I ran into an interesting Web site called
Honest SEO
which really seemed like a great idea, akin to what this Web site is all about.
The slogan sounded great "The information you need without the
sales pitch." And this introduction sounded very promising:
Due to the commercial nature of the web and
self interest of marketers it is difficult to get marketers to come together
on a solution to help people out. This paper was designed to help consumers
learn about SEO without being attached to any centralized body.
It's worth looking at this site because it will make you
think, and it does have some good, if inevitably dated, information.
The failings slowly materialized. Problem #1 was the usual
problem of definition. Too many SEO experts use words without defining them. You
don't know what they are talking about throughout the whole article or talk, and
when you're done, you figure out that they don't either. I thought SEO means "Search Engine Optimization"
and that this site was going to teach me some things about how to optimize a
website that I didn't know. Not really. It starts out meaning that, as above,
but then it gets to this
"Not
all SEOs are bad. There are many honest and hardworking SEOs who
provide exceptional value to their customers."
Got the idea? An "SEO" is now, by paragraph 3 or 4 a firm that
does Search Engine Optimization rather than the optimization itself. I read through the entire document, and at the
end I didn't know what this SEO firm is supposed to do precisely, and what the
person considers to be SEO. They wrote:
SEO is the art or science of gaining top
search engine placement for relevant keyword phrases through making search
engines believe your site is more relevant than your competition’s websites.
There are several things wrong with that definition:
1- The real goal is to get more visitors. Getting top
placement for a phrase doesn't always guarantee that.
2- "making search engines believe" sounds like we are trying
to pull a fast one on the search engines. The real task for legitimate SEO is
making sure that good pages rank highly and get visitors, not to fool Search
Engines. The technical problem is that search algorithms are imperfect and that
there are also SOBs out there trying to fool the search engines.
3- There is no operational definition of how to do SEO given,
just vague phrases like the above. How do we make Search Engines believe our
site is the best? By hypnotizing them?
Evidently, the person who wrote the site thinks SEO has to do
with link building, a good start. But they refer quite a bit to how much you or
the SEO firm should or should not use risky practices that get your site banned
-
Black Hat SEO.
The answer to that from my point of view is easy - not at all. That's a different business, more
related to robbing banks and Nigerian confidence scams and running bootleg gin.
I didn't learn how to choose an SEO firm either from this site.
In this website I learned a few things that I suspect more of
us know already. For example:
There are dishonest businessmen. You don't say!
"You should use your best judgment and research before
you hire an SEO." - I bet you thought you should just pick one at
random!
You get what you pay for.
Paying $6,000 to get four links is exorbitant, claims
the maven. I guess it is. Well, maybe you don't always get that
for which you pay after all. So how can we avoid that sort of firm?
Black Hat SEO
practices are risky and can get your site banned. That's true. But
practices that get your site banned should not be part of anyone's SEO
business. Why pay money to get your site banned? I shouldn't have to pay for
no visitors. That I can get for free.
I also learned a few things that are probably not true.
Whoever wrote this site claims that Search Engines don't encourage SEO practices
because they want you to pay for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements:
Search engines cannot come right out and
openly agree with SEO services since SEO service providers may directly take
away revenue search engines would gain from pay per click services.
That's not likely.
Google invests a
lot in quality of results (see
Google Quality Rater Secrets,
and read the original rationale for the Google search engine:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web).
What they want is to retrieve the best Web pages at the top of the SERP (Search
Engine Results Page). That's what makes them the top ranked search engine and
that is the basis of their PPC advertisements.
And I got this advice from the site:
Do not design your site and
business model exclusively around search engines.
Create a useful site for visitors which also is well coded for proper search
engine placement.
But creating a useful site is part of designing your site for
search engines, at least in theory. It should be the biggest part.
Herewith is a bit of my advice about choosing or not choosing
a Search Engine Optimization Firm and what SEO might be.
1- Search Engine Optimization is the sum total of legitimate
operations that make your site more visible in search engines. They include
generating content, getting links, getting listed in search engines and
directories, setting up auxiliary sites, proper page design and proper site
design (the last is often neglected) e-mailings etc. These are defined and
explained here:
SEO Basics
and in the links from that page. Topics such as Conversion Rate
may be very important for your business, but they are only peripherally related
to Search Engine Optimization.
2- The most important factor in
getting more visitors to your site is generating lots of good content. Only you
know your business and therefore you are going to have to generate that content.
SEO consultants can rewrite copy or give you ideas for new copy. But if you are
selling widgets or World Peace, you are the expert on those topics and you and
people in your organization need to make the copy. You might have good content
and still get few visitors, for many reasons - but if the content is poor you
probably won't get many visitors, and even if you do, they aren't likely to stay
around.
3- Search Engine Optimization
has both a startup phase and a continuous process phase. Unless you really
have a lot of money (infinite sums) and are really clueless, you are going to need to do the
continuous process part by yourself. An SEO firm should teach you what needs to
be done and you can or should do the rest. Each time you make a page that page
has to be designed right, and you need to worry about getting links for that
page and getting it listed in search engines and so on.
4- A lot of Search Engine optimization is more or less routine
work that has to be done on a continuous basis. For example:
- Soliciting links
- Submitting to directories
- Monitoring search engine placement
- Submitting sitemaps
- Analyzing statistics
- Analyzing competition and improving your main pages
A small, new online business may need a consultant to do the
above in addition to designing the site. But after the consultant is gone,
someone will probably have to do the work in-house unless you are outsourcing it
to some place where skilled labor is cheap.
5- If you have a really large Web site, hire one or two or three
people in-house to do the SEO work. It is a full time job if it is to be done
right. An SEO consultant can't replace those people, but might be able to work
with them and provide tips.
6- Before you start any site you should read up on SEO or hire
a consultant or both, to make sure you choose the right tools to build the site
and the right design.
7- If you have a large site and are getting a reasonable number of visitors per page
of your Web site relative to your competition (you can check that on Alexa or
Compete or Quantcast) an SEO consultant may not help you much. The biggest
potential for improvement is in large sites that have relatively few visitors,
or for keywords and keyphrases that are very new on the market and are found in
few websites. If you had a page with Osama Bin Laden mentioned on it and listed
in Google on 9-11, you got a lot of visitors. Who ever heard of Osama Bin Laden?
8- If you already rank in the top ten pages retrieved by
Google for your keywords, fiddling with page internals is probably not going to
help your rank. It might hurt! More good links always helps on the other hand.
9- If your top competition are huge established Web sites, it
is not likely you can displace them by SEO alone, unless it is really dishonest
SEO - more like phishing.
10- If an SEO firm promises "Top Ten rankings guaranteed" or
something similar, stay away. They didn't see your site, and they didn't see the
competition and they don't know your keywords, so how can they make that
promise? Maybe the top ten pages retrieved for your keyword are all from sites
with the Web clout of
Wikipedia, Google,
Yahoo! etc. You will have a tough time beating that if you have a hundred page
Web site that was established last month.
11- Find out what precisely this firm intends to do. If they
are going to set up Shadow domains or other shady schemes, you should at least
know in advance. If they are going to pay for links, you want to know that too.
