A bold title I admit, and one that could perhaps be better written as the answer to 49.5% of SEO questions, and the answer to the other 49.5% of SEO questions.  Before you read on expecting an opus of wisdom, I’m going to qualify the title by saying that it isn’t the answer to 99% of SEO questions, but a guide to answering them yourself.

Let’s start with how a question usually looks.  Type 1 questions say “What’s better for my rankings, technique x or technique y?”  Type 2 questions say “Will implementing technique x improve my site’s rankings?”  Let’s answer 49.5% of them first, and in this 49.5%, we assume that the technique you choose has little or no effect on the usability and user experience that your site presents.  So you hear the question, you ponder the question, and you don’t know the answer off hand.  What next? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the search engine, and rephrase the question accordingly.  So I know ask myself, is a site that is using technique x more likely to be relevant to this particular query than a site using technique y?  When we adopt this paradigm, many answers spring clearly to the mind.

I’m going to use this approach to argue the “orphan page” theory recently presented by Rand on the SEOmoz blog. (Click here).  I’m acting as the SE, and trying to work out where I should rank a specific page for the terms “foo” and “bar.” As it happens, this page is #1 for “foo,” but doesn’t currently appear in the top 1000 for “bar,” but I’ve just come across some interesting new information.  There seems to have been a sudden influx of links to an orphan page on the same domain as the page I’m ranking, all from “bar” related sites.  Clearly, this orphan page is pretty well related to “bar.”  Now as this “bar” page is on the same domain as the “foo” page I’m ranking, maybe I should rank this “foo” page a little higher for the query “bar.” After all, it’s on the same domain as a highly related page, even if the two don’t link to each other.

But wait a second, I also know that for the vast majority of domains, whoever controls the “foo” page is also in control of the “bar” orphan page.  So if this original “foo” page really is related to “bar,” surely he/she would have placed a link to it from the orphan page?  This would be logical behaviour for a webmaster, as it would be beneficial to his/her users who visit the “bar” page.  They must be interested in “bar,” so why not give them a link to a “bar” related page.  But the webmaster hasn’t.  As such, I can only determine that the incoming links to the “bar” page bear no relation to the relevance of the “foo” page, so I think I’ll leave its ranking for “bar” alone.

So, hopefully we can now answer 49.5% of SEO questions, just by putting ourselves in the shoes of the search engine, but what if we do this, and our thought processes lead us to believe that there can’t be much difference, or if there is, we can’t work it out.  We can answer these remaining questions just as simply, by changing the question slightly.  We must instead ask, “Will this technique be beneficial to the experience of my users?”  This is neither the place, nor am I sufficiently qualified to give any in depth analysis of usability, but I can offer one simple example. This involves the ordering of words in a page’s title.

Which of these is better?

            1) Bigalreturns’ Hosting Company >> Cheap Reliable Hosting, VPS, Dedicated Servers

            2) Cheap Reliable Hosting, VPS, Dedicated Servers >> Bigalreturns’ Hosting Company

Now, you may be tempted to answer this question as a search engine, and say, those URLs with keywords first are more likely to be relevant, so that is the best SEO tactic, but I would argue against this.  Option 1 provides a far better user experience, however.  The reason for this is simple: when browsing through different hosting packages, I might have several windows/tabs open.  Many of them will adopt technique 2, and I will have to sort through them all to find which one I actually wanted.  However, with approach 1, my (hopefully) memorable name will lead them to be able to immediately identify my site, and come straight back to it.  Now I doubt many will argue this is not better for usability, but several dissenting voices will probably say it’s worse for SEO, but I disagree here as well.  Better user experience leads to happier users leads to increased chance of linking to you leads to better rankings.  In short,

good usability => good rankings.

 
I hope after reading this you can now answer a wide variety of SEO questions, through some crtitical thinking from the search engines' and a user’s point of view.  If you answer every question you ask yourself, or if others ask you with this sort of reasoning, then you won’t go far wrong.