Oh, so *that’s* why I’m friendless…
Fox News, in their ever unwavering impartiality, referred to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a profession ripe with scammers. They infer that the SEO professional is a barricuda, a con artist, a fleecer, a flim- flammer, a hustler, a fraud, even a scammer or a shark.
Well, the word they used was scammer, I added all the others. Still, they suggest that the SEO community at large is full of people that stuff keywords, spam search engines and generally clutter the search engine results with a unique brand of useless crap.
Is it true? Are we all scammers and charlatans?
In a word… Yes.
I know. You’re shocked and surprised, and awed, and amazed. In one breath, I say that most professional SEO’ers are scammers while admitting to be an SEO professional myself.
The truth is that most of SEO is just a boondoggle. I talk to people every day who were promised search engine glory and have yet to see traffic go up one bit. I looked at one site where the client had paid for SEO – what they got were poorly researched keyphrases and an entire site made of images (that’s right, the text was rasterized right into the PSD, then sliced and reassembled).
Whether you choose Hosting Nation for your SEO, or someone else, you should be reading our article “11 SEO strategies whose days are numbered” before you do.
1. Meta Keywords tag. Hasn’t worked in years, Yahoo! used to use it for information retrieval, but it’s doubtful that they do now that their search is powered by Bing. Really, it hasn’t been used since 2002. Now, I can’t prove this, so if you think it’s helping your rankings go ahead and implement away. There’s one way to be sure. If you don’t have them, add them and see if anything changes. If you have them, remove them and see if anything changes. I expect that nothing will.
2. Meta Title tag. Right, so one tag on your web page says <title>your page title here</title>. The other says <meta name=”title” content=”your title here”>. The latter of the two is completely deprecated, only the content between the <title> </title> tags is valid.
3. Toolbar pagerank matters. Chasing pagerank is like going on a snipe hunt, even if you catch it you’ll end up with a bag of nothing. Actual pagerank is extremely complicated and is always shifting and changing and is rarely an absolute number. TBPR data is usually old, about three months old.
4. Submit your site to search engines. Don’t. Bother. Well, don’t pay anyone to do it. If it’s part of a package, ask to have it removed. The way to get your site crawled and indexed quickly is to have a link from a third party site that gets frequently crawled pointing to your site.
5. Your content should have X% keyword density. Another ridiculous statement. Show me the evidence that a site with 3% density always does worse than the exact same site with 9% density. You can’t, because it doesn’t exist. Just write, naturally, about your product or service.
6. The XML sitemap. XML sitemaps are useful if you have hundreds, or thousands of pages of frequently changing or updated content. If you have 5 pages that will never change, an XML sitemap is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
7. Latent semantic indexing, semantically related phrases, phraseology. Whatever the kids are calling it, it’s the process of placing keyphrases into your copy that are related to the topic of your page, but not the same as. Suggesting that there’s a special skill required to implement this is pure hornswaggle. The only skill required is the skill to write effectively. If you can write, you can write for SEO.
8. Duplicate content will get you penalized. What I believe is that while duplicate content won’t help you, it won’t hurt you either. Search engines want results that have an original perspective on a given topic. If you don’t offer an original perspective, they won’t rank your page, and I don’t blame them. Would you? How is your copy of the wikipedia article on the spawning rate of the pacific salmon contributing?
9. PageRank sculpting. It’s the process of adding the nofollow attribute to certain page links to direct the flow of PageRank to more ‘important’ pages on the site. I’m guilty of doing this on sites, especially my own. I can’t say if it works or not though, it hasn’t ever made a real noticeable difference and I probably wouldn’t do it on a client site unless they requested it.
10. Paid links are bad. They are not, I’ve seen them provide results for people plenty in the past and many SEO people that I respect and follow have asked the question “Can Google REALLY tell the difference between paid and unpaid links?” The answer, of course, is obfuscated. Search engines will never tell, but the evidence says they can’t tell at all. Just don’t make it the core of your SEO strategy.
11. My final piece of advice is not to believe what I say, or what any professional SEO’er says. After all, we all have motives such as increased business, or glory fueling our opinions. Demand examples of success from whomever does your SEO and request specifics on how they achieved it. If they won’t tell you, do you really want to do business with them in the first place?