I wanted to take a few moments and discuss the concept that I believe is an absolute truth and that is that in SEO failure is the key to success. And that might seem like a very strange philosophy but if you think about it chances are in your life you’ve learned so much more from your failures than your individual successes. You’ve learned more from bosses how not to do things than been inspired on positive paths.

We all do tests on a daily basis. We operate on what we believe to be the best practices and the most effective means to achieve our goals, but the reality is we’re not perfect. We will make mistakes or perhaps we may do things right but they simply aren’t as effective as something else we might be doing. If you are truly trying to be the best in all aspects of your business you should be making some number of mistakes. Otherwise you’re just playing it safe and leaving money on the table.

A fundamental differentiating factor of the SEO business is that everything we do is tracked and evaluated. Much like infomercials, the SEO business has hard verifiable and quantifiable measure of success. If an infomercial runs and receives no orders, it is hard to argue that it was a success. If an infomercial runs and receives thousands of orders is hard to argue that it was a failure. Likewise with SEO if your page does not rank it is hard to argue that you’ve accomplished something.

Therefore as you test different content elements and technical aspects of your page development I think it is important that you do have some failure. With the failure or perhaps ultimately lack of success in  ranking, you establish a benchmark where baseline from which you can iterate. Make it shorter, make it longer, add more details, add images MP3 files and other content elements that help focus the page around the phrase you’re trying to rank for.

Truly your success can only come from complete luck or from the iteration from your baseline. Said differently failure is your key to success.