The most difficult part of diving into SEO is not any specific tactic. Instead, just making sense of the enormous amount of information online and off can be overwhelming. Have you ever wondered what the most important pieces of an SEO strategy are? If so, this post is for you.

But wait, there’s more! Do you learn best by associating new knowledge to a mnemonic device, like a short phrase or acronym? Then this post is definitely for you – we’ll derive SEO no-brainers through the etymology of “pure visibility”, to really nail down those associations between high search engine visibility and specific tactics!

Let’s work our way backwards. In the year 1475, “pure” was applied to bloodlines. To translate this to SEO, we’ll think about incoming links. Inlinks to your site are one of the most valuable ways to optimize off your site. Here’s a tip that requires thinking about the sites that link to your site as family members or even ancestors:

Tip 1: Make sure that your incoming links are of a good lineage. In other words, find highly relevant sites in the same market as you are, preferably with a high Pagerank.

“Pure” acquired its the meaning of “free from moral corruption” in 1340. This one is easy to translate to SEO, pretty literally, in fact.

Tip 2: Don’t use blackhat SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, invisible text, dynamic page tagging, or duplicating content.

Taking a break from “pure,” “visibility” dates to 1581, derived from the Latin “visibilitas” or “visibilis” meaning the condition of being seen. This one translates easily to SEO in numerous ways. But the most important tactic for being seen online is probably this one:

Tip 3: Make sure every page of your site is seen by search engines. Use a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml to “talk” to the search engines, including providing a list of every single page.

“Visibility” acquired the meaning “range of vision under given conditions” in 1914. This reminds me of the importance of the user experience in SEO. If your site doesn’t display and function properly for users, than no amount of visibility is going to help increase your ROI. This simple tenet gets complicated though, when you consider the “range of given conditions” under which your website might be viewed – including browser and operating system variations, connection speeds and the possibility that users may have disabilities. So this tip is really three in one:

Tip 4: Design for everyone – that means insuring correct display of your site for all major browsers and operating systems, minimal download time regardless of connection speed, and using image alt labels for those who are disabled.

The earliest record of pure I found is 1297, meaning “unmixed,” and also “absolutely, entirely,” from Old French “pur” (12th century). What’s unmixed or absolutely, entirely about good SEO? Well, the most basic of ‘tips’, based on what we see here of what leads to success for clients, is that successful SEO requires commitment, in terms of the time and effort you’re willing to spend. Often, this commitment is enough that a big site requires more than just “one hour a day” as some books might have you believe. Maybe over time, but not at the beginning. Which leads to the most important no-brainer if you’re looking to jumpstart you’re SEO…

Tip 5: Hire a dedicated SEO resource for your marketing team, OR hire a good consultant!

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Tags: Etymology, SEO