Beagle - 4:59 pm on Jan 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Thanks, mack. Great post (and thread - although as a lefty I'm not sure I like all this talk about moving the nav bar to the right. ;-) 10% of us have to go across the screen to scroll as it is).

I'm one of the "old hands" (very relatively speaking!) who try to answer questions on a forum for people who are just beginning to build their first websites. Often they come with some very strange ideas about SEO, picked up from goodness knows where, the most common type being that there are specific rules that have to be followed: "Is it true that you're not allowed to have more than xx key words on a page?" Of course, the connected belief is that if you do everything exactly according to the rules, you'll be #1. It can be difficult convincing them that not only are there no absolute yes/no right/wrong answers to most SEO questions, but that the answers keep changing, as the algorithms get tweaked.

I generally point them to a page on the forum's site that has basic but solid SEO information - and tell them to go to WebmasterWorld for more details. 8-) Then I try to say basically what you said in the first post, that if you concentrate on what's good for your visitors you'll be doing what's best for SEO, especially in the long term. The following is the way I try to explain it; if this is totally naive or off-base, I figure someone here will let me know:

The general pattern, as I understand it, is that a lot of people building websites learn to "play the game" of whatever it is they think Google is using to decide the SERPs at the moment. But the search engines don't want sites that have learned to "play the game" well; their priority, if they want to stay around, is to find good, relevant pages for searchers so those searchers will keep using their services. So when too many people have picked up the new game in town, the algorithms get tweaked to discount it. Sites that have been depending on that game can have sudden drops when that happens.

But if you concentrate on what the search engines are actually trying to find for searchers - good content that's relevant to your keywords, navigation that's easy to follow, and helpful links to and from other related sites - you're good for the long haul and don't have to worry every time googlebot coughs.