Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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SEO Snakeoil

Oct 14, 2009

The blogosphere is abuzz with the publication of an inflammatory blog post entitled “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists,” written by a web designer by the name of Derek Powazek.  The short version of his thoughts is that SEO is pure snakeoil, that good SEO is just good design, and no one should ever pay for SEO.

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

Like all good rants, his comments have garnered tremendous attention and citations from industry voices and bloggers (and here’s me adding to the pile).  Danny Sullivan has written on it not once but twice.  Over at SEOBook Peter wrote up a nice commentary on the issue.

The Issue

Part of Derek’s whole problem is a confusion and distortion of terms.  “SEO” is a term beloved by many and despised by still more.  It doesn’t fully describe the methods and/or tactics involved in promoting a website online.  “Online Marketing” or “Internet Marketing” is a better catch-all term.  What Derek means by SEO is in truth “shady spammers who try to game the system in various dishonest ways.” Guess what – most online marketers don’t do that.  Of course everyone is against that – but he’s putting forth his narrow view and experience of this topic as Truth.

All in all his post has been a great opportunity for discussion and commentary – a true example of great link bait at work, whether it was conscious or not.  He ends with a statement that I couldn’t agree with more:

“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

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Bounce Rates can affect search engine ranking

Dec 11, 2008

For many people, the Bounce Rate shown in their Google Analytics account is easily, but mistakenly ignored. A bounce rate tells you the percentage of traffic you received that left your site right away, for whatever reason (the site wasn’t what they were looking for, or, most importantly to you, wasn’t quality enough or lacked clear calls to action, etc…).

Google Analytics Bounce Rate

If your bounce rate is more than 50 percent, you should take a closer look at your site to see how to make improvements, especially now that it has been confirmed that high bounce rates are factored into Google’s algorithm for search engine ranking. So, you may have a great site with a lot of quality content, but if there’s something confusing about it that turns visitors away, you may actually begin to drop in the rankings. Moral of the story: don’t ignore your bounce rate!

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Online directory lowdown: why you should submit

Nov 15, 2008

There are many different ways to go about link building, and it’s probably a good idea to explore as many of the available options as you can. However, one sure way to start to get some quality “link juice” is by submitting your site to online directories, such as Yahoo, DMOZ and Best of the Web.

Yahoo’s directory costs $299 to submit to, but is highly trusted by Google, because submitting to Yahoo doesn’t just guarantee a listing for everyone. Instead, you’re paying for Yahoo editors (real people!) to actually review your site to determine if it’s quality enough to be included. So, Google can be sure that Yahoo weeds out most inadequate, and even spammy sites (of course, sometimes not-so-great sites can slip through the cracks).

To Google, an inclusion in the Yahoo paid directory is a stamp of approval of sorts, but Google also values the “opinion” so to speak, of other directories, such as Best of the Web, another popular paid directory, and DMOZ, which is free.

Bottom line: if you have a site you’re proud of and want to spread the word in a quick, easy way, submit to to directories!

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Why duplicate content is a problem

Oct 17, 2008

duplicate content can hurt search engine rankingsNow, more than ever, duplicate content has become an issue in terms of organic search engine rankings. With the popularity of wiki or hub pages and social media profiles, many people are relying on the copy and paste method of content creation. While you may think this is a quick way to spread the word about your or your business (say, by taking a section from your About page on your website and pasting it somewhere else), what you’re actually doing is generating duplicate content, which is a big Google no-no.

While it’s well-known that duplicate content can negatively affect your rankings, due to filters search engines have implemented to do away with spam, it’s not very clear what constitutes as duplicate content. There’s no real way to know how much is OK to be copied. E-commerce sites, for example, will often have a lot of the same information in product descriptions as other websites, and there’s not really a way around that. The best advice is to avoid taking too much–large sections of text or entire pages–and recreating them. If you’re wondering if you could come off as spammy, it’s best to do a little revision.

One of the most common duplicate content issues arises when people rename a page of their website and forget to redirect the old URL to the new page. If you just leave the old page up and the new page has much of the same content, that counts as duplicate content and could raise a red  flag in search engines. Even if you change the content, it’s a best practice to redirect to the new page or site, anyway.

Unsure if your site could contain duplicate content? Try this free tool from Copyscape.

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Inbound links: why more isn’t always better

Sep 09, 2008

It’s no secret that link building is an integral part of SEO. The more links a website has, usually means it ranks higher than a similar site with few links, right? Wrong. Having a large number of links sure seems like the main goal, but in reality, the best practice is to not get the most, but the best links. This means that links from quality, trusted sites with decent page ranks are worth a lot more than twice as many link from half as good websites.

Now that you know this, you can stop sending numerous emails to friends (and strangers) asking for a link to your website from their blog and focus on links that can really help you: from reputable paid directories and high-quality, related websites. Link-swapping and partnerships may take more effort than submitting to every free web directory you can find, but it will pay off with much more valuable inbound links.

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