2 x 70% > 1 x 100%

I have to admit, this is my favorite mindset reminder. It involves both math and humor, two of my favorite things — the others are, um, well, nevermind.

About 70% of what it takes to rank is easy. It’s just three factors: title tag, link text and PageRank. The rest of those (supposedly) 200 factors account for the minority of ranking impact, not the majority. If you get really good at the three factors that make the most difference, you can ignore the multitude of factors that contribute much less.

Hence the reminder: twice as good at 70% beats 100%.

We know the three biggest factors do work. Work these as smart and as hard as you can, and you will outwork the parts that we don't know and matter much less.

That's one of the reasons "the algorithm" no longer matters as much as it once did. Rather than being highly skilled in the nuance of ranking, top positioning today is more about how hard you work. It’s Mr. Busy that wins, not Mr. Smarty.

Which leads to a corollary for our rule: twice as good at 30% is less than 70%.

This is another reason Mr Smarty loses. There is no money in studying SEO to the point you can figure out what all 200 factors are (if there actually are that many) because no matter how precisely you can measure and control that 30%, you still have to work the 70% that matters most.

Work the parts you know and work them harder than your competition. That’s the secret of ranking. It’s dead simple. It’s just hard work.

TOO HARD FOR THEM IS JUST RIGHT FOR YOU

If it were easy, you would have even more competition. How would you like to have twice as many people competing for your keywords? Even if they aren't any good at it, some of them are bound to get lucky and still others are likely to get good. Making SEO "easy" is bad for you, so don't ever complain about how hard it is. Give thanks that it does take some skill and hard work, because the alternative is far worse.

Worse still, reflect for a moment on your alternatives to running a web business. Can't quite make that picture? Go watch the movie Office Space. Or how 'bout this: watch all your neighbors drive to work one morning and then notice what time they get back home. Does that look fun? Now how do you feel about SEO?

And seriously, just how hard is SEO really? It is far more tedious than it is hard and most of that can be solved by being organized enough to use employees and outsourcers, so when you find yourself (as we all do!) complaining about not getting ranked where you want -- just time your morning commute!

ADMIT WHAT IS. THE RANKINGS DEFINE RIGHT.

You don’t get to decide what’s right. Your job is to admit what is and accept it. The rankings define whatever the search engine considers right and it is not up to us to change it. To be successful requires that you accept it and adapt to it.

In many cases the top ranked pages are not much to look at. It’s not a beauty contest. You don’t get a vote. Your opinion doesn’t matter, and there’s no court at all, higher or otherwise, so whatever sense of "justice" you may be bringing with you ... leave it at home.

Second guessing what should be so and complaining about results quality are thoughts that do not belong in your search marketing mentality. Thinking this way is an exercise in futility and keeps you from focusing on your own site and your goals.

When you look at search results, realize those results define right and they got there by simple math. If you want to replace them, one way to do it is just do what they did.

SEO for your website is a thoroughly mathematical proposition, but there are intriguing - and humorous - parallels between SEO and the social interactions at a nightclub. This analysis is necessarily written from a male perspective, but it should be pretty clear how to draw the analogy from a female view as well. So let's party!

The first comparison is one of difference. Unlike the online world where search is commanded by a very small number of search engines, the nightclub environment is frequented by dozens or even hundreds of "search engines" - Gender Inter-Relationship Leader (GIRL) units - each presenting a different mix of attractive benefits for the Mass of Attenuated Neurology (MAN) that achieves top ranking.

On the other hand, just like search engines, GIRL ranking algorithms are undisclosed and thereby subject to rampant speculation. The unavoidable result is the creation of an entire subculture devoted to this study - code named PUA - that enjoys a following every bit as intense as the SEO community.

But despite all the mystery, there are some things that we do know.

First, "content is king". It is clear the GIRLs rate MANs based on social interaction, both verbal and non-verbal. The first "spidering event", termed an "opener", appears particularly critical - much like a title tag. Be aware however that reusing previously successful openers can result in a well documented "duplicate content penalty" that results in nearly permanent loss of rank.

Numerous other penalties are possible, all generally delivered without any warning, and there are no credible reports of a successful "reinclusion request", so penalty avoidance is critical. In particular, "spamming" will almost always result in a complete "ban" and in the worst case will be accompanied by a "GIRL-slap".

But returning to observed ranking factors ... in addition to content, linking also appears to be vital to successful top ranking with many GIRLs. Such linking can take several forms, but all are directed at enhancing "social proof" as computed by the ClubRank^™ algorithm.

Methods for manipulation of ClubRank are widely taught in PUA. The most widely used technique appears to be the "mini-net" of interlinked MANs. In the simplest case, this is reduced to the "wing MAN" linking structure and this is the most common method observed in field tests.

There are a multitude of other factors GIRLs use to rank MANs - a commonly reported number is 200 - but the two covered here are widely reported as the most critical.

IT’S NOT MAGIC, IT’S A MACHINE

Ranking is just math – really simple math. What makes it amazing is that this math is run on more than 200,000 machines and produces results for millions of users in a quarter of a second. Of course, the math doesn’t always do exactly what they want, and that they have Matt. Matt is there to protect the math. It is Matt's job to keep the crap out of the index so the math can stay pure and ivory colored. So long as you avoid Matt, all you have to deal with is simple math.

So what does this mean for you? In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, much can be observed just by looking. How many times have you heard people say, “I just gave up on search because you can’t control it”? Don’t believe it. These people have the idea that search results are magic. It’s not.

If you want to rank #1 for a specific keyword, look at the page that currently holds that position. Since ranking is math, what can you learn from your competition to make the math machine rank your page above your competition? You just have to look at it with the mindset that it’s not magic and that it can be understood. Then you'll start seeing signs of math instead of magic.

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

Ranking is not about you. You really don’t matter at all. Ranking is entirely impersonal. If Bob can rank, so can you, and so can the other guy. No one at Google knows you, or Bob, or the other guy for that matter. If no one at Google knows you or Bob, you’re on equal footing. Yes, it may be lonely, you have no one to call and complain to, but that also means they won’t be calling you either. So remember, it’s not personal, if they can do it, so can you.

In 2003 I wrote an article that turned into an ebook that spawned an industry-wide technique named "PageRank Sculpting". A couple years later I updated the book to include the nofollow attribute as an alternative to Javascript, but the strategies and linking structures remained the same.

Fast forward another 5 years and the web is 20 or more times larger, the competition is far better educated and funded and the economic rewards of top ranking are many times larger. It was time for an update.

In this almost entirely rewritten "update" of Dynamic Linking I've provided new and expanded diagrams, updated code samples and a completely new applications guide. I've also revised and modernized some of the original material on Sacrificial linking (now known as PR Pumping) and mini-nets.

What I have not done is "lighten it up", so it is by no means a "casual" read. If you plan on putting the material into practice, you will want to print it, grab a highlighter and a pen, and personalize it with your own notes and questions.

And come to that, your comments, suggestions and requests for clarification are always welcome here. If there is sufficient interest, I may construct a discussion forum for this purpose.

To get started, grab your copy ... there's no charge ... at http://dynamic-linking.net

There's this little thing called StomperNet Live. Next week will be the 9th one and I have been a featured speaker at every single one ... except this one. For Live9 I'm just showin' up for the drinking and socializing with the (literally) hundreds of people I've helped over the last three years in StomperNet, in my own coaching business before that, and with my partner Dan Thies for several months now since.

And hell, the bar is where I do some of my best one-on-one coaching anyway.

If you are planning on coming, great, I will see you there. Follow me on Twitter so you can keep track of me in real life while you're on site. I'll try to provide a running text, photographic, and maybe even video commentary.

And if you'd like to spend some quality time with Dan and me, and find out just what it is we do ... come join us for dinner. Catch up with me in person and I'll hook you up.

In the coaching program that Dan Thies and I run together (The SEO BrainTrust) we answer several dozen questions a week between our 90 minute Q&A calls and our Platinum Member Podcasts. In a year we should answer a thousand questions between us and we've been teaching this stuff for 10 years — 10,000 questions .

A few days back I had a chance to explain how it is we do that. In the answer is a lesson not just about SEO, but learning in general.

Consider these questions:

• "For an affiliate link that I cloak on my domain in the .htaccess file, should I nofollow that link or do I not need to because the link is on my own domain?"
• "I use a tracking code on my banner ads. Do these links still provide ranking benefits to my site?"
• "Does leaving off the trailing '/' on my domain name make a difference?"
• "I want to link into the middle of a page (using an anchor like /page.html#bookmark). Does this link pass PageRank to the page?"

All good questions, and all seemingly different, until you understand how URLs work and then all these questions are really just variations of a single issue.

Questions are much like the leaves of a tree. Taken alone, they are numerous and seemingly not related, but when you focus instead on the branches, whole groups of leaves are seen to be connected.

Technical topics — SEO included — are rich with this "deep structure" where a relatively smaller number of core concepts give rise to many hundreds or thousands of observable phenomenon. By coming to understand the reasons why things work the way they do, future questions can be fit into already understood areas — new leaves placed on already discovered branches. It is this degree of understanding that constitutes real mastery.

American football is a frankly brutish game mirroring in a general sense the foreign policy most of our presidents project -- but I digress -- it also has something to teach us about SEO, which I'll try to confine myself to for the rest of this post.

I do not follow this game, or any game where I am mere spectator, but an upbringing in "the states" leads unavoidably to some amount of exposure to the sport and there is one really common football metaphor used in business that describes SEO as well.

There are essentially two ways to take the ball down field — running and passing. In regards passing there are two variants, the short distance (screen) pass and "the long bomb".

The long bomb is the quintessential "silver bullet" — in one play you move dozens of yards, and in the perfect scenario, pitch it straight into the end-zone for a score. Almost everyone in the Internet Marketing space is looking for the long bomb ... and to mix metaphors ... that's what they usually get: a bomb!

Because the long bomb is a hard thing to get right. It takes protecting the quarterback longer than it seems should be possible, a receiver that is not completely covered by a defender, exquisite aim and a perfect catch. If you miss, you have gained nothing and lost a "down" or worse still you could be intercepted and find yourself now playing defense. Not a happy set of alternatives

The running game by contrast is slow, hard, dirty work. The expression used is "four yards and a cloud of dust" — a reference to the yardage you have to gain to be awarded the privilege of doing it all over again. Oh joy! Yet another beating and more AstroTurf burns.

The ground game is ugly and brutal and will kill you if you do it enough but it is far more certain than passing. Where the bomb is one of finesse, the running game is one of brute force against force. You just "grind it out". Nobody in the IM space is interested in grinding it out ... but the bald truth of the matter is this: grinding it out is really the ONLY game in SEO. The long bomb is just a bomb.

Football players get paid millions of dollars a year to do a job that, despite the surface celebrity appeal, is an ugly, painful job. Their pay first reflects the willingness and ability to do what most people would not consider doing and second the enormous entertainment marketplace that they serve. What football players do is "create content".

Just as sure as your content on the web attracts search traffic to your offers, the drama of football attracts eyeballs to TV screens. So anytime you find yourself complaining about building more content, make a picture of a running back getting his knee injected with Cortizone so he can finish the game. Writing seems suddenly much less painful.

Grind it out. Every 4 yards is one down closer to goal and all you have to do to win is to keep playing the game.