Coconut Headphones

Students who study Latin commonly translate some of Caesar’s account of “The Gallic Wars”, where he begins by saying “All of Gaul [now France] is divided into three parts.” The three parts he named were Acquitania, Belgium, and “those who call themselves Celts or Gauls”. Yes, I know that last part wasn’t really a “part”, it was “people who call themselves something”. Clearly Caesar was a better general than he was a writer. 😉

Similarly however, Caesar may just as well have said “all of SEO is divided into three parts: Content, Architecture, and Linking”.

As far as the three parts go:

• Content – is pretty self-explanatory. It’s what you want to rank – it’s the point of the whole thing
• Architecture – this is how you organize your website so your content will be found and indexed.
• Linking – links are to be obtained so you will both rank highly, and be indexed. Your architecture may be great, but if you don’t have links, you won’t get indexed much.

But is this all there is to SEO, just these three parts?  Well, that depends on the overarching purpose of SEO.

In my opinion, the purpose of SEO is to create and curate content that search engines will find, index, and rank highly, so that you can attract desirable traffic.

This is a fairly narrow definition in that it’s only focused on traffic from search engines, but I think it works.

Here’s questions that fall out of that definition which every SEO practitioner is probably thinking about every day:

1. How many pages do I have?
2. How many of them are appearing in the SERPs?
3. What keywords are they receiving traffic from?
4. How high are those pages ranking?
5. How many clicks am I getting via those keywords?
6. How valuable are those clicks?

If you look at the words above highlighted in bold, you’ll see what the pieces of SEO are, in the same order:

many -> Content Strategy
appearing->Architecture Best Practices
keywords-> Keyword Strategy
high-> Linking Strategy
clicks-> Traffic Analysis
valuable-> Monetization

So, more accurately, all of SEO is divided into six parts.  Comments, and opinions to the contrary, are welcome!