(Blog-Off II Entry) The 6 Things SEO "Experts" Won't Tell You, But I Will.... (The BIG SEO Lie)

A Note For My Readers: Many of you have been used to me writing my articles on Stuff For Success about networking and social media. For this article, I have ventured into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is a very important topic in the marketing world. As a definition, you can think of SEO as anything you do to make Google, Bing, or Yahoo visit your page.   And now, enjoy:

Please note that there are many excellent SEO's out there.  The goal of the following article is to open your eyes to those that aren't so "excellent."  

It's all over the Internet.   Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the hottest topic out there.  Bloggers think that if they write “7 Tips on How to Improve Your SEO” for the 800th time, they will get millions of hits. Companies are – suddenly – feeling the need to create whole SEO departments. Webmasters are compelled to write their content just for the search engines.

And everyone else? They just don’t care. But I have something to say to all of you....Here is the most important thing you should know about most of the stuff you read:

IT'S ALL GARBAGE!

In this economy (and don't get me started on that) if there is a general misunderstanding about a topic, EVERYONE is going to try and take advantage of it on it. Have you noticed how many career “experts” have suddenly popped up during the recession? Well capitalizing on the same type of confusion, these so-called SEO “experts” have popped up all over the place claiming that they know the answers to make all of your internet traffic dreams come true.

A company with which I did some consulting has 10 million dollars in revenue. The guy spent 1.5 million a YEAR on ADWORDS thinking it would improve his search engine placement.  (Adwords are those little advertisements on the side of Google that you never click on...) I almost cried. And then when I tried to find his site, it was nowhere to be found in any search engine. This type of thing is a marketing travesty and it shouldn't be happening.

My goal here is to make sure you understand the reality of modern search engine optimization. So when you go to “optimize” your site, or hire someone to do it, I want you to make sure you take the right advice and know that there is specific experience you should be looking for that can help you do this job correctly.

So without any of my further blabbering, let me get to it:

1. SEO takes a LONG time: There are no shortcuts to getting your content to the top of Google, Bing, or wherever else.... especially in the popular categories. A major category in determining where your webpage comes up is how long it has been there, also known as Aging. Don't believe me? Run a search for a popular topic. Try “How to Network.” Even though I humbly think some of my networking articles are MUCH better, Google proudly displays a page from 2005. The first article isn’t even from the past two years and with people losing their jobs left and right since 2007, networking has been a subject of research that has exploded the last few years. Additionally, search engines are reading through billions of pages. If your site is not important, it takes a loooong time to update in search engines.
2. The Actual Algorithms Are Secret: Algorithms in this sense are the complicated methods search engines use to determine what pages should be shown for each search. It has been said that no one outside the actual search engines actually has a copy of the algorithm that determines search engine result pages (SERPS) and it is constantly changing. So how is it that these “experts” know what to talk about? Well, actually, it isn't really true that nobody has a copy. Most of the basic algorithms are patented or in provisional patent phases and patents are public but you have to know where to look for them.
3. The Days of the Meta Tags are Long Gone: A website owner used to be able to talk directly to the search engines by using “hidden” codes called meta tags. However, the only use for the tags at this point is in order to declare the title of the page. It doesn't matter what your tags say the subject of the page is. In fact tags, if repeated on your site could hurt you. In fact, Google added a keyword tracker in their webmaster tools. It seems to me that they are trying to suggest that they are reading the actual text content of the site? Additionally, writing content that repeats repeats repeats repeats the keywords doesn't work either. You will get a site banned from a major search engine that way and that is an awful thing.    Amendment: The "description" tag is also still pertinent as it describes your page to the search engine.   (I forgot to include this)
   
4. Not just any backlinks will do: Backlinks are when websites link to yours.   Many know that an important factor in SEO is how many links you get coming to your content. What some don’t know is that they must be high quality links. As we previously established, there are plenty SEO companies and individuals who will gladly take your money to submit your page into spammy links directories and link schemes. They may work temporarily, but because this is not the way search engine companies want you promoting your site (it's considered spam), your site could be quickly removed from search engines. There are quality directories that still exist such as the DMOZ and Yahoo and if you can get your site onto one of these, that’s a bonus. These are human edited and search engines give credibility to this characteristic. This brings us to my next point:
5. Search Engines are Meant To Work For Humans: Back in the beginning days of search engines, it was possible to simply “optimize” your page to attract the search engine to the page. Seeing this as an opportunity, many took advantage of this and found ways to cheat the system. They wrote sub-par (and downright bad) webpages designed to get top results through spam-like tactics. As a result, search engines, which, ironically, happen to be written by some of the smartest people in the world, were redesigned and none of these old techniques work anymore. There is NO way to search optimize your page legitimately aside from producing quality content and getting others to link to it - EXCEPT to utilize:
6. Good Coding Practice: You know all of those SEO changes that people are willing to come in and make for you? Guess what. They shouldn't need to.  Code should be free of errors that would otherwise prevent search engine "spiders" from being able to crawl through it.  Think of it this way: you wouldn't want to read a book littered with grammatical errors. Search engines hate reading webpages with grammatical errors too.  These errors could make your ranking suffer.   There are tools such as the w3validator that will help you identify these errors.  One change you can make immediately is to make sure the titles of your pages contain the key words for your page as well as the URL (also known as a permalink). This is VERY important.      Thank you to James Allen of St. Louis for assisting me with this point. 
   

Real SEO People are Hustlers and Great Networkers in Real Life. From my rants we have established that quality links to your site, age, and good coding practice are the main ways to influence your search engine rank. Well once you register a domain and have your code written properly, then establishing quality links is the only thing you can do. There are only two ways to get these, and one of those is pay major advertising dollars to get them from high quality sites. The other is to get someone who is VERY good at networking, both online and off, who can get out there and meet the people who run these sites and convince them of a reason to link to you. It's a very specialized practice that few are good at. But that's an article for another day. Let's hear what you all have to say!

Update:  As of 12/04/09, evidently Google is making all searches personalized.   This means that it could become possible that you will no longer discover sites that you didn't know you were looking for.   This could have a HUGE effect on the SEO world.   I would love to hear your thoughts and discuss here as well.   This news is from the google webmaster blog.  

Directly quoted:

Extended Personalized Search
Starting this week, we are extending Personalized Search worldwide to users who are signed out of their Google accounts, and in more than 40 languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be better able to provide the most relevant results using 180 days of Google search activity from your browser. For example, since I always search for "ADA" and often click on results about the programming language, Google might show you those results before the American Dental Association results.

Conclusions: Sam Diener joins Blog-Off2 from Philadelphia, PA, US.   He started Stuff For Success, The Sam Diener Blog.    In five months, he has built an audience of nearly 25,000 readers, and has guest blogged for major US sites such as Under30CEO and the Personal Branding Blog.   Feel free to read more at the Sam Diener Blog.   

Oh, and if you don't mind.... click this button to help me share:

Comments

[James Hunt]

I am relatively new to SEO and Search, i have been working in the industry for just 3 years...

i would never call myself an expert as the industry changes so quickly, by the time you are "expert" at something the rules have changed.

However, after spending a good 18 months talking to eCommerce / online marketing managers about seo, I can assure you that there is nothing worse than speaking to someone who THINKS they know what they are on about..

Yes it is true!!! Anyone can do seo, anyone can cut hair but i still choose to pay £50 for my wife's stylist! why?? because its done professionally, looks good and will keep its shape long after its done.

SEO is no different.

If anyone is considering hiring an SEO then ask yourself two questions...

1) How much is an hour of my time worth?
2) How many hours will this take?

Multiply the two answers, and if it is substantially more than paying an seo, take the seo!!

Its all about "rich dad, poor dad" why do something yourself if it is financially better to outsource

[Internet Marketing Aidan]

Been there, done it and even got the t-shirt.

SEO does not HAVE TO take a long time but depending on how competitive the keyword it CAN take a long time while sufficient backlinks are acquired to reach the top. I've had some first page rankings in under an hour, some of which continue to be there.

As for good code - it can't hurt but I've seen some badly coded pages rise to the top because the content was good.

Waiting to see the effects of personalisation before commenting on it!

[Eric Goldman]

Sam;
A great post which makes a lot of sense. About the only thing I would add is something which seems obvious to a good marketer, but which often gets lost in the technical translation: a great SEO strategy begins as a marketing exercise before it becomes a technical one. There really is no sense doing the best SEO job in the world on your website,and then driving huge volumes of the wrong traffic to your site to bounce away immediately. We like to think of the keyword phrase (or phrases) as your Online Brand Identity, and just as you would not go to market with a half-baked strategy regarding your positioning and branding, so you should begin by making sure you have found the right keyword phrase/s.
Our website has a few blogs on the topic and additional resources (glossary, white papers, tools) for those who want more: www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca

[Sam Diener]

I am not knocked out, just fanning in my corner for a second....

Round 2: FIGHT! (where is the ref on this.... anyone work at google?) ref this and give me a job.... (or ANYONE give me a job for that matter)

Certainly, I would agree that perfect validation is not necessary. But ultimately my point was W3 validation makes sure that the robots can read the page. Therefore, your best bet is to make sure it validates.....

Here's some support from a commenter on my page:

Great post, all that you're mentioning is "good practice for web master" and it's well known. It's surprising how many people making a lot of money don't care about those particulars. For example this italian website www.lavoricreativi.com (i'm italian) it's not a good site for standard (nearly 122 errors) and it's popularity on Italy is due to the diffusion of it in creative and artistic persons.
Coming from this kind of human circuit, i was searching for some of it's meta tag in google and i found much more interesting websites, maibe with grammatical errors but with standard validation.
Facts speak by themself.
cheers

Do you wish to stand back up and fight?

Samuel Diener

[James Allen]

Ok, here's your knockout punch, LOL.

W3C is not endorsed by any search engine. While there are some coding errors that will prevent a search spider from indexing the content on a webpage properly, most errors reported by the W3C validation tool will not effect the spiders ability to index the webpages content properly.

I'm not saying that W3C validation is a bad thing, I'm just saying that validating your code by W3C standards will not effect your Search Engine Rankings. Google itself does not validate by W3C standards. Neither does Yahoo or MSN. I would be willing to bet that at least half of the websites that currently rank on the first page of search results do not validate by W3C standards for some reason or another.

Because of the way the W3C validation tool analyzes a webpage based on its document type, a webpage that contains code that is not normally associated with its particular document type, it will generate an error in the W3C validation tool even when all the code is valid.

[Sam Diener]

James.... PROVE IT. (The w3validation part).

I would love to go punch for punch with you, here or on the page on these points...

It would probably help you drum up some extra business....

In terms of technicality, yes there are extenuations for every point I made. The simple goal of this article is to point out the basic points.

Sam

[James Allen]

The only "SEO experts" that exist, work at the search engine companies and do not offer SEO services. I agree with you that there are alot of so called SEO experts out there scamming people. I have been studying and implementing SEO for 9 years and I call myself an "SEO specialist" Unfortunately, I can point something out in all 6 of your statements that is either not accurate, outdated info., or misleading. I don't have much time to elaborate right now, so I will just address #6.

W3C validation has no effect on search engine rankings and while having relevant keywords in the title of the web-page is good advice, changing the title to a webpage that is already indexed by Google will get the webpage sandboxed(sent to the end of the search results), and sometimes even de-indexed altogether if it is not done properly.

[Lou Neofotistos]

OK so the personalized search really wont have an effect on much. If someone searches as your example provides for ADA and I am the American Dental Association and google knows they are likely searching for a coding lanquage... then they arent traffic that would convert on my site anyhow so its not a relavant potential user lost. The only people that would likely be hurt by this are spammers looking to pull anyone and everyone they can get to their site and then funnel through a PPC matrix. This wont drastically effect the legitimate stuff people are doing out there. Im glad you posted this, now I dont have to worry what havoc it might cause :) Im sure Google will however throw something in there like they do now on misspellings that says "did you mean "American Dental Association" so traffic wont be lost. Also on a side note if you pay for adwords then this should help deliver more targetted traffic and better ROI.

As for being as smart as me, I dont know that id go that far. I have been doing internet marketing and SEO since its infancy. From my college dorm in 1999 - 2000 when people were using andgetting away with every trick in the book. I was never much for gimmicks however there were a bunch that would work. I was always a straight shooter, never spammed people or engines. Theres a lot of things that come and go but ironically... if you build a legitimate website, list meta tags so google doesnt have to guess at your descriptions, use relevant page titles, enough text that actually describes what you have to offer, tell your friends about the site, trade legitimate links with other sites offering similar or complementary services you will be rewarded in google. Its kind of like a paycheck that way, if you actually o your job, you get paid, AND get to keep your job.

SEO is not get rich quick, its a necessary evil where if you follow some advice you will be better off but if someone tells you they have the secret... ask them why they are in this business still instead of sitting at home collecting residual checks and never having to work again.

Also since reading your article I was poking around at some of the spam posts about Best Bang for your buck and SEO services touting they got their client ranked #2 for "Dentist in east bum worcester county MA" and you have to put the quotes... it literally pains me to think people are paying money for this stuff. So hopefully your article might save someones pocket.

[Sam Diener]

Haha - some people aren't as smart as you Lou..... but I anticipated some would know what was going on ;)

Ready for the Oh crap moment, here it is:

On the official google blog:

Extended Personalized Search
Starting this week, we are extending Personalized Search worldwide to users who are signed out of their Google accounts, and in more than 40 languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be better able to provide the most relevant results using 180 days of Google search activity from your browser. For example, since I always search for "ADA" and often click on results about the programming language, Google might show you those results before the American Dental Association results.

[Lou Neofotistos]

Sam,

The part about "Personalized searches" caught my attention as something that is new information and would love to hear more however all of the rest... I can find all the rest of the information anywhere online. A quick summary of the rest of your article would read like this:

The economy is down, we all know SEO is important however a lot of out of work people are claiming to be experts. They all claim to know exactly what it takes to get you to Number 1, well they cant! Google doesnt release their algorithym to the public, old tactics dont work the same as they did. Spamming can get you banned. SEO takes time..

What part of any of that is new? Post up more on the Personalized searches and lets get some great discussions started!

-Lou

[Michael]

Sam,

Can you post a link to the Google using IP information? I can't find it. and I can honestly say I don't think I like it either.

Great info!

[jake]

interesting but here are some suggestions that have worked for me. I have done a lot of research on SEO since 2004 and made it an important part of my business strategy which is over million dollars right now. If you want to bounce ideas off of each other my email is jake@empirecovers.com. My website is ranked in top 5 for many keywords i want and makes good money in SEO. the top 5 are

1. using a repeater on 1000 pages to reinforce the brand
2. Using text link brokers to establish the brand and give me some creditability
3. very targetted title tags
4. content on the page repeated a couple of times
5. blogs that link to the website
6. very clean site

[jake]

Hi Sam,

I just joined philadelphia interactive marketing group. I can send you my website and i can show that i am in the top of the search engines for many keywords i want and make very good money in SEO. I have also been researching it since 2005 when i made it a top priority of mine for my business which does over million dollars(just for creditability reasons and not bragging i swear). I want to get in touch with good marketing minds such as myself on many of these issues. These are the things that have worked for me. Yes they do work.

1. .net repeater tag for my buying pages that have make model and year and the word i wanted to target. Sadly it redefined my brand
2. Text link brokers has worked to establish my website and make it credible.
3. Building 5 blogs that link to my website.
4. have very targetted title tags on every page
5. adding some keywords in the content.
6. coding it very clearly which nobody with a good website will be 100% clean

If anyone wants to talk marketing or spread ideas my email is jakegoldblum@gmail.com

[tab1ta]

Great post, all that you're mentioning is "good practice for web master" and it's well known. It's surprising how many people making a lot of money don't care about those particulars. For example this italian website www.lavoricreativi.com (i'm italian) it's not a good site for standard (nearly 122 errors) and it's popularity on Italy is due to the diffusion of it in creative and artistic persons.
Coming from this kind of human circuit, i was searching for some of it's meta tag in google and i found much more interesting websites, maibe with grammatical errors but with standard validation.
Facts speak by themself.
cheers

[Sam Diener]

James...

Thank you for your comments:

1. You are quite right ... if you are in a lower population of keywords, certainly it is possible to get up to the top quite quickly.

2. I agree with you. I was more saying no one can preach for sure that they know the algorithms.

3. I missed this. I actually amended my article because of your comment. Trial by fire right?

Sam

[Tim]

Sam,

My marketing manager and I have printed out your article and are spending all of today (besides of course working on my next blog post) to re-work our SEO campaign. We are going to utilize your steps and measure the results. I have had very little knowledge in SEO, however I did practice some of the ideas I have thought of myself and have seen proven results with that. I am excited to use your techniques to rank my site and I applaud you for outlining your points. Keep up the great work!

[Danny]

I definitely know a lot more about this than I did before reading this article. Good job!

[James Hunt]

I would personally disagree with points 1,2 and 3

1) SEO doesnt have to take a long time, I love it when I hear people say it should take 3 months, or a year to rank highly. Not true, it is possible, and I have achieved, page 1 listings on Google within hours of publishing an article.

2) Although the actual algo is definitely a secret, there are many good resources that highlight testing results and can give an educated guess on the particular weightings of different elements of the algo. SEOmoz have created Linkscape which highlights the importance of the varying factors very nicely.

3) The only Meta tag that is useless is the KEYWORDS tag...The Meta Description is hugely important. It is the first sales pitch your website has! I could write an entire article on best practice for utilising the description tag!

[Sam Diener]

Ed.... they are evidently going to start using IP information.. This was just released on the google blog on Friday. Better start picking up the apples....

[Ed]

Hey Sam - Agree Meta tags are dead. All about the home page title tag, and the those of the first level nav most relevant to the keywords. Then Meta Desc. Ref: personalisation, is'nt it just when you are logged into analytics, or are you suggesting that Google is going to start using IP data to track searches or something else? That really would upset the apple cart!

[EliasD]

I agree with this information. I have been doing search engine optimization for some time. I can not emphasis the importance of good code (if accessible, even better), quality back links and regularly updated information. These three items are the only way to move above a rank 5 (on Google rank toolbar).

[Tom Denegre]

Sam,

I enjoyed your comments and observations. I don't like to bow down to cliches, but as they say, "nothing is easy as it appears." Having said that, I've seen several inbound interactive marketing companies that are worth looking at. They are Hubspot, Eloqua, and Aprimo. I like Hubspot's free tools. Aprimo has a new customer lifecycle studio that is worth looking at.

Tom Denegre
www.tdenegre.com

[Mike Rosenberg]

SEO is such a hot topic these days and I think most people who claim to be experts over promise and under deliver. I think the number one reason Social Media is so popular is that anybody can post links to their content in relevant places in order to receive hits; assuming what you have to say is interesting or relevant!

There are ethical SEOs in the marketplace, you just have to do your homework and ask for plenty of references. Even if you don’t get the entire concept behind SEO, you still need to have some background on how it works.

[Michelle C. Lee]

Great article Sam.

Our office actually had a big discussion this morning about whether or not meta tags are still relevant. I used your article to help prove my point, thanks for the ammo!

Michelle C. Lee
www.openvision.com
www.mysocialmediacompany.com

[Kellie]

Sam, you contine to impress me with your vast knowledge - from where to stand during a networking event to backlinks and coding. Keep them coming as I think they are extremely beneficial for many audiences!

[Jason Meiers]

There is certainly value to generating leads. i dont know about google ads since i dont know a single person who actually bought somthing on the bar on the right. but seo is certainly a traffic generator. conversion rate depends most likley on the product your selling. a bad product wont convert leads. a good product may even convert more leads with less traffic. i think its a mixture of both value add for the customer and traffic.

[Car Insurance]

there's good and bad in every profession.
good will have a history of success!

[Mary]

Thank you for confirming what I always suspected. All those promises to immediately get you on page one are illusions.

[Robin]

Very good article about SEO. Thanks

[Judah]

Great post and so true. need to drive traffic with any means available to you and often that can be done in many easier ways then SEO.

[Sam Diener]

"A lot of people flocked to SEO because it seemed like an easy job. But the kicker is a lot of these SEOs didn't have a background in programming or web development. Nor even bothered to learn." And it makes me sick!!!!!

[Sam Diener]

Melissa - thank you for your compliments. You will learn in your time to as a graphic designer that this is going to go hand in hand with web design.

[Marilyn Moran]

You know, as someone who actually has been doing "SEO" for a very long time both personally and professionally (personally since the late 90s when I was creating niche websites and communities and I wanted them to be found by any means necessary ~ which included putting up flyers in coffeeshops, record stores, etc.), I cringe every time I hear the word "SEO". It has become exploited and bastardized. A lot of people flocked to SEO because it seemed like an easy job. But the kicker is a lot of these SEOs didn't have a background in programming or web development. Nor even bothered to learn. So #6 is totally spot on. I'm have been and always have been an advocate of standards, good coding, good UX, etc. A clean website with good URLs, good content, and no broken links can go a long way in being searchable and accessible by not only search engines, but humans too.

Good article!

[Melissa]

Very interesting article Sam! I found your points on search engines to be very useful. I never knew you knew a lot about these topics! I can relate to the career expert thing by getting bombarded with them targeting me and my searching for a career. GL your posts enlighten me!

[Tim]

Good job Sam :) You made the right move!!

[Sam Diener]

Tim, thank you for your compliment. I am quite sure that this is not self-promotion. It is simply an introduction. I would not be interested in drawing readers to this blog post, just to redirect them away. It would kill the time they spent on this page, which would be a bad thing. I have written a few other blog posts in other places that had many more links to my stuff than this.

However, I am certainly willing to pull that link out, which I will do, as I do not want it to truly a concern to the judges or a few other contestants. I would rather have them concentrate on the content.

[Tim]

Hi Sam, I love your posts they are always informative. You are good at SEO which is why you got a lot of page views, Kudos to you. Just one thing I want to point out and you may want to look at, one of the things talked about in the conference call is no self advertising, which you did in the first paragraph by linking to your site. I don't know if that constitutes or not, since I am no judge but that is a fine line I would not have crossed. Otherwise keep up the great work, you will get many page views again, that I know of. You deserve it as your posts are great!