Google’s Gary Illyes: stick to the SEO basics

Google’s Gary Illyes had an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit. When people asked him about search engine optimization, Gary Illyes advised webmasters to stick to the basics.

SEO basics

Who is Gary Illyes?

Gary Illyes has been with Google for over 8 years, always working on Web Search. He worked on most parts of search: Googlebot, Caffeine, as well as ranking and serving systems that don’t have public names. He was very clear about advanced search engine optimization techniques:

“I really wish SEOs went back to the basics (i.e. MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE) instead of focusing on silly updates and made up terms by the rank trackers, and that they talked more with the developers of the website once done with the first part of this sentence.”

Before working on PageRank sculpting and other ‘advanced’ techniques, it is much more important to make sure that search engines can crawl your web pages.

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler helps you to check crawlability of your website. If there are any issues, the website audit tool will tell you how to fix your pages.

When Gary Illyes was asked about his favorite SEO conspiracy theory, he repeated that sticking to the basics was the most important thing:

“I don’t have a favorite [SEO conspiracy theory], they generally want me to crawl up in a corner and cry, because we don’t do a good enough job getting people to focus on the important things …like CREATING A DAMN CRAWLABLE SITE.”>

What are the SEO basics?

It’s simple: First of all, find the keywords and the topic for which you want to be found on search engines. Then create web pages that are related to these keywords and the topic.

Ensure that search engines can crawl your web pages. Then your website needs good links from other websites to show Google and other search engines that your pages are good.

The tools in SEOprofiler help you with these tasks. If you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines, SEOprofiler offers everything you need.

Make your pages crawlable

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.