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Let’s face it. If you look online, there are 1000s of SEO blogs and articles on how to do SEO or quick and easy shortcuts. SEO advice also fills your email box and it’s a quick Google search away. Much of the advice is accurate to an extent, but it depends on when it was written and the other conditions of your website presence and online competitive atmosphere. And yes, I’m being vague on purpose.

Well, read it all but to quote the old Thin Lizzy song, “Don’t believe a word of it.”

I’m not saying that the blogs and articles are lying, but most likely, the info is incomplete, inaccurate or outdated thanks to the wizards at Google and their seemingly infinite algorithm changes. The search algorithm that decides what you will see in the search results is complicated. The blogs have been simplified to make it not complicated; but science is science. A real SEO primer (and they do exist) would take you much more than a few minutes to read. The algorithm is so complex that technically no one thing you read will change your SEO fortune most of the time. And to blow your mind even further, there are plenty of “one things” that you can do that might rocket your search engine rankings towards the top …but I can explain. There is a logic.

SEO is complex.

Let’s say you just read a blog that says web page speed is a definite factor in rankings. Let’s also say the blog post is by someone who looks respectable and calls themselves an SEO analyst. The analyst even has a website that looks professional. They may even work for Google. As a matter of fact, I have seen many recent posts about this and recently spoke with a client about this exact thing.

Do you immediately take this advice so you can move up in the rankings?

The answer is yes, because it is a factor that makes sense. However don’t expect much in the way of changed rankings, but you may shoot way up as well. The expert was not lying, but they left off the thousands of other factors that work together to find the most relevant sites and create change. Depending on how your website scores on these factors in comparison to your search term competition, this speed issue could make a difference. It may also seemingly do nothing, even though it did help you.

Confusing huh?

Quite simply, what good would a search engine be if you could do one thing to move up. Wouldn’t everyone do it? Think of all of the SEO advice you read as gears on huge machine. Each gear makes other gears, that you can’t see, move in various ways. As a non pro, you have no idea which gears move the engine more. Also, every website has different shapes and sizes gears. Now does it make sense as to why the one change you got from a blog post didn’t make a difference?

SEO professionals have dedicated themselves to learning and testing the parts of this machine and have a good idea of how many multiple gears to move and in what sequence to make the biggest permanent impact. Now you know why that SEO advice you got did and didn’t work.