SEO is like marketing

At the SXSW Conference Amit Singhal (Google) sat down with Guy Kawasaki to talk about the evolution of search engines.

Kawasaki veered the next stage of the conversation onto the topic of SEO, and how companies can improve their search rankings.

“We at Google have time and time again said—and seen it happen—that if you build high-quality content that adds value, and your readers and your users seek you out, then you don’t need to worry about anything else,” Singhal said. “If people want that content, your site will automatically work… you could make a bunch of SEO mistakes and it wouldn’t hurt.”

“Is SEO bullshit?” Kawasaki asked.

“That would be like saying marketing is bullshit,” Singhal said, which drew a laugh from the audience—and maybe some gritted teeth.

I wouldn't say the SEO is bullshit but there are a lot of bullshitters who say that they are SEO experts. As it happens the SEO world has merged with the advertising world and SEO/on-line marketing is becoming synonymous in many people's minds. Obviously expertise in marketing, determining ROI from analytics is necessary and legitimate for many businesses.

Traditional SEO has it's white hats: people who focus on what many content developers, product owners and developers don't do: associating high value words to directory and file names; placement of these words in H1s, alt tags; and cleaning up the HTML code. The last point should have been done by the developer - and is, only now, becoming standard as responsive web design forces developers into this practice. (EX: Putting navs at the end of the file and using CSS to place it elsewhere.)

The merge between traditional SEO and advertising is the focus on landing pages associated with marketing campaigns; how users navigate from this landing page; and the associated ROI analysis.

However, SEO, for much of the web-community, is associated with fast-talking scam artists who promise high returns and, of course, can only deliver for a short while by unethical practices such as creating landing pages with nothing but carefully crafted key words - but no actual content; by link farming; click-jacking, astro-turfing; hiring people to do automated +1 ranking; and spamming forums & blogs.

After showing such "promising" early results the company then takes more money from their victims until the game inevitably plays out.

Underscores versus Dashes in URLs

I had a whole series of discussions with clients regarding this, especially in having them change company policy in constructing URLs. I found this video and, to paraphrase an old saying, a video is worth a thousand words.

Google Includes Site Speed in Search Ranking

Give 3 cheers to Google. They are trying to take account of how fast a page loads when determining their search results. This is a tremendous advancement: advancing properly coded pages over poorly coded ones. The devil is in the details but including page load and rendering speed in their ranking algorithms will only make things better for all of us.

Now, if only they can determine the original content writer and rank the site higher than copycats. I suppose it will become practical in a few years as Google increases their indexing and computer/database speed increases.

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Using site speed in web search ranking

Improving Blogger Search Engine Rankings

You may have heard of all the meta-tags that can help with your Google ranking. Of course there aren't any. But there are some tips and tricks that you can use to maximize your SEO.

One means by which Google and other Search Engines rank pages is by the use of the Heading Tag. Heading Tags There are 5 heading tags but only the H1 is truly meaningful in SEO searches.

For some reason Blogger Templates use either a H2 or H3 for the post title. So, assuming you are optimizing your post titles, you should change the Heading Tag associated with your post title to H1.

Go to Layout > Edit Layout and
do a search for "data:post:title" and change the H2, or H3 if you're using one of the Minima Templates, to H1.

Don't forget to change your style sheets. Do a search for H2 or H3 and change them to H1. Make certain you change only the ones with "post."

EDIT: May 6, 2010

I've been told that Google doesn't like it when there are more than one H1 per page. If that's true then changing H3s to H1 is not a good idea. I'm researching this to see if this is true.

Google Does Not Use Keyword Meta Tags

Nothing is easier to convince a client that Google does not use the keyword meta tag in its ranking than hearing it straight from the source.

Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. ... Our web search ... disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present

Why aren't search engines more useful?

I was asked the other day "why aren't search engines more useful?" Why do they come up with so much junk?

For two reasons. One cataloging data is an incredibly difficult task. New data is added daily in an ever increasing amount of new website; and not only does this data have to be found and catalogued but it has to be presented to people in whatever way they happen to think of.

Second developers and SEOs (such as you would hire at GLM Designs) do their best to make their clients sites rank as high as possible in the search engines. Up until recently there was a perpetual battle between the two with the search engines trying to come up with the most relevant site and the site owners trying to become as highly ranked as possible.

For the most part, except for a few people who game the system, the war between SEOs and the search engines is over. There is a series of agreed upon standards and, by following these standards, you can quickly and surely increase the visibility of your site by providing relevant data to the search engine (Google, Yahoo) users.

Meta-Tag Generators, Which is the best?

Readers of this blog know that I've been saying, for a long time, that META tags are not very useful and, for the most part, not worth your time. Do not waste your time and money developing META tag generators. META tags will not help you get your site ranked higher.

The only value of META tags is that accurate META tag information may help in clickthrough. Google and other SEs will sometimes display the META description in their results page.

See Meta Tags and Title Tags

Who uses Meta Tags in Search Ranking

As far as I know Yahoo is the only major search engine that still supports the META keywords tag. The question that must be asked is: how high in their algorithm to they place the META tags in comparision to words in the title, body, anchor text, etc...?

We know that the META keyword tag is still being indexed and used in Yahoo's site description. For that reason and that alone it would make sense to KEEP the field (as well as META description) if, and only if, your CMS already has it built in; and you have default keywords and descriptions so employees do not have to waste time with them.

All in all, while these META tags don't hurt, they don't particularly help either. If they are automatically entered fine. Don't remove them. I don't see a ROI should you need employees to spend any time deciding on values for either of these tags.

Sponsored Conversations

Analyst firm Forrester published a report this morning telling corporations that it's a good idea to engage bloggers in "sponsored conversations," or the exchange of goods or credit in exchange for blog coverage. The report, titled "Add Sponsored Conversations to Your Toolbox", is 8 pages long, focuses on a number of high profile examples like the case of KMart and Chris Brogan, and sells for $795.

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Forrester is Wrong About Paying Bloggers

Forrester is promoting a very dangerous idea. It is a good short term way for bloggers to make money but, if abused, will in the long run diminish the value of the blogosphere. The flip-side to this argument is that there is a lot of pay-to-play in the print media (you buy this ad I write an article about you) and few people question the validity of print media.

Meta Tags and Title Tags

There is no magic bullet in getting your site to be ranked higher. It is doubtful that either the keyword or description tag helps with any major search engine. The tags were abused by spammers to such a point that, as far as page ranking is concerned, they are ignored. There is still some debate as to the value of title tags in page ranking. That tag, as with the meta tags are also being abused.

The value in the tags come, if at all, in the higher clickthrough from the search pages.

Content Management Systems cannot write useful META and TITLE tags without input from the user. Google and the other search engines start to ignore the META and TITLE descriptions when too many pages display the same information. Your CMS can be modified to help in the creation of these descriptions based upon directory information and other information given to the system. But even the most well-thought out system requires someone to tweak the final result.

Search Engines and Dynamic URLs: Part II

Adding to the previous post there are two additional potential problems when using dynamic URLs.

Search engines have problems indexing URLs that contain session IDs. I would only pass session IDs in the URL in areas of the site which are not to be indexed -- such as password protected areas or shopping cart pages.

Session IDs cause problems with the SE bots. The session variables are different each time the bot lands on a the "page," giving the impression that the page has a new URL every time it is visited. This appearnace of duplicate content causes numerous problems, simply put Session IDs must not be visible to search engine.

A second problem with Dynamic URLs come in parameter ordering. The coders must be careful to order the parameter the same way each time else the search engines will have to juggle which "url" to use to go to the same content.

All in all dynamic urls are fine as long as no session variables are used in indexed pages and if the coders are consistent with their parameter ordering.

Search Engines and Dynamic URLs

Too many people still think that search engines have trouble indexing dynamic URLs. For the most part this isn’t true. Search engines still have problems indexing URLs with more than three parameters. This happens because there are so many combinations that the bot gets stuck on the site and has to abort. This problem will lessen as computing power increases. In general URLs with one or two parameters provide no problems. They are spidered and indexed just fine.

Which Meta Tags Will Get My Site Rated Higher?

Fortunately or unfortunately there are no major META tags that will help your site be ranked higher. Anybody that says so is trying to sell you something.

Several years ago there were two META tags whose expressed purpose was to help you describe your site.

<meta name="description" content="Place Description Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Place Keywords Here" />

Developers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) quickly started to take advantage of the tags. One of the more eggregious ways that people took advantage of these tags was by putting highly ranked search terms in the tags even though those terms had nothing whatsoever to do with the site in question.

The logic behind this was that people would find and see the site even though it had nothing to do with what the people were searching for. This may or may not have been effective for the sites who were abusing the system but it annoyed people who were using the search engines. It also annoyed the decision makers at Google and other search engines. The result was that these two meta tags became deprecated: search engines no longer valued the information in these tags.

Once again, anybody who says there are meta-tags that will help your site be rated highly is -- at best -- many years out of date.

Is there anything you can do to get your site ranked higher? Yes, there are many things that can be done but none of them include META tags.

SEO A Tutorial Your First Step

I'm often asked about SEO tips and tricks - namely how does one begin: does one need to know HTML? does one need to have a marketing background? What does one need to know to promote ones website?

Ultimately it helps to know some HTML and to have some background in marketing but it is most important to understand what Google - and other search engine companies are trying to do and how they are doing it. To begin with let's look at the ideal scenario. Milliseconds after a webpage is is uploaded the search engine finds and evaluates the content of the page and correctly displays the page in order of relevance to the user searching for the information.

Currently this "ideal" is only partially met with heavily indexed sites such as CNN and other news sites. New files are indexed and evaluated remarkably quickly. And yet the two main points need to be kept in mind:

1. Speed and quality of result are at odds;
2. The relevance of the result is not / cannot be perfectly graded for every person and every query.

Thirdly search engines are still not good at (but will shortly) in determining originality. By originality I don't mean it a creative writing sense but in the search engine "knowing" the originator of the content. This is gaining in importance as a result of increased site scraping.

Once you know what a SE is trying to do you need to start thinking about what you can do to place higher. Knowing that news sites are crawled multiple times a day shows that you need to consistently add more files to your site. Knowing that SEs are quite fallible in determining the relevancy of your pages means that you must do your best in aiding them through the use of keywords, titles, urls, and many other big and little things such as getting in bound links and the proper use of heading tags.

These tips and tricks can be easily picked up over time but nothing counts as much as consistently adding valuable information to your site and being frequently indexed.