Posts Tagged ‘Search Engines’

Here we are again, two years after What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines: The Sequel and eight years since the original, What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines. I’m back with a new Christmas wish list. I smell a franchise opportunity here!

Let’s start with some open items from the original wish-list and see how things are coming along from 2008:

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There was no commercial internet in the 80′s, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t reach into the recesses of our past to see that, everything we know now about SEO, we already knew back then. How? From the greatest, most magical music of all time: 80′s hair band glam rock!

They just don’t make music like this anymore, and it’s a shame. The sweet sound of rock’n'roll has never tasted better. All it takes is a reflective look at some of these song titles to realize that these guys knew their online marketing! (Though I’m sure they were all too wasted to even know it!)

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I was thinking the other day about how influencing search engines is like influencing people. Short of brute force and absolute control, you can’t force anyone to do your bidding. With search engines, you might make a spam brute force attack, but that will be short lived. And absolute control? Well, no one has that, not even Google engineers, unless they all got together in a drunken binge and decided to reprogram the algorithm collectively.

Brute force and seeking absolute control are temporary measures at best. Eventually there will be an uprising and you’ll be shock-and-awed into a big heaping pile of disaster. Not a good way to go.

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I’ve never really been an algorithm chaser. As an SEO, I understand the need to keep up with what’s going on with the major search engines as a prerequisite to being able to perform solid optimization strategies. However, there is a point where you start getting diminishing returns from chasing every nuance in the search engine algorithms vs. building a solid, well-optimized website that performs well for both search engines and visitors coming through search.

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Over the last dozen plus years, unscrupulous SEO’s have given the entire search engine optimization industry a bad rep. It seems like every few months some high profile person in the Internet world says something about how SEO is snake oil, sending ripples throughout the SEO community.

To be fair, some of the complaints about SEOs are deserved. Not for the entire SEO community, but for a small segment of “SEO providers.” Unfortunately, like sleezy lawyers, it only takes one to ruin the whole batch, perceptively.

I’m sure many readers have either heard about, or know someone who has had (or have themselves had) an extremely negative SEO experience. I talk to many business owners who are skeptical about SEO because their last SEO didn’t perform as expected, either over-promised and under-delivered, dropped out of contact, or just wasn’t doing the job as promised.

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Most business owners start with a pretty good idea of who they are competing against before they even set up shop. This is valuable information that can help you overcome a deficit of knowledge that you may not even know you have. Just as competitor knowledge is valuable for offline businesses, a business owner must also have intimate knowledge of those who they are competing against online as well.

You need to know who is the leader in your industry, and then do what you can to find out how they achieved it.

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I’ve started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum’s new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers.  Although it’s about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines.  Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper.

Here are some of the highlights that I personally took away –

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The optimal time to start consulting with the SEO on a new website is at the very beginning. And, I mean the VERY beginning… when the website is just a sparkle in it’s dreamer’s eye.

I was recently consulting with a client who brought us on at the very beginning of a new project. It worked beautifully, as we got to work with their wire-frame layouts and help guide them through the important design and architecture aspects before they paid a single cent to a programmer.

Had they brought us in later, much of our advice would have either been discarded because they were beyond the point of no return, or they would have shelled out more money to have the developers re-program the entire site to accommodate good usability and search friendly architecture. Getting us involved when they did not only saved them thousands of dollars, but allowed them to build a strong, search-engine-friendly site from the ground up.

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SEO can be a boring, monotonous job. But, it can also be an exciting detective trail of discovery. The hardest SEO jobs are those that are for websites that are already performing strongly and you’re trying to eek out slightly better results. The fun one’s are those that have lots of problems, which even the smallest SEO and analytic edits produce huge changes in the results.

Unfortunately, not all sites are easy to get results for regardless of how much improvement is necessary. Continuing on my theme of using traditional clichés to make SEO points, I hereby provide you with some clichés that will help you be a better SEO.

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