The Truth About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You
have a website and now you want to be listed on the first page of a search. Or
perhaps you have been called on by an SEO company (let's call them ABC SEO),
and they have promised you that they can get you listed on the first page of
Google. That is, you will be one of the TEN listings on the first page returned
by a Google search. GREAT!
When
performing SEO, the first thing someone will ask you is which KEY WORDS do you
want to associate with your website. Okay, let's pretend you are a moving
company and you want to use the following key words and terms:
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Fine.
Now let's even assume you have cleaned up your site, updated it, added the
recommended meta tags and key words to your site's body text. NOW your ready to
be found on the first page of a search in Google. ALL RIGHT!
However..
In
case you did not know, there are other moving companies, not just in your area,
but also nationwide and worldwide. The chances are pretty good that ABC SEO has
called on some of these other moving companies. Let's assume they have provided
this same service to 20 other moving companies. They also promised these other
companies they would come up first in the search engine listings.
How can this be possible?
If
ABC SEO has optimized 21 moving companies websites so that each one will be on
the first page of a Google search, and there are only 10 listings on that page,
how can all 21 companies be listed? IT'S NOT POSSIBLE.
The
reality is that there are literally thousands of SEO companies making the same
promises to tens of thousands of moving companies around the world all looking
for that first page listing on Google and ALL of them using the same key words
you are using.
If
it were possible for Foot Print Strategies (or any company) to simply 'tweak' a
website so it would come up in the first page of the major search engines, we
would already have retired. Unfortunately, regardless of all the claims made by
companies selling Search Engine Optimization, there is no holy grail to search
engine ranking.
Let’s
use a real world Foot Print Strategies client as an example. Beverly Hills Transfer, located in Gardena, California, has been a
great client of Foot Print Strategies since 2001. Let’s do a Google search for
‘gardena moving company’. On this day the Beverly Hills site came up number one
out of 52,600 listings. This may be a typical search for people living in
Gardena but this would not be the average search phrase for someone living
outside of Gardena.
Click to view search results
Now
let's do a search for ‘Beverly Hills transfer’. Again Beverly Hills came up
number one of 907,000 listing. This should be the case because this is practically
the domain name for the website. However, once again this would not be a search
phrase that the typical user would use because they probably would not know the
name of the moving company. If they did, they would not need to search for the
company in Google.
Click to view search results
Let’s
now use search words that the typical searcher would use, ‘moving &
storage’. No surprise here, out of the 31,200,000 listings, Beverly Hills was
nowhere in the top 10 or 12 pages.
Click to view search results
This
result is because in just the US, there are an estimated 35,000 moving
companies. However, the internet is not limited to just the US, it is worldwide
and there are hundreds of thousands moving companies worldwide. The majority of
US and international movers have websites and all of them are using the same
basic key words. (Moving, moving & storage, storage, boxes, crating,
packing, local moves, office moves, etc.) Beverly Hills’ small site has very
little chance of being found among the thousands of huge sites related to
moving and storage.
However,
the news is not all bad. The CMSA, another long-time Foot Print Strategies
client, is listed on the first page of the search using the phrase 'moving
& storage'. The California Moving and Storage Association (CMSA) is a
non-profit trade association representing over 450 licensed and insured movers
operating in California. Here is an example where size on the internet matters.
The main reason the CMSA website comes up so high in the search listings for
this generic search phrase is that the site has almost 1,300 linked pages,
whereas Beverly Hills Transfer’s site has about 20.
The
good news for Beverly Hills is that Beverly Hills is a member of the CMSA, as
such, they have a better than average chance of someone finding their website
even though their site is not listed on the Google search page. This is because
associations such as the CMSA provide credibility and a searcher is likely to
visit the CMSA to learn about quality companies. They will likely visit the
CMSA Mover Directory and now can find Beverly Hills. Also, because
Beverly Hills has a banner on the primary search page of the Member Directory,
they improve their chance of being found even more.
Click to view search results
Additionally,
the inbound links to the Beverly Hills' site from the CMSA, AMSA, FIDI, and the
Chamber of Commerce websites improve search listings for Beverly Hills because
search bots follow links from other sites. This makes being a member of
industry organizations or chambers of commerce worth the investment if they
provide links from their sites to yours.
Also
note that of the 20 or so top van lines in the country none were listed higher
than the CMSA. If the major van lines, with large marketing budgets, hundreds
of agents each, and hundreds of web pages on their sites, cannot get listed
higher than the CMSA, the chances that a small company being listed on the
first page of a search are very remote
The bottom line is that here is NO real way to influence the
search engines without spending lots money. Why?
Search Engine Companies do not reveal their Search Criteria
There
are many "experts", claiming they know exactly what search engines
are looking for, but it's not true. There are some some general guidelines one
can follow, however, no one knows EXACTLY what search engine criteria are. Only
the software engineers who work for the search engines know their search
methods and they aren't telling.
Search
engines never tell people exactly what they are looking for when they try to
match web sites to searches that their users perform. And to make it even
harder, they change what they look for regularly. At any moment, they can
change what they are looking for, and any good results you are enjoying will
vanish. It happens all the time.
Search
engine companies are so secretive about what they look for when selecting web
sites for searches because they don’t want anyone to be able to influence the
results in their system. It compromises their "editorial integrity".
Every search engine has software engineers whose sole job is to make sure that
the results they show people are of high quality. They don't want anyone
"hijacking" their search engine using any tricks or inside knowledge.
So how does anyone make their pages do well in search engines?
It
takes countless hours of experimentation, comparisons, testing, and retesting.
There's nothing exact about it. It's all really educated guesswork. And in the
end, after doing all this work and coming up with a successful strategy,
success can and will be taken away when the search engines change their
selection criteria. You end up having to start all over, again and again. One
prominent company in this industry estimates that it takes about 30 hours per
week for an individual to keep up with the search engines for one web site.
Even
if the search engines did divulge EXACTLY what they look for, in detail, then
everyone would know it. Everyone would quickly make the same changes to their
websites and then everyone would be back to search engine frustration.
There is no such thing as "Guaranteed Search Engine Listing
Results"
When
you launch a new website you will want to know how to get your site listed at
the top of a search engine. Because SEO companies know this, you will get a
flood of spam (unsolicited) e-mails declaring "guaranteed search engine
results". The "guarantee" is supposed to give you enough
confidence to send them money.
We
have already explained that the search engine companies do not share their
search methods. In addition, search engines change their search algorithms on a
frequent basis. Because of this, where your web site appears listed on their
system can change radically from one day to the next or even one moment to the
next.
Knowing this, how can anyone give a guarantee with any real
credibility?
Search
engine companies do not have agreements with any company providing them the
actual methods they use. Since search engines jealously guard their
credibility, refusing to let outside sources have any real influence or control
over search results, the guarantees of search engine optimizers must, in turn, have zero credibility.
Let’s
look at a classic guarantee example:
"Guaranteed
Top 10 Results or Your Money Back"
Make
sure you read the fine print to find out:
- What search engines do they
guarantee your site to list on in the top 10?
Google,
Yahoo, Excite, Dog Pile, Fred’s List, Sally’s List? (There are literally
hundreds of search engines on the internet.)
- What specific Key Words will be
used to list you in the top 10?
Are
these key words related to your industry or simply your exact domain name? (It
is almost a sure bet that if you put your domain name in a search engine
search, your website will be listed on the first page.)
- What duration will your site be
listed in the top 10? (One day, one hour, once only?)
Let's
assume that one day you go to Google, you do a search for some variation of
your key words, and there you are, in the top 10, just like they said. Hurray!
The next day though, your site is not on the first page, nor the next week,
more the rest of the month. Want your money back? Sorry. You did get a top 10
result, didn't you?
OKAY
Enough
about the negative side of SEO. Let's talk about what you CAN DO to help your search listing opportunities.
(SEO Continued)
Following is a list of things you can do for your site, in order
of importance, that most search engines look for in a website:
Size Matters
The larger the site, the better the chance a search engine will
list it well. This is not often an option for the small business owner.
However, if you have several services, say, household moving, packing, crating,
etc., instead of listing all your services on one page, create a page for each
specific service. This will increase the size of your site and help with Key
Words discussed later.
Update Frequency
The more frequently a site is updated the better it will list.
This is due to the fact that search bots look for fresh content. If a search
bot visits your site and sees new information, it will re-index your site. If
it sees that nothing has changed, there is no reason to re-index the site. The
longer the length of time between updates, the lower in the search engine index
your site will be listed.
Inbound Links
The more links inbound to your site from external sites, such as industry organizations
and chambers of commerce, the better. Especially if those sites are large and
already list well in generic search phrases associated with your industry.
Think about clients, vendors, and suppliers that also have sites and may be
willing to link to your site from theirs.
Key Words and Meta Tags
This one item is the most overstated and underutilized item in
this list. An SEO will tell you that you MUST have meta tags and key word text
on a page for it to list well. This is NOT true. Here it is in Google's own
words:
"Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our
web search ranking. Google Search disregards keyword metatags completely. They
simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present."
Matt Cutts, Google Search Quality Team
Don't take our word for it. View the video by Matt.
Case in point is that in our previous example of Beverly Hills, at
the time of this publication, their site had NO meta tags and was not optimized
with key words in their body text, however, the site DID list on the first page
of a Google search.
A site should have at least the following META TAGS:
·
Title
·
Description
·
Key Words
·
Key Phrases
These meta tags should NOT be exactly the same on each page. They
should be tailored for the content of the page in which they are imbedded.
Then, throughout the page where the tags are placed, the Key Words and Key
Phrases should appear in the text of the page at least once.
Site Map
Search engines need to know all of the pages of your site. While
they can follow the links found in you website's menu, it is very helpful if
you provide them a single page with links to all the pages in your site. Most
search engines look for a single special page called SITEMAP.XML. This is a
specially designed page written in Extensible Markup Language that makes it
easier for a search bot to find all of the pages in your site.
Other
things you can do:
Search Engine Submission
Most search engines provide a way for you to let them know you
have a website by registering it. You can do this manually one at a time, but
since there are literally thousands of search engines on the internet, we
recommend you have this service performed by a company that can automate this
task for you. You may also want to have this service performed on a regular
basis just to ensure your site is visited by search bots.
Website Statistics
A website statistic report provides information regarding the
performance and traffic of your website. This information may include page
views, unique visitors, pages requested, campaign tracking, hits on pages, and
literally hundreds of other data items. The key items to look for in web
statistics is total visiting users and the top pages requested.
Total visiting users tells you how many actual visitors have come
to your site. This should not be confused with 'hits' which is a grossly
overstated number with very little meaning. The number of total visiting users
should be tracked on a regularly basis, say monthly, and trended over time to
see if traffic is increasing, decreasing, or stable.
To help trend your total visiting users in a positive direction,
look at the top pages requested. If you find the top pages visited on your site
to be your home page and your contact page, this could be an indication that the
content of your site is not catching the attention of the visitor. You may want
to add industry related content are a specials page to attract attention.
The statistics can also tell you how long, on average, someone
viewed a page. Again, an indication of interest on the part of the visitor. If
you have a page with a lot of text but the average visit is only 10 seconds,
you may want to revise that page.
