One Week of Sphinn SEO Lessons

What valuable lessons, if any, do we teach on Sphinn regarding SEO?

A high-level analysis of one week of Sphinn postings.

The Selection

I'm coming at this from an angle where a non-SEO site owner says "hey, I have to do something... now let's learn from the best".

I sifted through the 900+ items posted between Friday May 9 00:00 and Thursday May 15 24:00, culling the ones that seemed to convey real value for a newcomer and dropping items like "30+ Weird, Educational and Stupid Search Screenshots", "Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference", "Exercises For Lower Ab Workouts" or "Is Bebo better than Facebook? Creating a profile network".

As much as possible I dropped questions that didn't seem to provide a definitive answer of value to the newcomer. I forgot about insider discussions, insider watercooler jokes and a whole bunch of other stuff.

In short, I sat down and looked at what I could learn from Sphinn were I new to SEO and get some answers.

I did 3 rounds. Once picking everything that seemed plausible. Second round I went over those items and picked out the good stuff. Third time around was on the article level where I had to let go of some forum spam, some article directory content and posts that in 100 words would repeat the question they had raised.

The Results

The results were surprising.

After round 1 and 2 I ended up with a little over 90 items that has passed the smell test.

By the end of round 3, which coincided with having compiled the lists, 57 items were left on the table.

Let me be honest with you; I hadn't expected this. The idea for this post was one that had me doing an evil laugh. The idea was more along the line of a linkbaity "24 Sphinn Contradictions" or "The Top 10 Things Sphinners Disagree On" ... But no, if you stick with it and dig down deep enough, there's actually some pretty solid material to go with.

Hiring SEO

The SEO Basics

A Bit More Advanced SEO

Keywords & Keyword Research

Links & Link Building

Web Analytics

WordPress & Blogging

Duplicate Content

Tools

Theoretical Discussions & Opinion

Images courtesy of Dean Terry and l0ckergn0me

About the Author: Ruud Hein

I love helping to make web sites make it. From the ground up if needed. CSS challenges, server-side scripting, user and device friendly JavaScript tricks search engines have no problems with. Tracking how the sites perform and then figuring out how to make that performance and the tracking better. I'm passionate about information. No matter how often I trim my feeds in my feed readers (yes, I use more than one), I always have a couple of hundred in there covering topics ranging from design to usability, from SEO to SEM, from life hacks to productivity blogs, from.... Well, you get the idea, I guess. Knowledge and information management is close to my heart. Has to be with the amount of information I track. My "trusted system" is usually in flux but always at hand and fully searchable. My ~~paid passion~~ job at Search Engine People sees me applying my passions and knowledge to a wide array of problems, ones I usually experience as challenges. It's good to have you here: pleased to meet you! Read more...