keyword in the meta tag, you couldn't rank any better by having it there. I like Danny's post on this.

PageRank doesn’t have anything to do with relevance. Google uses PageRank to decide which pages will be displayed as the most relevant to a query regardless of where the most relevant pages actually are to be found.

I think he's saying that PageRank is just how Google orders search results, and thus, is only important for SEO, while many relevant results that are unpopular are ignored. I guess I agree with that - there's certainly a lot of very relevant, but not "popular" content or sites that's ignored by the search engines. That's why SEO exists - to help bring great content to light by using the tactics of successful search targeting.

“Aged domain” has joined the list of ambiguous SEO expressions like “relevant link”, “authority site”, and “SEO friendly” that mean nothing and provide no value to a discussion.

I strongly disagree with this entire sentence. Every one of those phrases means something and is very useful in conversation (at least, to me). In fact, I had a meeting with Seattle Children's Hospital about their SEO today and I think we used at least 2 of those to help facilitate our communication. Here - I'll detail what each of them mean:

• Aged domain - a domain/host that's been in the search engines' indices for several years and has some quality links that have pointed to it for a long time.
• Relevant link - a link from a site/page that's actually on the same topic as your site and might provide not just raw link popularity, but topical link weight and even actual visitor clickthroughs.
• Authority site - a domain that ranks very well for a wide variety of terms in a particular niche and has a considerable amount of traffic and link popularity.
• SEO Friendly - used to describe a domain, CMS software, or a particular tactic, simply meaning that it's properly structured for search engine robots to access and links/content to be properly counted/indexed.

Why wouldn't you use them in a discussion?

If you believe firmly that the age of a Web site or domain can matter, how do you explain why it matters to yourself? If you cannot offer yourself a rationale, who else do you think will believe you?

This is true of virtually any piece of information a human being believes. If you can't understand or justify a belief, it's called "faith" and is probably not good to introduce into an SEO campaign (or any non-theologic work environment).

I did not say that aged domains don’t matter.

I agree; he did not say that.

If all you had to work with was links and content, what would you do with your search engine optimization?

This isn't a statement and thus, doesn't fit particularly well with the manifesto/antifesto format, but I am confused about what you really have to work with in the SEO world outside of links and content - maybe historical and user data? But even these are dictated by links and content (the latter more than the former). I suppose offline marketing and social media aren't directly content and links, but I'd still consider them in the "content" realm, particularly if we're talking about a online-specific entity.

If you want to buy an aged domain, are you hoping to leverage existing link value? Are you buying that domain on a blog or forum used by blackhat spammers who milk every domain for as much as they can get from it? Do you look at the domain as a fixer-upper with potential long-term brand value? Are you ready to invest more time and money into building value in that aged domain than you feel would be required for a previously unused domain?

I'd agree that these are all good questions to ask oneself before purchasing a domain.

The real value of an aged domain lies in its future, not its past.

I think this sentence is a paradox (or, more correctly, a performative contradiction), but maybe he meant to phrase it as "The real value of an aged domain lies in what it can do for you in the future, not necessarily what it has done in the past." That, I would certainly agree with.

Every link counts in your backlink analysis, but not every link counts in search engine results.

Yep. That's what makes backlink analysis so hard.

You cannot determine which links count for search engines, but you can decide which links matter to you.

Also true.

You build linking pages, you find linking partners, you use linking resources. If you blur the distinctions for yourself, don’t be surprised if other people get confused too.

I agree that doing all those things is a good idea, but I'm not sure why they can't have any overlap with one another, or what the dangers are. I'd be interested to hear Michael expound on why he phrased it this way - is he worried that we'll "find linking pages" or "build linking resources?"

Anyone who says that search engine optimization is all about links doesn’t know enough about search engine optimization to be talking about it.

Damn... I guess no more talking about SEO for me. The problem is - SEO IS all about links. Anyone can optimize a page or create relevant content, but only an SEO knows that it's not just about the right keywords and good semantic markup, it's about the links that content can earn. If you're thinking about links when you design your business, thinking about them when you architect your user experience, thinking about them when you brainstorm your content, and thinking about them when you're developing a marketing strategy, you're going to lose out to a more link-savvy competitor. The problem is that information on how to put keywords in the right places, how to build good URLs, and good site structures is easily accessible and easy for anyone to accomplish. On-page SEO is NOT a competitive advantage - content that's focused on link acquisition and a business strategy that recognizes the power of getting attention from online peers and networks IS a competitive advantage.

On the flip side, Michael's right in that SEO is sometimes just about identifying the problems that hold back great rankings and traffic. We've worked with plenty of enterprise-sized client, from NPR and Yelp to Microsoft and Fast Company (and more), where the goals were much more focused on simply fixing canonicalization or duplicate content or URL structure or internal links. Although, to be fair, there is almost never an aspect of website design, development, content creation, or marketing that doesn't relate back to the links argument. Fundamentally, links are a proxy for votes, and we want the web's voters (the online "influencers") to cast their ballots in our direction. Maybe it's just a case where Michael and I hold different perspectives.

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Whew! That was actually a lot of fun - I think it's great to see where you hold agreements and disagreements with others in your field, and I'm even a little curious to learn more about the areas where Michael and I have different opinions. Naturally, I'd love to hear from you as well - any points where one or both of us are completely off-track?