03.27.08

The Snake Oil Continues

Posted in SEO at 2:48 pm by Mosey

I have always had an issue with SEO farms. Since the inception of the word SEO has always seemed sleazy and unethical. Oh, not that SEO isn’t incredibly important, it is huge. Yet, there are, and always will be underhanded ways of “beating” SEO or tryingto trick Google. I am a firm believer good content gets linked. Getting linked means getting better search ratings. There isn’t really an “optimize” strategy you can pay someone $1000 for and magically float to the top of the search rankings.

If there was a way to just vault to the top, everyone would do it and then we would start over.

That said, 90% of the websites are not even taking the basic steps, to SEO work, and maybe the legit SEO consultants and just fixing mostly that. I see SEO work as an extension of social marketing. If you do good work, people will notice, they will comment, link back, point to you, talk about you in blog postings, etc. You will get noticed for being good.

I know, that is the long tail and not the quick hit, but sometimes you have to work that way. If that is what you want to do, take your time and do it right, great. Here are a few basics to pay attention to.

Get your text out of graphics. I know, that outer glow looks great against that sweet photo you found, but search engines can’t read graphics. You are “hiding” your most important text from them.
Properly use H1 and H2 tags. Search engines notice these first. Don’t over do it, but make sure every page has one. If you don’t know what an H1 and H2 is, find someone who does (and close Dreamweaver). This isn’t 1996, apply some CSS to your H1, make it nearly the same size as the rest of your text.
Be friendly, link and link back to people. “In partnership with…” is fine. Links pages… not so much.
Encourage people linking to you using key phrases. 70% of web traffic to most sites is by search engines. 70% of that traffic uses the company name as the keyword. What that means is if people know your name, you will already be number 1 in their searches. Don’t encourage people to link to you using “mysite.com” because if they know mysite.com then you already won. Using key phrases, the things you want people to know you for is far more important for example ask for links like fantastic website design by mysite.com (link gores nowhere).
Comment, expose yourself on the web. I don’t mean in a getting-you-kicked-off-myspace way, I mean go find friendly blogs (with lots of feeds!) and comment. Don’t troll, don’t look like an uneducated schmuck, ask and answer and comment, and always have your link in your signature (with keywords linked if possible).
Make sure your content makes sense. “add to cart” is weak, it looks like everything else. Short directional copy doesn’t just help usability, it adds to the things search engines notice. “add your cool designs to your cart for purchase” is one more hit of “cool designs.”
Be careful what you write. Don’t be too verbose of obvious or your usability goes down. I once blogged with the words “tranny midget porn” and got search hits for weeks. Luckily none of them comments in my blog.
Content is always king. Sometimes, forget your SEO, forget your page rank and just give a good chunk of content. All the snakeoil link farms, blog farms, share-a-lots and exchanges in the world don’t matter if your content sucks. If your content rocks like an old-school Kiss concert people will find you, and they will link back and that is worth more because Google is never going to outlaw it or ban you because of it.

Hopefully this is helpful. All these simple things are probably 80% of SEO work, the rest is the gravy on top of an already good set of pot roast.

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