6 Clichés That Help You Understand SEO
by Stoney deGeyter Clichés are a funny thing. We don’t like to hear them… especially in movies, TV shows, or blog posts, but we frequently use them in everyday conversations. Clichés are a great way to make a point because the meaning of them is pretty much universally understood, even if not entirely true. Just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it can, or should be, disregarded. Here are some clichés that we can use to help us better understand SEO. Good things come to those who wait We’ve all heard the expression, “Good things come to those who wait”. Whether you’re waiting for your Heinz ketchup to pour out onto your burger, waiting for Christmas day to open your gifts, waiting for summer vacation to be let out of school, or waiting in line at the BMV, good things will come if you simply allow them to come in their own time. But, under normal circumstances, this cliché is largely untrue. You’ll still get your ketchup if you shove the butter knife into the bottle and drag it out onto your burger, you’ll get all of your gifts if you choose to open them all on Christmas Eve, you’ll get your summer vacation if you skip the last few days of school, and you’ll still get your drivers license renewed if you go to a BMV express. The real lesson behind this particular cliché is that patience is a virtue. And that much is true, especially in search engine optimization. Unlike placing sponsored ads via Google AdWords or Microsoft Advertising, where results are almost instantaneous, SEO does not produce immediate results. You won’t get your return on investment a week after SEO starts. Optimizing your site for your targeted key phrases won’t get you to #1 overnight. You won’t find all your keywords rankings in the top 10 on Google in 19 days (despite some claims you read), nor will you get significant traffic improvement after an hour of SEO consultations. To use a simple analogy, SEO is like boiling water: you don’t get a hard boil the moment you turn on the burner… you have to wait for it. The process of optimizing a site can take weeks and, in some cases, months or years, depending on how big the site is. In most cases SEO is an ongoing process with growing measures of return. The return in SEO is good, but you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to let it happen. Can’t Hit the Broad Side of a Barn from the Inside The front end of the optimization process can include hours and hours of research, site architecture, and fixing usability issues. This isn’t even considering the actual optimization of specific pages. Everything from keyword research, industry research, competition research, marketing research, and more, all need to be completed before any optimization can begin. We often get asked if research time can be shortened if we have performed optimization work for another site in the same industry recently. The short answer to that is “no”. Every site has different construction, design, layout, history, and each speaks to it’s audience differently. These are all factors that are considered in the multiple levels of research performed. No two sites are the same; therefore no research is the same. Sure, some elements of the research can be applied, but you can’t just take what works for someone else and apply it to your site. Cloning a competitor never works. But, outsmarting a competitor does. Nothing to Write Home About A good SEO will actually write or re-write content to properly (and effectively) work in your targeted keyword phrases. We often put “SEO writer” and “copywriter” into two different categories, with the SEO writer being someone less skilled than a “real” copywriter. This is a fallacy. An SEO copywriter is a “real” copywriter that also understands how keywords get worked into content. Any copywriter can be trained in writing SEO copy. But, if you’re not already a writer, forget trying to write SEO copy. Any programmer can throw keywords on a page and call it “optimized”, but that doesn’t mean it is. A professional writer should be able to take the SEO recommendations for keyword usage and incorporate that into existing content in a way that reads naturally (i.e. does not look as if you just tried to insert keywords here and there for search engine relevance) and maintains the ability to convert your visitors to paying customers. This is no small task and should be done with the utmost time and care. You Can Take It or Leave It “Code bloat” is probably one of the most overlooked parts of the SEO process. Eliminating page code bloat can be an incredibly daunting task. Removing excess tables and re-coding in CSS, moving CSS and javascript code off the page, and generally making the code as lean as possible can make a considerable difference to page download speeds. Since Google, and likely other engines, are looking at speed as a significant factor, “code bloat” removal becomes an essential part of the SEO process. There have been times where we have had to nearly rebuild entire pages, removing tons of excess code. These changes may only add fractions of seconds to download speeds, but those can weigh heavily against other sites that may be running much faster. Even a Broken Clock is Correct Twice a Day Validating your SEO code has no effect on your search engine rankings. I want to make sure you’re clear on that… so I’ll say it again. There is ZERO SEO benefit to having your code validated. However, as an SEO, I’m a big proponent for using valid code. When code isn’t validated it means there are coding elements that are incorrect. While browsers and search engines can be extremely forgiving on these errors, there are some coding errors that can stop the search engine spiders cold. The error may prevent them from reading the paper properly and, consequently, not assign values of your content correctly. Again, validating your code won’t achieve good rankings, but it can help prevent you from getting poorer rankings due to confusing and improperly created code. If you validate your pages, it is easier to find potential problems as you continue to make edits. If one of your pages has 50 warnings but no problems with the search engines, great! But, let’s say you edit the page and you now have 51 warnings, and this new one is crippling. That error is just another one in the group and, unless you’re paying attention, you won’t even know it’s there. On the other hand if you have zero warnings or errors and after an edit you see one pop up, you can correct it before it becomes a crippling issue for you. All Things Being Equal “Site maps”, “custom 404 redirects” and “robots.txt” files are all important to the overall construction of your site, even if they don’t necessarily have a direct effect on the actual on-page optimization of your site. Site maps help both search engines and visitors quickly and easily get to the information that is important. A “custom 404 redirect” eliminates that annoying “page not found” error and lets you keep visitors on your site if they somehow access a page via a bad link. The “robots.txt” file is useful to communicate with the search engine spiders about content they should or should not index. This allows the search engines to focus its time on the good stuff instead of the irrelevant portions of your site. Up against a similar site, these things can help you keep visitors engaged with your content and prevent them from jumping off to a competitor. It’s often the small things that can make the biggest difference. There are a lot of nuances to SEO and, with that, there is often a lack of understanding from those that are not directly involved. Even still, quite a bit of bad information is easily spread. You don’t have to know SEO well in order to understand it, but having a basic understanding of SEO can help you converse intelligently with your SEO provider. Turning a blind eye to the work they do often leads to incorrect assumptions and false expectations. Having a better grasp on the needs of the SEO will help you ensure that you’re both working to keep the SEO project on track and not chasing after pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Be sure and visit our small business news site.
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6 Clichés That Help You Understand SEO
Google, Search Engine Optimization, Webmarketing | | 7 September 2010 | 
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code, content and copywriting, gifts, Google, search-engine, summer, Webmarketing
Generally these reports take about a day or two, ours had some type of processing error so it took about a week. Overview The first section you’ll see is the number of pages crawled, followed by 3 “critical” aspects of the site (Crawl Coverage, Reputation, and Page Optimization). All three have their own report sections as well. Looks like we got an 88. Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be a B+? 
Recently Rand highlighted his surprise at how prevalent search spam is . But the big issue with search today is not the existence of spam, but how it is dealt with. For a long period of time Google spent much of their resources fighting spam manually. That worked when spammers were sorta poor and one hit wonders fighting on the edge of the web & few people knew how search worked. But as technology advances & “spammers” keep building a bigger stock of capital eventually Google loses the manual game. Search engines concede the importance of SEO. It is now officially mainstream. Both Google and Microsoft offer SEO guides. Microsoft and Yahoo! have in-house SEO teams. Yahoo! purchased a content mill. Microsoft’s update email about powering Yahoo! search results later this week contained “After this organic transition is complete, Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches, which is 31.6 percent of the search market share in the United States and 8.6 percent share in Canada. You can take advantage of this traffic by using search engine optimization (SEO) to complement your search campaigns and boost the visibility of your business.” Sure you will still see some media reports about the “dark arts” of SEO, but that is mainly because they prefer publishing ignorant pablum to drive more page views, as self-survival is their first objective . Some of the same media companies alerting us of the horrors of SEOs have in-house SEO teams that call me for SEO consultations. A Google engineer highlighted this piece by submitting it to Hacker News , using this as the title “sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content.” We tend to over-estimate end users. If most people don’t realize something is spam then to them it isn’t. If the search engineers have a hard time telling if a blog is ESL or auto-generated, how is a typical web user going to distinguish the difference? Some SEO professionals have huge networks of websites and are 8 or 9 figures flush in capital. They can afford to simply buy marketshare in any market they want to enter. Burn one of their sites and they get better at covering their tracks as they buy 5 more. At the same time the media companies are partnering with content mills & the leading content mill filed for an IPO where they are hoping for a $1.5 billion valuation. Why does one form of garbage deserve to rank when another doesn’t? If link buying is bad, then why did Google invest in Viglink ? If link buying is so bad then is lying for links any better? If so, how? How exactly can Google stop the move toward spam in a capitalistic market where domains can be registered with privacy and marketers can always rent an expert to speak for the brand? Is a celebrity endorsement which yields publicity spam? How can Google speak out against spam when they beta test search results that are 100% Google ads ? Wherever possible, Google is trying to replace part of the “organic” search results with another set of Google vertical results. If Google can roughly match relevancy while gaining further control over the traffic they will. Just look at how hard it is to get to the publisher site if you use Google image search. And Google is rumored to be buying Like.com , which will make image search far more profitable for Google. As Google continues to try to suck additional yield out of the search results, I believe they are moving away from demoting spam (due to the point of diminishing returns & risks associated with demoting what they themselves do creating anti-trust issues). Instead of looking for what to demote, they are now shifting toward trying to find more data/signals to promote quality from . The issue with manual intervention (rather than algorithmic advancements) is that it warps the web to promote large beaurocratic enterprises that are highly inefficient. That is ok in the short run, but in the long run it leaves search as a watered down experience . One lacking in flavor and variety. One which is boring. Google is going to get x% of online ad revenues and y% of GDP. In the long run, them promoting inefficient organizations doesn’t make the web (or search) any more stable. They need to push toward the creation of more efficient and more profitable media enterprises. Purchases of ITA Software and Metawebs allow Google to attack some of the broader queries and gain more influence over the second click in the traffic stream. Business models which are efficient grow, whereas inefficient ones are driven into bankruptcy . As Paul Graham has highlighted, we might be moving away from a society dominated by large organizations to ones where more individuals are self-employed (or who work for smaller organizations). We hire about a dozen people, but they are sorta bucketed into separate clusters. Some work on SEO Book, some blog, some help create featured content, some help with marketing, etc. etc. etc. The net result of our efficient little enterprise is pushing terabytes of web traffic each month. Would you describe the site you are currently reading as being “spam” simply because it is efficient & profitable? Would a site that took VC capital and was less efficient be any more proper? How much less interesting is the average big media article on the field of SEO? If a search engine gets too aggressive with penalizing “spam” then tanking competitors becomes a quite profitable business model. If they are to focus on what to demote search engineers need to figure out who is doing what AND who did it. Thus the role of SEO today is not to remain “spam free” (whatever that is) but to create enough signals of quality that you earn the benefit of the doubt. This protects you from the whims of search engineers, algorithmic updates, and attempts at competitive sabotage . You can future-proof your SEO strategy to the point where your site never loses traffic because it never ranked! Or you can get in the game and keep building in terms of quantity and quality. If lower quality stuff is all that is typically profitable in a particular market then it isn’t hard to stand out by starting out with a small high-quality website. That attempt to stand out might not be profitable, but it might give you a platform to test from. After all, Demand Media purchased eHow.com to throw up their “quality content” on. Online the concept of meritocracy is largely a farce. Which is precisely why large search companies are willing to buy content mills . If search engines want to promote meritocracy they should focus more on rewarding individual efforts, though that might have a lower yield, and some people prefer to stay anonymous given competitive threats from outing AND some of the creepy ways online ad networks harvest their data to target them. What does the lack of meritocracy mean for marketers? If you are a marketer you need to be aggressive at marketing your wares or someone with inferior product will out-market you and steal marketshare from you. Will someone consider your site spam? Sure. But they will have worse rankings than you do! 
