HOW SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION MISSES THE POINT

Victoria was kind enough to share this story - and if this doesn't qualify for this site I don't know what does.

In part, the story makes the point that I hoped to get across in my talks on SEO. Content is ultimately king. The purpose of SEO is to drive people to your site and have them stay. If you don't have the content that people are looking for - they are going to leave.

How do you know your content is good? The press generated by the contest points out that the popularity of the author, the number of readers reading his site, and the links they made to his site are good indications. From Google: " PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value."

And how right they are. If people are regularly reading your content and 'vote' for your site by linking to it - it really does say something about the content you produce. It shows (in theory) that your content is actually worth while and that people appreciate it.

The un-ethical part of the SEO industry creeps in when people counterfeit links and create link farms to "trick" the search engines. Or worse - spam blogs to piggyback on the blog's popularity.

I mentioned a few "tricks" to improve your search engine placement in my talks, but I would argue that none of them are really tricks. They are just good web design practices and common sense.

1) Do your market research. Find out what your clients are actually searching for.
2) Design and write your content so that it actually provides the information your clients are searching for. (in an economical/efficient way)
3) Update your content.
4) Design your site to be standards compliant. Use tags and markup in the ways they were intended to be used.
5) Make your site meta data rich so that the brainless robots that spider the web can 'understand' what your site is about.

Don't worry about your seach engine placement. If your content is useful and relevant people will find it. If its really useful and relevant they will link to it. Or better yet - they will buy something from you! Or even better than that - they will buy something from you and tell their friends how great you are!!

The articles also pointed out precisely why I left my position at the last company I worked for. In a quote from a wired article about this competition, the winner said, "A lot of people are trying to increase their page rank unethical. I think if we show them (that) the best thing you can do is to write really good material, then hopefully, they'll spend their time doing that (instead of) spending time coming up with ways to graffiti other people's pages."

It wasn't so much that the work we did was un-ethical (the client's sites actually had the content people were searching for), but it was mainly a job that amounted to spraying "graffiti on other people's pages." How dull is that? Where's the challenge?

I left the position, but I have no problems sharing the information I gained from working in the field.

I hope that some of you have found the information I have been providing to be of some use. I also thank everyone that shares the information they find with the group. I will continue to update this page with that information as long as people find it worthwhile.

andre

LINKS:
The Original article that Victory told us about. Popular blogger enters SEO contest on a lark and wins.

A blog entry about the article. Reiterating many of the points in the original article. A nice touch is the notice at the bottom of his page "SORRY, COMMENTS ARE TEMPORARILY DISABLED DUE TO COMMENT SPAM"

Wired article about the contest and the winner.

Press Release Optimization: All Science, No Art

Kevin has been kind enough to share another link.

Press Release Optimization: All Science, No Art.

Feel free to e-mail me links and ideas - and I'll happily add links on this site.

andre

Meta Data

Kevin was kind enough to pass along this link:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/4/mcgovern30.asp

Its an article that basically re-states some of the concepts covered in my talk - and makes an important observation:

"Some people think that the only reason to write metadata is for the search engines. This is so wrong. In the first place, you don’t write metadata for search engines. You write it for people who use search engines. "

Certainly something to keep in mind.

andre

Search Term Bids

Kevin pointed out that I didn't have a link showing where you can see the search term bids.

Here it is from Overture.

You might note the Human Input Validation on this page (the area where it asks you to type the letters in the image). This was put there - because people like me wrote programs (robots) to automatically gather the bid prices for long lists of words.

Human Input Validation makes it tough for scripts to access the bids - but in response to the demands of the high volume purchasers there was an API developed for programmers to access the listings (thus bypassing the form). I happened to be one of the firt people to give overture feedback on the API documentation. I am not 100% sure if Overture ever put the project into production - but I know they did work on it.

andre

Another Link

I thought I would add another link to a Freebie search engine submission.

The site is called Gigablast. Its a one person search engine. Luckily that one person is a former employee of infoseek - and luckily he seems to know what he is doing because Gigablast actually generates decent results.

I'm going to bet that everyone hears more about this search engine in the future as its 'underdog' status gains it fame.

As with all rules there are exceptions - this will be the exception to the rule about not submitting to non top 10 search engines. I'm pretty sure this one is safe. (one good clue is that it doesn't ask for any information about you - just your URL if you are submitting - plus it is free to submit).

For more information about Gigablast check out http://gigablast.com/about.

To submit your URL http://gigablast.com/addurl.

andre

Additional Notes

Hello everyone.

First of all thanks for the kind words after the talk last Thursday. I hope the information I provided was of some use to members in the group.

I just wanted to add a couple of notes to go along with the talk from the April 29th 2004 newpath discussion on SEO.

1) When choosing keywords and search phrases: Another tip - try plurals of your words. "Art Program" and "Art Programs" produce different results in search engines.

2) A general note: I'm not sure if I made it clear during the talk - but when you are optimizing for a search phrase or search terms - you are actually optimizing a single page on your site for the phrase or term. If you attempt to optimize your entire site for a single term or phrase all of your pages are going to look and sound an awful lot alike.

3) I didn't talk about Blogs much because they are typically personal sites (vs. your corporate site) - but I did include a few links to some Blog Search Engines you might consider adding your personal blog to (so more people can read your take on the world).

4) Feel free to add comments or ask questions on this site. Also post your own research or links of interest here (or on your own site and link to them from here). I will try and answer as many questions as I can.

5) A shameless personal plug: If you know of anyone that needs SEO work done - or would require a consultant on their SEO campaign - please pass along my name and contact information.

Andre Molnar
905-522-1648
andre@andremolnar.com

6) Attend the June Newpath meeting: I will be covering:
i) Google Specific SEO
ii) Meta Data (way beyond the meta tag)
iii) Covering FAQs from the first talk.

andre

Supporting Links from SEO Talk on April 29th 2004

General Search Engine and SEO Related Resources

SearchEngineWatch.com (Granddaddy of SEO News) - http://searchenginewatch.com/

1StSearchRanking.net (Lots of Free and Useful Information) - http://www.1stsearchranking.net/articles.htm

Submission Tips from Search Engine Watch - http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/index.php

Search Engine Landscape from Search Engine Watch (Who owns Who) - http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156401

Submit Your Site:

Free<br />

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

All The Web (owned by Yahoo) - http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/submit_site

Yahoo/Altavista - http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

LookSmart/Zeal (non commercial) - http://www.zeal.com/users/become_a_zealot.jhtml
DMOZ (ODP) Directory - http://dmoz.com/add.html

PAY

Teoma (Ask Jeeves) - http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/submit_site

Yahoo/Overture/Inktomi/Altavista - http://http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/sm.jhtml

Yahoo Directory - https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/express/intro/

Pay Per Click

Overture - http://www.content.overture.com/d/about/advertisers/

Google Ad Words - https://adwords.google.com/select/

LookSmart - https://secure.findwhat.com/signup/signup.asp

BLOG Search Engines / Directories

BlogSearchEngine - http://www.blogsearchengine.com

BlogDex - http://www.blogdex.com

BlogORama - http://www.blogarama.com

BlogsCanada - http://www.blogscanada.com

Tools

Word Tracker (Pay - but has a free trial and other free resources) http://www.wordtracker.com

Overture (Free) Tools - http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ac/index.jhtml

Search Term Suggestions

DMOZ Resources

ODP Forum - Answers and Questions to DMOZ issues - Can also check submission status of your site http://resource-zone.com/