Archive for the 'Optimizing for Yahoo' Category
I just spent a few minutes perusing the computer services category of my local Craigslist to see what the local competition is up to….and let me tell you - they are up to no-good!
Usually it would make me feel good to see so many clueless folks calling themselves SEO and SEM experts but I am really starting to get concerned. Why you may ask, would I be concerned if my local competition is a bunch of quacks? Well the thing is that I still think they are getting clients and those same clients will walk away in a few months scratching their heads and thinking SEO/SEM is a total waste of time because of these tricksters.
Let me take a moment to count the ways my local competition scare me (and should scare away clients):
1. Most of their websites have very few backlinks but they all brag that they have 5-10 years experience. How can that be?
2. Most of them don’t rank for anything at all, well almost nothing…one of them ranked for ‘online SEO youtube vids’ - now there is a money term!
3. Most of them offer submission to search engines as part of their service.
4. One doesn’t even have his own website, when I called he said he is not a good designer so he needs to buy one soon?!?!
5. A couple are on free hosting services.
I received a private message at a forum I have been a member of for many years and it was from a relatively senior member that was promoting some discounted listings reviews in his network of web directories. The directories themselves look pretty nice, good templates and category structure but I took a quick look through the backlink profile of one of them and I was quite shocked!
I found backlinks from porn, coming soon sites and even from a page that was simply 10k+ links jammed full of porn, gambling and rx - I was going to post a screenshot of the page but it crashed my browser twice so I figured I better not push my luck.
Most good SEO’s always check backlink profiles before building links but there are many ‘cut-rate’ services out there that won’t spend the extra time doing this type of due diligence. So be very careful or your website might just become part of a ‘bad neighborhood’.
John Dvorak over at pcmag.com wrote an article yesterday where he complained quite mightily about how SEO is ruining Google search results by:
“tricking Google or Bing or Yahoo into ranking your particular Web site higher than the competition by reverse-engineering the tricks used by Google, et al to rank sites in the first place.”
and
“It’s killing the Internet if it hasn’t already.”
and his proof of this is:
“Try and find the best cell phone deal on the Internet. Do it by using a search engine. Every hit is some commercial site trying to sell you something.”
So basically he typed in ‘best cell phone deal’ and he was upset that they results that came up were various websites that wanted to ‘actually’ sell him a cell phone. Ummm, ya….if you type in cell phone deals or some hybrid of that query you are likely in the market to ‘actually’ buy a cell phone, ergo the results that come up will be sites trying to do just that.
The real truth is that Google and other search engines encourage SEO as a way of putting your websites best foot forward and they don’t have any problem with this as long as you represent your website and its content in an honest way. In fact here is a link to Googles SEO starter guide - which by-the-way is available in 40 languages due to its popularity.
After making the above wildly unresearched statements John continues to hoot-and-haw about how everyone is out to trick him but then he gives SEO a little free promo by stating:
“My advice to Web site managers, when you see this sort of result, is to contact THAT site and hire the consultant doing SEO for it. This sort of thing is no accident.”
Maybe he was just spouting off to attract readers but some of these comments, obviously made by search engine marketing folk got pretty nasty:
“I wonder if you have any understanding of business and marketing if you think commercial sites coming up when you are actually looking for a deal is a bad thing. That really made me laugh.”
“You’re right John, if I type in “best cell phone deal” I definitely don’t want to see sites offering me the ability to get good deals on cell phones. What I’m REALLY looking for would be a wikipedia article talking about the future of cell phones followed by a bunch of sites featuring cell phone news and tips on using cell phones to order pizza.”
“Congratulations!! You have created the worst article that I have ever found on the internet.”
“John…seriously???? you just lost all credibility.”
“What a pity to read your post! What a pity for pcmag to let you write about SEO! I do recommend reading some basics SEO before you put up another post.”
“Which is worse? SEO, which you woefully misdescribe, or linking keywords in your article to adverts so that they pop up without warning in a really intrusive way?”
“John, a long long time ago, I respected your intelligence. Today, that’s completely gone.”
Ouch, I hope John does not take all this criticism too hard but I do agree - this article did seem quite ‘light’ on research.
Lately I have had the subject of lying on my mind and not only for the fact that I have five kids ages 7, 9, 10, 11 and 13 at home and lying seems to have become one of their favorite pastimes. In the world of SEO (like many industries) there are a slew of lies floating around the web and some individuals benefit by them, some big companies (starting with the letter ‘G’) encourage them, but mostly the entire industry suffers for them.
Lying is a big part of everyone life, from the little tiny white ones; “do I look fat in these pants”? to “I have never had sexual relations with that woman”! - My kids and I love the movie The Truman Show and my 6 year old daughter wondered for weeks whether she was in the “Jessica Show” (and I encouraged it by looking at the mirror every once-in-a-while and saying a few halted lines about a product). One of my all-time favorite movies, The Matrix was about a really big lie and the recent movie, The Invention of Lying was about a world were no one even knew what a lie was because one had never been committed. I think I have a permanent fascination with ‘lying’ since reading the book, The Truth Machine because it was so amazingly interesting. I even heard there is a professor in Cambridge teaching an ethics course and every class he tells one lie and it is part of the grading system for the student to find out what lie was perpetrated each class.
Some of the popular lies running the gambit in SEO are:
-SEO companies that offer search engine submissions, some even charge as much as $99 for this useless service. All you need is one backlink out there for the search engines to follow and they will naturally index your site, no need to pay for this as a ’service’ and in my opinion any SEO company that offers it is on the shady side.
-You need thousands and thousands of links to rank for competitive terms - completely untrue, you can rank for competitive terms with half or a quarter of competitors backlinks depending on the quality of those links. One good link can easily be better than 100 spammy links.
-Getting a high page rank will help you rank better in the search rankings. No way, no how! These days visual page rank means very little and I have seen many low page rank and even zero page rank sites place very well in the organic listings. Not only is page rank almost worthless, chasing it (by purchasing incoming links from high page rank sites) can actually get your site penalized.
-Guaranteed results scams - This one is big these days and I have had numerous potential clients ask about what guarantee I offer and I tell them the same thing each time. I guarantee I will work very hard to get you ranked as high as possible in the shortest time while balancing out risk. It is about then, they launch into a speech about an email they got promising them number one position in Google or your money back. I try my best to explain that no one can guarantee that and there is always a catch. Whether it is by them using paid placement, ranking for obscure, low competition key phrases or plain old ‘hit-and-run’ tactics (meaning the business won’t even be around when you try and collect your money back). Please have a look at my SEO scams section for more info on these types of offers. I end each of these conversations with a statement like this, “If nothing else, do you really think that a company is going to work on a website for months and then because of something beyond their control - get paid absolutely nothing for it?”
-SEO can be done by anyone, including yourself. Now I am not saying it is not possible for a website owner to learn the basics of SEO and in fact I encourage it, because if and when you eventually hire a professional you will at least have a rudimentary understanding of what needs to be done. But just like plumbing, you may be able to tighten up a washer or unclog your own drain but when it comes to doing any complicated work you better be prepared to hire a professional or devote some serious time to learning the plumbing trade. Same with SEO - you can write better content and buy a site design with a better structure but when it comes down to serious SEO you will need to hire a professional or spend 100’s of hours learning a new part-time career. And just like trying to fix your own broken water pipe problems you might end up making things worse and then paying twice as much to fix the damage you have done. If your business depends on you to provide a function, be it sales, support, planning or other expertise - your time is much better spent doing those things and paying out profits to a professional SEO that can perform those specialized services faster and at a much higher level than you could.
-Here is another myth/lie that I can vouch for personally. It seems many people think that if you go to Matt Cutts blog and write down complementary comments (read: kissing his butt) to his posts you will receive a higher page rank and up to 400% more Google traffic. This is false.
Lying is part of human nature but it is always a good idea to stay up-to-date on what lies are floating around a particular industry so you don’t fall for them.
It seems SEO’s are fairing well these-days, even in a bad economic environment - salaries for SEM/SEO related positions were up in 2008 and that just shows that decision makers are continuing to see the relative value we bring to the table.
2009 yearly salaries for an individual contributor with 1-3 years relevant experience range from $40,000 to $80,000; senior manager salaries range $70,000 to $120,000; and vice presidents with responsibilities for large SEM campaigns or a team of specialists earn from $160,000 to $250,000.
While the salary range for those with 1- years experience is quite wide I think that the majority of those getting the low range, $40k - $50k are in the 1-2 year experience range. Once you have 3 years plus under your belt I don’t think you would even consider a position for under $60k.
It seems the spending on SEM will continue into the distant future and that is sweet music to anyone that is involved in this industry!
It is official, Yahoo! is not longer considering the ‘keyword’ tag when ranking websites in their search results. Google stopped paying attention to these many eons ago but it seems Yahoo! has finally followed suit. It was just too easy to manipulate so I am not really surprised. This tidbit of info came out Tuesday during the SMX East conference.
For a long time, the industry some what made fun of Yahoo for using it (at all) for ranking purposes. Then, during the Q&A period of the session, Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo said at 2:09pm (EST), that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for rankings. In fact, Yahoo stopped using it a “few months ago,” said Pierry.
I was kind of funny when Danny asked Cris, why didn’t Yahoo announce this? Cris basically shrug his shoulders. He then asked Cris, “are you sure?” Cris gave me a look, the look like, that was a dumb question, since he is the man now behind Yahoo Search.
So don’t bother optimizing (stuffing) your keyword meta tags anymore because none of the search engines really care!
After some SEO testing proved this to be incorrect Yahoo! stepped in with an explanation.
What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.
Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.
However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.
The LA Times is reporting that the judge in the MySpace Mom’s suicide killing case has overturned his decision about the ‘criminality’ of breaking the Terms of Service of a website. And that is really good news for all those SEO’s out there that have ever purchased a link.
I know a few SEO’s that were considering leaving the country because a few of their paid directory submissions were in the ‘gray’ area. Now they can remain in the USA and Canada and live out their lives not fearing the long jail term that should be associated with breaking the ToS of companies like Google.
In 2008 it is interesting to see that paid search efforts outspent organic optimization 10-1, my thoughts are that this will drastically change over the course of the next 5 years because many competitive industries are hitting extremely high costs on a pay-per-click basis and even though SEO can be harder to measure and can take a longer time to show results. Those results are so impressive that they can mean the difference between ‘making-or-breaking’ a business.
I was recently involved in doing SEO for a company that had a cost per acquisition of $47 through traditional style advertising and that cost went down to $3.85 for those aquired though search engine optimization.
I find the biggest problem with SEO continuing to grow at the pace it deserves is twofold, first there is a lot of resistance from traditional marketing folks because SEO is a much different animal. With SEO you are spending considerable resources on something your company ultimately has no control over, the search engines. And to make matters even more complicated the search engines keep their algorithms and methods of ranking a secret. Secondly, most business owners and traditional type marketing managers don’t really understand SEO and that makes it very difficult for them to justify the expense and risks involved in switching over their traffic acquisition methods to organic vs. paid.
But there is hope and I do see a pattern starting with the largest and most progressive companies as they give SEO a try. It has even reached a point where many of these companies are bringing SEO in-house where they can learn, track and enjoy these advantages up close and personal.
-We had a quick page rank update a couple of days ago and it pretty much surprised everyone. Even though page rank does not seem to mean a heck of a lot these days every update still seems to get the webmaster and SEO community up and jump’in! Personally I am wondering if my weird news site will ever see some green juice again but the PR0 does not seem to be hindering the steady flow of traffic - this week it was extra busy averaging around 1,100 visits a day.
-Finally the ‘SEO’s are criminals’ buzz is calming down. After Matt came out and said that SEO’s will be held to higher standards and Google is tracking them there was a long and painful cry of foul across the entire industry. Myself I don’t really think it is such a big deal and the SEO playing-field has never been level anyways.
-As far as the ‘page rank sculpting’ episode I will simply say I feel sorry for the SEO firms that sold this to their biggest clients and now have to figure out a way to get their foot out of their mouths.
What will next months buzz bring….no idea, maybe a new conspiracy theory about Google and Yahoo! planning to buyout MSN to stop BING from conquering the world?
Craigslist seems to be a potpourri of bad SEO’s - take a gander at this advertisement:
Affordable SEO - 1 WEEK TO THE TOP (Toronto and area)
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