SEO for Humans

Posted by Edwin Lynch on November 3, 2011 in Blogging, Business Practices, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

Is SEO mostly a waste of their time and your money?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a very misunderstood term. In the web design industry, the term is met with scorn and sidelong glances. Even Google Webmaster Central warns about dubious SEO operatives.

Nobody knows how Google’s algorithm works

It’s a closely guarded secret because billions of dollars are at stake.

Google have been accused of anti-competitive business practices because that very algorithm often determines who gets the business. Add this to the fact that many of your competitors are also employing SEO experts and it’s easy to see why SEO is often referred to as “The Google Dance.”

With too many people on the SEO dance floor, your toes will get crushed. So why dance in the first place? Why not simply build a better website?

I’ve had sites banned from search results because I unwittingly employed “Black Hat” SEO techniques. Doing things such as;

• innocently using the same phrase too many times on a home page (my bad),
• using invisible writing (white text on white background) or
• using 0 size (zero pixel) keyphrases

… had one of my client’s website banned.

More blatant techniques such as building doorway websites with the aim of funnelling customers to your main website or flooding search engine results with your results are also considered “Black Hat” or “unfair” by search engines. If caught using these techniques, you’ll find yourself mysteriously omitted from the search results.

In my case, I was banned for a month and my client lost a LOT of business (we’re friends now). But the whole business made me uncomfortable about taking money for providing an SEO service. These days I put my efforts into building a great website and Google always seems to find me (and my client sites). It’s also hard to accept praise for getting a client to number one in their industry when all that may have happened is other SEO operatives might have been having a sandwich at the time.

Search engines consider Black Hat SEO techniques “spamming.” They send spiders (little programs) to crawl the web looking for genuine and viable sites. If you are caught “cheating” the natural flow, they see you as a spammer. It’s completely understandable and you know what? As a reformed web developer, I’m with them.

I’m forever deleting spam from my inbox, sent to me by self-proclaimed SEO experts promising higher rankings in search results and thousands of new customers. I get emails from clients asking if they need to “do anything” about seemingly important SEO emails.

My advice?

Write a blog.

Writing might actually be the hardest thing to do on Earth, but by jove, the pen is still far mightier than the sword.

The imaginary website :

Imagine writing an article, once per week (say Sunday night) about your business, product or service. Be honest. Reveal something about yourself and the way you think. Allow others to respond to your article by having a comments section. Imagine writing a helpful article – like this one. How can you help your future customer – no – scratch that … How can you help people in general? What knowledge can you freely give to the masses? And then imagine the Google spider comes crawling, every Monday morning before breakfast, scouring the web for useful tid-bits and other information to serve up to the public as a Google result. And imagine someone finds that article. The very thing they were looking for. They may not want to buy your product, but they are keen and subscribe to your site. Happy to have read your article and warming to the idea of receiving articles of a similar nature on a weekly (or fortnightly) basis.

Now imagine a site that rates number one in Google search. It has 300 sites pointing to it and there are 1000 100% positive reviews all linking back to a product landing page.

Which site would you rather visit?

While there are many things you can do to improve your web site ranking, you really need to keep your eye on the ball. That ball is NOT SEO. Before obsessively monitoring your position on the Google search page like it’s a stock market, ask yourself this very simple question …

Is my site worth visiting?

There’s no point in ranking number one in a search for “hardware stores melville” if your site is impossible to navigate and you’ve forgotten to add a contact form. You have to be worth it.

One thing I’ve learnt in my 16 years as a webmaster, is that the web turns everything upside down. Literally.

If your site is about promoting your services, increasing brand exposure, building a customer database and showcasing your awards … you’ve got it all wrong. That’s “old school” thinking.
- Geoffrey Multimedia ;)

Your website isn’t for YOU, silly, it’s for your customers.

Sure. You’ll check your new web layout on your friend’s iPad, set it as your office homepage and gloat over your company history and embedded YouTube ad for hours. After all, you’ve come a long way. Plus, your logo looks great (although it could be bigger) and your company name ranks #1 in a Google search for “Homocentric Slippers.” You’ve made it!

But where are the customers? This is the 24hr web. New customers should be pounding my door and I should be collecting untapped leads and making sales while I sleep. Something’s wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

Don’t subscribe to “if you build it they will come.” They will – for about 3.5 seconds on average – but if you’re boring or banging on about your company and your awards, they’ll quickly go find someone who cares. There are plenty of other places to go these days. Know this and you’ll start to see clearly how SEO works. Pretend it’s not the case at your own peril.

"Why doesn’t anyone else share my enthusiasm?"

You are enthusiastic about your new company website because it’s really a substitute for YOU. Nobody cares about your company unless they find something of value in it for themselves. Your employees will care if you give them a pay rise, a bonus, or let them take the afternoon off. And your customers will care if you include a few useful freebies with their swiftly delivered product.

I know if I’m going to buy a product, I’ll research it … to death. I’ll ask questions on Whirlpool Forums.

Sometimes price isn’t the only factor. Shipping, delivery details and speed of service might be important. I’m often interested in an “upgrade path.” Is there some way to offer an upgrade path on your physical item or service? It’s all the rage with software. Buy it today for $50 and when a new one comes out get 25% off! Think outside the box.

The key to a successful website is to find an obvious (or overlooked) weakness in your market, and deal it properly on your website.

It’s kind of why I’m writing this blog entry. SEO is such a minefield, that I really needed to get this off my chest. Also, to be honest, the web industry is full of sharks and charlatans, feeding off the technologically illiterate. I may get picked up by the Google search robot writing this article and (possibly) rank slightly highter on subjects like SEO, web development and web design in Perth, Western Australia, (there I go – seeding those crawlers, again) but my real volition here is to help wean small businesses (and people in general) off an unhealthy obsession with Search Engine Optimisation. Why rank highly if your site is nothing more than an egocentric business card floating in cyberspace? Why even have a website in that instance.

I don’t know about you, but I want to visit a great website that is updated frequently with lots of information and customer feedback and reviews or the service etc. I want to go where other people go and I want to read about what they say about the company. Good and bad.

Search engines read. In fact, until they come up with a better image recognition software, that’s all they do presently. So if you have something to say, write about it. And let others respond to your writing. Be brave. Go with the good and improve the bad.

If you take a look at all the great professional websites in my industry, you’ll notice one thing in common.

• www.sitepoint.com
• www.alistapart.com
• www.designfestival.com
• www.sixrevisions.com

All these web industry sites are centred around a blog structure.

By the way, nobody will search for your company name, except you. They might search for “comfortable slippers western australia” but they won’t tap in “homocentric slippers”. They’d be nuts, wouldn’t they? So why obsess about your company name – up there in lit pixels?

Nobody cares.

List 5 reasons why you visit 5 of your favourite websites and the answer will be staring right back at you. You’ll probably find they are doing one or more of the following things.

Giving users a voice.
Answering questions publicly.
Providing good service.
Posting the good and the bad.
Encouraging discussion.

They certainly won’t be obsessing about their company name.

Yes. There is such a thing as an SEO expert, but the only one I regularly read (and therefore trust) is Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing. I read his marketing blog daily. He’s a sensible man who doesn’t do the hard sell and speaks plain English about search engines and what you can do to rank higher.

Here’s Ian’s site.

Interestingly enough, like the web professional sites listed above, Ian also presents information using a traditional blog layout. He knows. The most important page on your site is your home page. If you are refreshing that daily with regularly updated content (weekly is a close second), in theory, that should be all you need to worry about. That is, Providing you’ve had someone like me coding your site from the ground up – and with the Google search engines in mind. ;)

I’ll leave you with one last question, because there’s another well-established industry that operates a lot like SEO IMHO…

Would you pay for weather updates?