Top Slot SEO Promises Are Nonsense

It’s a geat come on, but it’s nothing short of hot air.  Some self-proclaimed search engine optimization firm or expert is willing to guarantee you a top slot in the search results in Google if you fork over enough cash for their services.

Hey, everyone would like to have a few nice #1s under their belts.  It’s a tempting offer.  Well, it would be a tempting offer–if it was legitimate.  Unfortunately, it isn’t.  Those guarantees of a top slot are nonsense, plain and simple.

Here’s what really happens with respect to that pomised #1 (if anything) and why it shouldn’t get you very excited at all.

The #1 is for “allegorical monkey hopscotch management”.  Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it isn’t much of one.  The trick these scammers are using is to deliver a number one for some search term, regardless of the actual value of that term to your business.  It’s not that hard to ice a #1 position for a long tail keyword that has virtually zero competition.  In most cases, though, it doesn’t have the kind of value that would warrant hiring some SEO cheat.

The #1 might cost you a few bucks per click.  Read the fine print (if there’s any real print beyond the bogus sales pitch at all).  Your “top of the charts” result may be nothing more than having the top ad position on an Adwords ad.  That kind of SEM is a far cry from SEO and all it takes is a willingness to spend more than anyone else per click to get that position.  

The #1 might come from the wrong methods.  The promised top result could come from the use of so-called “black hat” techniques.  The SEO company might be using a few dirty tricks to boost you up in the SERPs.  All’s fair in love and SEO though, right?  Not really.  You won’t be so happy with the strategy when Google catches on and decides to yank your site right from the listings altogether and forever, will you?

If someone is promising you a #1 result, back away immediately.  They’re not really selling you anything more than a bunch of hot air.  Legitimate SEO companies understand that a guarantee of that sort is irresponsible.  They can’t control Google and they can’t control your competition.  A good SEO team can benefit a site a great deal, but you’re not going to find a lot of help from people who are willing to mislead or lie to get new business.

Obsessing Over Page Rank? Stop.

Page Rank.  It allegedly tells us how valuable Google believes a site to be.  It theoretically plays a role in how sites are treated with respect to search engine results.  Google won’t let us peek under the hood of its algorithm, but it will let us know an idividual site’s Page Rank.  Thus, it’s not surprising that so many site owners develop more than a passing interest in the those little green bars that express just how “important” a site may be.  They become obsessed.

Is it really a good idea to be that concerned over Page Rank?  Not everyone thinks so, and there are some very good arguments against the development of a Page Rank obsession.

Sites with low Page Rank often outrank those with higher Page Rank.  That should be a clue that PR isn’t the end all, be all of SEO, don’t you think?

Low and no-PR pages can dominate for specific search terms.  This is especially true when you go out and target a long tail keyword.  If you’re one of the only pages out there optimized for the term, there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll outrank even a high-PR site that isn’t exactly on-point.

Sites that get their PR sliced and diced can still experience even more traffic.  If Page Rank is that important, that kind of thing shouldn’t be happening, should it?  Remember, traffic is what we’re all really interested in, after all.

Page Rank is an indicator, not a dispositive factor.  Page Rank represents Google’s assessment of a page’s importance.  Importance is undoubtedly determined by looking at a number of factors, many of which undoubtedly play a role in search engine performance.  However, importance is not the determining factor nor would a look at importance necessarily involve an examination of all factors related to the the highly-complex Google algorithm’s process of determining where to rank a page for a specific search query.  In other words, it has some meaning.  That meaning, however, is only a indicator of how a page might be doing with respect to one part of the SERP calculation process.  

Conclusion?  Enjoy it if it’s high.  Don’t sweat it if it drops a little.  Use it as an indicator, but don’t spend your life obsessing over Page Rank.

Narrowing the Keyword Field for PPC Advertising

One of the most common mistakes committed by PPC advertisers is building a capaign based on relatively broad keywords.  In fact, the SEOMoz listed this tendency as its #1 pay per click mistake.  It’s that common–and that potentially devastating.

If you’re only bidding on the giant keywords in your niche, you’re undoubtedly paying top dollar for traffic.  You’re also missing out on ways to get more targeted (read:  more valuable visitors for a fraction of the price by uncovering and bidding on good long tail keywords.  This blunder made it up to #3 on the Karcher Group’s top ten list of PPC goofs.  

How should you narrow the field of PPC keywords?  First, take a look at your stat sites.  Find out what search engine terms people are using to find your site and use those as a jumping off point.  You may uncover a few hidden gems that way.  Second, get serious about your keyword research.

If you’re not using professional keyword tools and you aren’t doing your homework, you’re probably throwing away more money than you need to on your PPC campaign.  Focus on finding keywords that are intimately related to your niche and site–particularly those that communicate a buyer’s mindset.  Don’t just dig one level deep, either.  The most cost-effective keywords (and those that frequently offer the greatest return on investment) are of the long-tail variety.  

Pay per click advertising is a rock solid way to profitably promote your web interests, but the whole process can often be misleading for new participants.  There’s a instinct to bid for the most popular keywords, pitting  you against more competitors.  Owning a good spot for a huge keyword will bring you traffic, but the price per click may turn the cost of acquiring it against you.  The bet way to make PPC truly profitable is to isolate equally relevant, but less competitive keywords.

The Funny PPC Mistake that’s so Easy to Avoid

If you’re buying PPC advertising, you know that the process really revolves around your ability to research and bid upon the right keywords. PPC is keyword driven and having the right search terms can spell the difference between a great ROI and a complete waste of cash.

Often, PPC buyers will maintain a list of keywords in a spreadsheet. That makes perfect sense. It’s a great way to organize them and to manipulate them, as necessary. When the time comes to insert those keywords into the pay per click interface, it’s easy to quickly copy and paste them.

It might be too easy. There’s a fairly funny and fairly common PPC bidding error that results from that simple Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V on a keyword spreadsheet. PPC campaign managers have a nasty tendency of grabbing all of the content in the keyword column. Including the column header. That header usually consists of a single word: Keyword.

Look at the picture accompanying this post. That picture is taken from a screenshot resulting from a simple Google search for “keyword”. It appears as if someone handling the health insurance company’s pay per click campaign is bidding on the term “keyword”.

I doubt anyone at Assurant really believes that folks searching for “keyword” are prime insurance prospects, do you?

Others have noticed this blunder before. Bill Hartzer refers to it as “the funniest pay per click mistake”. He argues that it’s indicative of a lack of attention to detail and states that “a lack of attention to detail causes companies thousands of dollars every month.” The blunder won the #2 slot on Apple Pie & Custard’s “3 Silly Mistakes You Might be Making When Optimising Your PPC Campaign”.

The moral to the story? If you don’t want someone dredging up your bidding error and/or having a chuckle at your expense, check your keyword list from top to bottom.

Changing Titles to Improve SEO Performance

Search professionals are fond of reminding us that SEO is an ongoing process.  In some ways, that’s an obvious proposition.  Adding new content, building new backlinks…  Those SEO staples are clearly not one-off affairs.

The idea of perpetually improving SEO isn’t limited to those obvious machinations, though.  The idea of changing title tags as a means of improving your site’s SEO is a perfect example on ongoing on-page improvement.

The underlying principle to this tactic is that by changing the titles you may be able to rank for different and/or the “right” keywords after making an adjustment.  Generally speaking, experts recommend revisiting the tags on pages (or sites, for that matter) that are significantly underperforming in hopes of breathing some life into them.  SEO Theory, for example, recommends changing “the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.”

Changing your title tags is an easy way to increase return on your already-made content investment.  It doesn’t require a webmaster to create anything “new” (other than the tags).

It is worth noting that title changes can result in short-term SERP drop-offs.  You may find yourself actually ranking lower for a particularly keyword after adjusting the title.  That drop, however, is often temporary.  After a few weeks pass, you should be “making a comeback” with respect to search engine performance.

A word of warning, though, it is possible to do more harm than good!  Sometimes, the changes actually create long-term SEO damage for the pages.  That’s why it makes sense to “test” adjustments on pages that aren’t performing well in the first place.  That undercuts any real risk associated with making adjustments.

One commenter explained how tag alterations, if not done correctly, may produce negative SEO repercussions, further demonstrating why you don’t want to “mess” with your top-performing pages:

If you made <title> changes without taking into consideration the page markup, internal anchor text leading to that page, etc., you may have changed the meaning of that page and disrupted the indexing routines. All you can do now is wait and see. Hopefully your titles did not become diluted with keywords or phrases that the page is not “naturally” optimized for.

If you’d like to give you’re disappointing page a boost, consider changing the tags in a manner consistent with its existing content.

Using Cache Date Info to Your SEO Advantage

So, you have a shot at securing a link on a good-looking high-PR page. That sounds like a sure winner, doesn’t it?

Well, before you fork over the cash (or do whatever quid quo pro might be necessary to get it), there’s something you need to check. Go to Google, find the page you’re looking for in the SERPs and take a look at the date upon which that page was last cached–or, in the case of some scenarios, if it’s been cached at all. PixelHead breaks it down like this:

Check for cache with the site:url and with out the site:url. I believe that using the site:url returns pages that have been visited by the Google Spider that does deep searches, which are done with less frequency. If paying for links, I want to make sure that the links are cached by regular spiders as well as deep searching spiders for more Google juice for the link.

What you find might surprise you. Some pages and sites get visits from the Googlebot a few times every day. Others, even ones with impressive PageRank, see the spiders less often than you see your great aunt Edna who lives on the other side of the country.

You can find out which category a site falls into by looking at that cache date. That information is going to give you a good idea of how important Google really thinks the page is. If the search engines don’t feel a site’s worth checking out more than once in a blue moon, you should have reservations about its ability to help your site as a backlink source. As one forum commenter noted:

Since you need “quality” backlinks, you can start out by checking the cache date in Google. In the search box enter: “cache:www.thedomainname”. If the cache date is more than a month old, or worse yet, unchached, you might not want to waste the effort.

It actually goes a little deeper than that. Cache date isn’t just a good way of seeing how valuable potential link locations are. It’s also a good way to assess whether your site (or those of your competitors) are really as impressive in Google’s eyes as you might think.

Code to Content Ratios and SEO (Part Two)

In our last post, we talked about the way rumors and bankrupt theories can linger in the world of search engine optimization.  As an example of that kind of bad advice that’s easy to find, we isolated the idea that a page’s content to code ratio would impact its search engine performance.

Here are a few reasons why this oft-repeated idea shouldn’t influence your approach to SEO.

First, it sells search engine spiders short.  The underlying theory is that the bots won’t be able to find and index your content if it’s hidden within a pile of code.  That’s not true.  The search engines can parse the content from the surrounding HTML, so long as your not using “robots” instructions that explicitly tell the search engines to stay out.  If it’s written your pages, the engines can find it.

Second, the content to code theory has been dismissed by the folks at the search engines themselves.  A few years ago a Google employee nixed the idea in an interview.  Recently, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst mocked the idea of the content to code ratio outright, claiming that the answer was “42″ in an homage to the comedic sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The people on the inside don’t take the concept seriously and maintaint that webmasters should “[s]tay reasonable, make pages for your users and things will usually fall into place.”

Third, it’s hard to screw up code so badly that it would somehow garble the underlying content.  That’s particularly true today in a world driven by search engine friendly content management systems and CSS.  Even the old school HTML hand-coders, however, would have to really go crazy to create a code-heavy situation that would foil the search engines.  As Richard Tretheway noted:

Its only when pages are run through some WYSIWYG editors so many times that the code starts to get completely mangled that you might be able to say the code size has any impact. As far as I can see, the content of a page and the mark-up employed have a significant impact on rankings, but not the ratio of text to mark-up. Good luck!

Maybe there was a time in which search engines would wrestle comlicated code and lose.  There may have been a point in history where really light code was the only way to insure indexing and effective SEO.  If that was ever the case, though, those days are long past us.

If someone tells you that change in the ration between code and contet is a determining SEO factor, don’t believe them for a second.

Code to Content Ratios and SEO (Part One)

Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving endeavor.  What was true a few years ago might not be true anymore.  What was believed to be true as early as yesterday may have never been true.  You get the idea.  There are gray areas, black spots, and zones that have been completely razed and replaced.

Even when we find out that “the truth is a lie” and/or have a frequently-parrotted SEO perspective debunked, not everyone gets the memo.  That’s why you can still find throngs of websites crowing about the “code to content ratio” and just how important it is to your SEO success.

The idea is simple and it has an intuitive appeal.  Google wants content.  It wasnt to see it, read it, log it, etc.  If your site is 90% code and 10% content, Google will have some very big questions about the quality of user experience youre providing and exactly why there isn’t so much text on your pages.  Thus, it pays to have a lot more content than you do code on your site.

The story is often buttressed by this idea that the Googlebots will only read a certain quantity of text/code on any given page before it simply gives up and/or moves on.  If you have too much HTML and too little text, the story goes, Google isn’t going to get a clear picture of what you’re doing and you’ll suffer in teh SERPs because of it.

This story has bee aroud for a long time.   And people are still talking about it today as if it’s one of SEOs gospel thruths.  

It isn’t.  In fact, it isn’t even close to being the truth now and there’s good reason to wonder if it every has been.  

That’s right, the idea that your code to content ratio will have a real impact on your listings in the search engines is completely wrong.  It can’t, it doesn’t and it won’t.

Next time, we’ll break it down a little, explaining exactly why your code to content ratio doesn’t really matter.

Reciprocal Links and SEO

SEOs used to advocate reciprocal linking as a way to boost performance.  Search engine algorithms were rewarding links of all shapes and sizes and it made a lot of sense to trade links with other sites.  Entire networks were built around the idea of massive link-sharing.

And then the search engines wised up a little bit.  Today, link swaps don’t work exactly the same way they once did.  Links are still the currency of SEO, but the old “do reciprocals” model isn’t what it used to be.  Here’s why.

First, Google, et. al., have become increasingly concerned with efforts designed to intentionally manipulate rankings.  Their job is to deliver good search results, not to reward link traders.  They’ve tweaked their analysis to look for SEO-motivated trades and can spot a big ol’ reciprocal link exchange program (even a three-way system) a mile away.

Second, old school reciprocal swaps often involved dumping links on a “links” or “resources” page.  While those links still have some value, the search engines recognize them for the reciprocal landfills that they are.  If a page has two paragraphs of legit content and 500 outbound links, Google isn’t going to be particularly impressed with it.

Third, smart SEOs know that they can secure non-reciprocal inbound links just as easily as they can go after reciprocals.  And they don’t have to risk leaving an ugly footprint or bleeding a site’s PageRank with gobs of outbound links to do it.  It’s just not the most efficient method of getting those links.

You don’t want fistful after fistful of reciprocal links to boost your site.  What you do want are high-quality, thematically related links.

As reciprocal linking has fallen out of favor, some people have grown to believe that the practice can actually damage SEO efforts.  If you’re wondering if reciprocals are now the enemy, you can relax.  Reciprocal links often come about naturally–it’s only logical that two sites in the same sector may link to one another, after all.  The problem with reciprocal linking isn’t the fact that the links are reciprocal.  The problem is in the way people hopped on the reciprocal bandwagon, using tools and methods that were obviously efforts to court search engine favor.

Links are links, reciprocal or not.  They’re judged on their merits not on whether or not their reciprocated.  It just so happens that it’s more efficient to stay away from intentional link exchanges and to focus on building non-reciprocal inbound links today.  That also allows you to completely avoid the “excessive” reciprocation that has had a negative SEO impact on many of the sites who used to wade neck deep in the reciprocal link exchange game.

The “Number One on Google” Lie

“If you read this post carefully, you’ll know how to be #1 on Google.”

I hope you didn’t believe that.  I hope you don’t believe anyone who claims to be able to help you lock down a #1 slot on Google for anything that matters.

The reason I hope you don’t believe the story is because you’ll be seeing it again and again from different people.  And if you fall for it, you’re going to end up losing money in the process.

It’s a popular scam carried out by countless “search engine optimization companies” who are far more adept at ripping people off than they are at helping anyone climb the SERPs.  They claim that they can get their clients into top slots and that can be very persuasive (especially to those who aren’t well-informed about SEO).  Unfortunately, it’s just not true.

First, no one knows what it takes to get to the top of the SERPs.  Google’s algorithm is more closely guarded than Colonel Sanders’ friend chicken recipe or the formula for Coca Cola.  Unless someone knows exactly how the engines work, there’s no way to make the guarantee honestly.

Second, no one knows what other sites are going to do.  Anyone who promises a certain SERP position is, in essence, claiming that they know what the competition will do in the future and how much your site needs to fend off their efforts.  Unless the SEO firm has Nostradamus on their team, that’s a ridiculous claim.

Third, read the fine print.  Those #1 promises are generally limited to the kinds of keywords that anyone could dominate with ten minutes worth of effort.  They aren’t applied to the kind of search terms people are actually using.  If the firm assures #1s for the “big fish”, you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for them to make good on the promise.

The kind of outfits who make those outlandish promises don’t just fall short of snagging top positions.  They also have a nasty tendency to use practices that the search engines don’t appreciate.  These lousy providers are more likely to do long-term damage to your site than they are to vault it into a top position for a competitive keyword.

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