The video promotes the sale of my book “The Dao of SEO”.
But please ignore the sales pitch at the end. Any url you follow to buy the book has probably been hijacked and the book is a bit dated now. However, the central principles are as valid as ever.
I’m happy to give away the book as a free download to anyone interested.
But what is the Dao of SEO?
I teach a course about Chinese history and culture (in one of my other lives) and I’m intrigued with the philosophy of Daoism and its related concepts of Yin and Yang.
You may know that Yin (e.g. darkness, female, earth) and Yang (e.g. light, male, heaven) are mutually dependent opposites. Western philosophy is based on the notion of mutually exclusive opposites (e.g. good vs evil). Chinese philosophy is based on the notion of opposites that arise together and are mutually dependent. Simply, you cannot have one without the other (man without woman, strength without weakness, good without evil, light without dark, one end of a line without the other end).
For example, Yang is strength and Yin is weakness. When strength is at its greatest, we have the beginning of weakness. To illustrate, in a great storm the wind might break a mighty oak tree whilst the weak, young sapling beside it simply bends and survives another day. Here, you can’t say that strength is better than weakness or that weakness is inferior to strength. Weakness is the beginning of strength and strength is the beginning of weakness. One of the foundations of Chinese martial arts is to use weakness to overcome strength. Your opponent strikes out at you and you step aside and use your opponent’s strength to throw him to the ground.
It is possible to be too strong. Too much strength begets weakness. I see this with the majority of my search engine optimization clients when I look at their SEO.
To boost their rankings they try to be too smart, too clever, and invariably too aggressive; they try to outfox Google, go strength against strength. The problem is that the search engines are very strong and they employ staff to thwart those who try to out-muscle them.
How do site owners try to out-muscle the engines? There are many tricks: keyword stuffing, link farms, invisible text, malicious redirects (gateway/doorway pages), mirror sites, etc. At HandSubmit.COM I prefer to take a more natural approach, the Sun Tzu “Art of War” (a Daoist classic) approach. When confronted with impossible odds, adapt, harmonize, and use weakness to overcome strength. I obtain high rankings by playing within the rules, barely within the rules. I use Yin to overcome Yang. When you sign on, I will teach you how, just as in martial arts, you can use Yin to overcome Yang.