There's no need to introduce Brett Tabke's '26 Steps To 15k a Day'. The page, that was posted almost seven years ago, has had nearly 29 million page views and 15 million unique visitors. It has also been used as a training manual by numerous Fortune 100 companies. In this interactive session, Brett gives an insight at the controversial issues that the post had raised and how the relevance of this webpage posted in 2002 transcends to present times.

Moderator:

• Brett Tabke

Speakers:

• Brett Tabke,
• CEO,
• WebmasterWorld.com

Brett started out with some stats on the famous '26 Steps' Webpage. Some of his Webpage's achievements:

• 29 million page views.
• 5 million uniques.
• 200 copies over the web.
• 290 cease and desists have been issued so far.
• It is the first chapter in Google Hacks. The post is owned by O'reily now.
• Total income generated is $500 paid by O'reily for Google Hacks Book.
• The webpage features 10,000 thousands back links.

One by one, Brett went over all of the points he wrote in the webpage back in 2002 and discussed over the same with the audience. Back then, Brett had written that it was enough for the initial document to have 100 pages. However, he said, now the number should be around 500.

The posts are not really supposed to be about SEO, but more about content, traffic and building a sustainable website. On asking the audience regarding their experience with website having less that 100 pages, most say that they (the experiences) haven't been satisfactory.

Regarding the domain name, Brett said that the domain name game is now much more complicated than ever and one can have a TLD (Top Level Domain) of his own.

About Site design, Brett stated that the criteria was and still is that the simpler the better. The advent of the iPhone has further confirmed on the notion. It is imperative that now every website is designed keeping the compatibility with mobile devices in mind. One has to adapt all current designs to iPhones.

Static sites are seemingly going extinct and there's simply no point in building up sites in HTML. But the most important thing was, is and will continue to be content. Content should have its purpose and not be there just for the sake of existence. Quality content cannot be substituted.

Matt Tuens added here that content was the main reason that Search Engines were created. One should ensure a certain degree of stickiness in their websites since people are too busy to go to twenty different sites. You can do the same by simply creating one site that could be the 'go to' site.

Brett moved on to the topic of user generated content. The reliance on UCG is a thing of past now. Back in 2002, outbound links were considered a delicate issue since each site was as good as to the ones they were linked to. Even now, Search Engines judge on the same criterion. One could practice cross linking to boost up PageRank on lesser value pages.

Shared hosting is unthinkable now for the simple fact that costs have dropped drastically and everyone can have a server of their own. About regular log tracking softwares, Brett stated that his team uses one they have created on their own and displayed the wide variation it shows from the results of other packages.

Many CMS (Content Management Systems) are still not spider friendly and this can be a major bottleneck in your SEO objectives. Ensuring that you are in the right directories is still a good way to enhance traffic. With the users becoming more web savvy than ever, gimmicks are still a hit. People tend to negate the importance of options, such as 'e-mail a friend'. These are still as valuable as they were earlier.

Targeted content is the key now. Smart content can get your business places. Matt Tuens goes on to elaborate on 'smart content'. You have to understand that everyone is trying to criticize and judge your content. Give information that your demography is looking for instead of irrelevant garbage just to get a good ranking, otherwise you will incur losses on sales, credibility and overall business in spite of a good ranking.

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