SEO Stuff

WebSideStory's black hat techniques?

2006-06-09T13:19:00.000+08:00

I was researching for web analytics packages when I came across WebSideStory site that provided questionable content. When I disabled stylesheets on my Firefox browser I saw a collection of text and links found at the bottom of the page. I was shocked because I never thought an analytics company could resort to such technique but at the same time I was not surprised since every site that’s aware of search engine optimization and the benefits of getting pretty good ranks can bring, wants to go on top of search results.

Emphasizing on keywords such us “web analytics”, “search engine”, it’s never bad as long as it’s necessary for the page.

For the record I did not report this to Google. Instead I posted it to several bulletin boards for further scrutiny. However I never got such great number of responses. The most popular in the list edited the details of my thread and no one seemed interested in responding out of the 65 or so page views it got at the time. Not so long ago I was part of the debate on whether Colgate-Palmolive web site employed hidden links disguised in its dynamic menu. One moderator argues it does violate search engine policies and guidelines while I stuck to my argument that it did not; the site was not penalized by Google as far as I know.

The other lesser authoritative forums had replies but not with the quality I would like to read. I was even told to report to Google if WebSideStory’s SEO procedures bothers me. It does not. And I would not care to raise the issue if not because of the reputation it brings. I see a lot of lesser known brands do worse and I leave them to flirt with disaster. But this is a site that is supposed to be a role model in implementing fair and non-deceptive coding. To me this is beyond the desirable content.

With this “discovery” does it seem to show that companies don’t seem deterred by the fact that sites of more known brands like Ricoh and BMW do get banned? Is it easy to trick Google? Just because there is this thing called “reinclusion request”, you are forgiven of your sins and you’ll be back on search engine circulation. Would this be a repeating cycle or repeat offenders stand to lose their footing on search results forever?

Adopting New SEO Communities

2006-04-11T13:07:00.000+08:00

I have applied for accounts on a couple of other SEO-related bulletin boards. Once I logged and to each of the new forums, I immediately felt I was in a new place. New layout and colors, many new nicks not familiar in the old forums, new type of topics. There were lots of merchants selling domain names, lots of people asking for Adsense tips, something that I don't usually see at my old forum.

People are warm and I got several welcome messages the moment I introduced myself. There are also opportunities for revenue earning and an unselfish way to promote newbies with blog feeds and signature linking plus the reputation tool which I haven't found in my older forums.

To me there are more stockbroking and merchandising of sites where people post domain names for sale, free startup directories asking for submissions or high PageRank pages offering a directory listing for $10 to $15 a month. I was quite surprised with the activity because I rarely saw such type of posts in my other community. Perhaps it's against the rules. Obviously, many posters at the new forums are creative entrepreneurs.

In many SEO discussions some people are asking questions about subdomains, redirections or keyword relevance. The funny thing is that in their signature links are their company web sites offering search engine marketing and optimization services. So it appears that they channel questions and seek affirmation on efforts they do to their clients into the SEO community forums. The company integrity and level of competitiveness has become questionable.

When people rely too much on what others say and rely less on their brains, that is where the madness comes. Search Engine Optimization techniques should be primarily out of common sense and secondary concerns should be more of the legal, technical and financial aspects.

That is why I'll always describe search engine marketing as more of an art; being scientific is just secondary.

Star For A Day

2006-04-07T09:09:00.000+08:00

Ever since I joined the SEO forums, I never felt quite like a star, where people recognize me, or at least my posts. I seem to be obscure, quite seemingly hesitant to voice out questions or reply to queries. But the longer I stayed, my confidence grew. And while I do not know anyone personally, save for one Eastern European woman who settled in the US and sent me very long e-mails I myself could not cope, the people in the room are nice. Somehow I knew the character of behind each avatar so I kinda adjust what type of message to post especially when a certain personality is actively engaged in a thread.

I am active in HighRankings since May of last year and so far I think I am the 15th ranked active member in terms of post volume (excluding moderators) out of 11,000 plus members. I am a newbie at Search Engine Watch Forums and an ocassional eavesdropper at Matt Cutts’s blog.

High Rankings members are quite close and often collaborate in many aspects like speaking engagements, project partnerships or simply widening the social network. Search Engine Watch Forums is quite comprehensive but as a new comer I barely know anyone except the moderators who oversee certain sections and often reply to questions. Matt Cutts’s is an “anything goes” blog where people respond to a post by asking, refuting or perhaps to have their names read or links clicked.

Recently I felt I am a star in my own little way. Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan paid attention to my post about the accuracy of Google Zeitgeist and placed it in an update of the site’s daily blog. High Rankings administrator Jill Whalen (Jill) was not amused by the look of my chosen avatar: Ralph Wiggum of The Simpsons pointing a finger onto his nose. We had fun in that one thread and I was resolved to changing it to my personal photo until another moderator Bob Gladstein (qwerty) defended the avatar as a symbol of one’s honesty and innocence into asking SEO questions in the thread. And regading Matt Cutts, he blogged about the visit of his parents around and he said he is trying to show them he is not workaholic. My single sentence indeed attracted his attention and replied it may not be possible to disprove the fact that he is workaholic because his parents are also Internet-savvy and read his blogs.

That’s me, a star for a day.

Google Zeitgeist's Accuracy

2006-04-04T12:47:00.000+08:00

I posted a message at SearchEngineWatch forum about the accuracy of Google Zeitgeist especially the international version.

It was because I was just wondering how accurate the details they put there. Google Zeitgeist displays a list of most popular searches. It could mean seasonal or consistently in demand. But just like Yahoo! Buzz the rankings are pretty volatile although Google's version does not appear as such; it is updated only once.

But in an age of automated searches, spam blogs and things that take away intimacy between the web and the surfer, the least I could expect is that the accuracy of that once-a-month update will be preserved. But it wasn't.

I did not get lots of responses to that post but Danny Sullivan took care of it and posted it among the highlight blogs of the day.

Here are some of my findings:

1. Malaysia is spelt Malasia.

2. Singapore's top search is Viagra? Does this mean people using Google Singapore search are ideal target for Viagra or Cialis spammers?

3. The URL for Singapore data actually is www.google.co.za as you can see (unless they changed it already).

I e-mailed Google and I got some pretty quick responses:

Hi Elmer,

Thank you for your note. We have passed your email on to the appropriate
team. We appreciate your taking the time to write to us.

Regards,
The Google Team

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
From: Elmer W. Cagape [mailto:yada.yada@domain.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 7:29 PM
To: press@google.com
Subject: [press] Correction

Hi,

Just wanna make some corrections.

http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html
Malaysia was spelled Malasia...

Elmer

PS.. Can't believe Singapore people had "Viagra" as the most popular search in Feb.

I forgot to include that issue #3 so I mailed them the details. And here's the reply:

Hi Elmer,

Thank you for your reply. Please be advised that we've passed your
additional comment on to the appropriate team.

If we can assist you further, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team

Hopefully the issue is fixed.

Singapore Craves for Viagra?

2006-03-31T09:40:00.000+08:00

This must be short.

I can’t imagine Singapore people have been putting “Viagra” as their top search keyword for the month of February. No I am not kidding but this is according to Google Zeitgeist. I can’t help but speculate:

It’s the month of Valentines Day and for a great romantic evening with loved ones, Singaporeans might need extra energy.

Could this spell a green light for spammers who now know that this specific market is what they’d like to pursue, after those unsuccessful inbox penetrations and numerous ignorance to their product offers?

More about Zeitgeist, I felt the team did their best to come up with such compilation. But I saw a couple of mistakes. Malaysia was spelt Malasia (I did report it to Google and they made a quick reply to my e-mail). The search URL for Singapore actually shows www.google.co.za.

Do Designers and Search Engine Marketers Argue?

2006-03-18T23:59:00.000+08:00

When you optimize a page sometimes it's difficult to fully apply all SEO recommendations because of content and design constraints. That is why there is a quandary on whether search engine marketers are against designers. SEM professionals think designers build pages whose design are less friendly to search engines - remember search engines do not index an image but only its alternate value - as much as search engine marketers recommend methods that result to the missing "wow" effect of a page.

But wait, I believe this is a myth based more on common sense than further study. Yes there is a tendency that that designers and search engine optimization professionals have good chance of disagreeing but most of the time this problem is addressed.

You don't have to have a bad page to rank well. Take an example of our client La Kasbah, a Moroccan restaurant in Mid-Levels here in Hong Kong. The page was built in 2004 and was starting to appear prominently on search engine results in 2005. It's a Flash page with no other html page except the index that holds the animation. If you search for "hong kong restaurant" in Yahoo! Hong Kong it comes up at the first page, ranked 8th. When I switched to Yahoo! International (www.yahoo.com) it came up 7th. In Google it's a poor 29th.

It did not have any "black hat" technique such as inflating font sizes hidden from a visitor's site nor implementing some doorway pages and other crazy linking scheme. Perhaps it was the backlink generation that made the site popular. So it just shows that a page can get a good search engine placement without sacrificing attractive asthetics. Kasbah has managed to get nominated at the Webby Awards held in New York City. And with 972 queries for the keyword, "hong kong restaurant" is pretty competitive not to mention that Hong Kong is home to more than 10,000 dining places.

Thus, there is no cause for worry between search engine optimization staff and design crew members. If they collaborate well, desired results aren't difficult to achieve.

MyAyala.com Caught Keyword Spamming

2006-03-03T03:06:00.000+08:00

I have a colleague who used to work a company with so called "black hat" SEO practices in the Philippines. While he is aware that the practice was doomed to fail, his previous business dealings in that company was never in peril at the time.

I was a little more conservative, dropping the methods I think that are never thought would be helpful to site visitors. If you were reading a lot of threads on SEO over the Internet you will be amazed to see different tricks are advised with an equal number of naysayers refuting such tricks.

Remember the temporary disappearance of BMW web site on Google a few weeks ago? Such was an example of a site that adhered to what "experts" were saying. In the SEO world, "experts" is a very subjective term which can include Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman or any other pioneer in search engine marketing, to the dubious, secretive people who never tend to disclose their process for "fear of being copied".

And one of the more recent bans by Google involved a Philippine shopping portal MyAyala.com. For a respected name in the country to have a web site that deals with the underworld in hopes of gaining popularity quickly, this is a big embarrassment. The site has been banned for hiding multiple occurence of search phrase within the site and has tried to apply for reinclusion.

Maybe their developers are too tired or just plain stubborn to consider their mistakes, they did not fully comply with the Google Webmaster Guidelines and retained some of the hidden spam keywords. What it got may have benefited the portal as it became a feature of Matt Cutts' blog and have drawn interest from visitors of this popular blog site.

To gain popularity, one of the easiest way is to be controversial.

The Importance of Unique Page Titles

2006-01-30T23:07:00.000+08:00

When I do SEO I always focus my attention on page titles. It is because page titles is among the most important elements in on-page optimization for search engines.

Even if this issue is a well-known fact, still many web sites do not provide a good description of their pages. Often times, it is the title of the homepage that is being copied into the internal pages which therefore does not help search engines distinguish the difference among those pages.

A common item I see when I do SEO is that page titles are very generic and does not seem to correlate with the page content. Therefore, even if the pages carry different titles, there is not much focus on the title keywords and the actual content.

On search engine results, page titles appear the most prominent since they are rendered in larger, bold font typefaces. If a title does not seem descriptive enough, it does not get a big share of clicks even if the page ranks highly on search results (search engines don't have to rank them high anyway since there is already an anomaly with the way page titles are built).

Consider a thorough research before deciding on a page title. It's because it is important to find out what are people typing in to look for those pages. The preferred approach is to look for the most used search phrases but since a lot of competitor are vying for such keyword, it is always a good idea to consider the less competitive keywords, incorporate them with the thought of the page and you get a nice, descriptive page title.

After Pay Per Click, Now Pay As You Call By Google

2005-11-23T18:45:00.000+08:00

I have read this idea already in the past that Google is going to pursue other media in online advertising, with the success of its pay-per-click schemes.

And it's imminent that they are going to launch the "Pay-Per-Call" service pretty soon. Why? It's because someone just found a link on the Google Click To Call FAQ page.

The scheme works so that when you see the telephone icon on ads served by Google, you can leave your number. Google will then call your number. Wait privacy advocates, it's Google taking the call because it does not disclose the number to the advertiser. Once your number is dialled, you are actually being directed to the number of the advertiser.

You won't get charged with a long distance call though you are charged the airtime on your subscribed telephone plan by your provider.

What I am not sure of is how the arrangement between Google and the advertiser is done (that is, when to call me after I left my number). But wait a minute, how does Google reconcile timezones if I am in Hong Kong and the advertiser is in Boston? I do not want to receive call in the middle of the night.

In Premature Love With Google Analytics

2005-11-16T23:29:00.001+08:00

Just hours after the release of Google Analytics, I immediately signed up and registered Singles For Christ Hong Kong as my initial website to measure stats.

As a web stats freak, I am always fascinated with the information displayed on various aspects of a web site: how did a visitor interact with the content, which referrer delivered the most traffic, which keyword was often used in locating the site, and so on.

Google Analytics is actually Urchin which was bought by the search engine giant early this year, and adjusted the fees a month after acquisition. Not much news was heard about the product until its release as a free product. We in the office thought of changing our web traffic analysis software but good thing this new offer from Google is quite satisfactory. 24 hours after installing it, the data began appearing and it's very interesting.

I wonder what will be the impact of this to other products like WebTrends and Clicktracks which are sold at least $495. Google Analytics has traffic limits being a free service. But most users won't worry since the threshold value is pegged at 5M, something that's quite unreachable monthly for smaller sites like Google Analytics, I immediately signed up and registered Singles For Christ Hong Kong. After Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google Talk, and now Google Analytics, what's next?

Types of SEO Clients: Part I Web Built This Site

2005-10-24T14:27:00.000+08:00

So far, optimizing pages for search engines has been fun but at times it's also exhaustive, if not downright frustrating. I have been doing SEO for quite a while with a some success and some failure.

The level of success or failure of an SEO project depends on how things get done, how quick recommendations are implemented and on the degree of freedom of modifying web pages. And from the various types of clients I handled I see a variation of results.

I'd like to classify them into three. No funny tags or curious names.

Clients whose websites are built by us. I have brilliant colleagues whose talent are not limited to project management, programming or creative design. There is that out of the box thinking which does not limit us into building sites just for the sake of it. We tend to measure ROI based on converted sales, analyze traffic and of course success in search engine optimization. That is why even before I came in, sites are already doing well in search engines, even if it's in Flash. These sites we built are the most likely candidates to succeed in SEO campaigns. A couple of examples are a property agency in Hong Kong and one restaurant of African motif.

It's because we get more freedom to tweak sites, change page content, easily access traffic statistics, etc. We built the pages, we modify them, we upload them. And do the same cycle if necessary. At the end of sixth month, results were visible. In return, an expected increase in reservations and closed deals in flats and furnished apartments is seen.

Well, initially it was not us who build the property web site, but since the designer himself was aware of SEO, he got rid of frames and listed the web site into Yahoo! Directory (we did submit it to Open Directory shortly).

I particularly like to optimize sites driven by CMS. Simply because they are dynamically generated and I do not have to scan every page to modify each tag. Also it generates content which is what I really advocate on every web site I optimize.

Next stop is the second type of SEO clients.

Yahoo! Search Explorer

2005-10-03T13:17:00.000+08:00

Yahoo! Search Explorer is now online. It helps you determine how many pages of a particular web site is currently being indexed by Yahoo! and tell whether these pages need to be submitted before focusing on keyword rankings.

Superfreak SEO

2005-09-27T18:14:00.000+08:00

Been there, done that.

My current SEO project is making me have headaches everytime I look at the document. Together with a colleague, we divide the job for English and Chinese pages and from the eight pages we optimize, we came up with more than fifty pages of explanations, measurements, recommendations and justifications in Word document.

The more page I add up, more pressure is building up to meet the expectation of this client, one of the biggest banks in the world.

The Real Baseline Report

2005-09-23T18:33:00.000+08:00

I am in trouble for not explaining properly why rankings do change so often. A client has been requesting a manual -- er, recommendation reports which details how their keywords are ranked. When she checked it, the results were off and asked for explanation.

I myself am not very convinced with my response. Anyway I had to explain. One of the reasons why this happens is that search engines have different data centers which accommodate the millions of searches taking place every single day. Another one is more dubious: search engines update their algorithms that any change in rules and patches will have affected the results.

With this experience, I feelt that keyword ranking is only good to show prospect clients how SEO improved their keyword ranking on search engine results. But doing it as baseline report when closing a deal is not the best option. Real results should come from traffic and sales and real return of investment. Keyword results are at the mercy of MSN, Google and Yahoo! which I have no control at and does not translate to sales.

Ultimately setting up a website, apart from telling the world that you have a new labrador pet, is to generate money.

Bad SEO Clients

2005-09-07T13:40:00.000+08:00

Often times, we hear many reports of unscrupulous search engine optimization providers who just do nothing but suck client money and masquerade it with technical conversations peppering sentences with terms such as link popularity, backlinks, PageRank, redirection, mod_rewrite and so on. Often times when ranking don’t improve it’s the “gurus” who are labeled incompetent.

This seems quite unfair because in organic search engine optimization, the service providers can’t have all controls in search results. It’s at the mercy of the search engines on how they read each page and value links, content, etc. What if spam blogs are found in Yahoo! search results?

Honestly, it’s a matter of best practice SEO that will propel sites to have improved ranking, plus a busload of patient as these results will not happen overnight.

Take a look at the following signs. If you come across any of these, then you might be working for a bad client.

Does not implement all SEO recommendations.

Dictates what keywords they want to rank even if many of them are poorly targeted.

Complains a month after implementation that SEO did not bring any significant change in rankings.

Constantly overrides SEO guidelines every time a page update is done.

Performs SEO tasks not recommended (e.g., buying links from free for all sites)

Does not communicate properly and seems to doubt the capability of the SEO company.

Or if you are a client, you could be behaving the same way as any of the above. If so, then you’re not exactly the best client SEO companies want to work for.

Yahoo! Splogs

2005-09-07T11:02:00.000+08:00

Not too long ago Yahoo! made an indexing update during the time it went into a numbers war with Google.

Barely two months have passed and Yahoo! search engine results pages are still choked with spam blogs or splogs.

Take a look at this example.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=property+agent+in+hong+kong&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

I am trying to measure the ranking of “property agent in hong kong” phrase for one client over at Yahoo.com. The results are disappointing since I was aware of the update made by Yahoo!

Two of the first three results are German-domain links that redirect to Adsense-built pages.

I would have thought that as Yahoo! made the cleanup it got rid of these types of pollutants by way of detecting keyword patterns. Instead they proliferated as described by Jason Bailey as "riddled with spam – worse than before – yecch."

It’s difficult to justify to clients if you have optimized for keywords that are attractive to spammers, say Cialis, pills, or online lottery. You could have ranked higher but splogs get in the way and you are powerless to eradicate them.

Looking For Hong Kong Disneyland?

2005-09-06T15:59:00.000+08:00

I am astonished to realize that the web site I am maintaining, www.sfc-hongkong.org, is ranked 11th on Yahoo! Hong Kong for “Hong Kong Disneyland” phrase, and number one non-Chinese web site in the ranking which lists 2.05 million related pages!

Having said it, the site is at page two of search engine results and it means not a lot of people are going to reach such page and click our link.

We had a minimal mention of Hong Kong Disneyland (we had a little countdown on its opening day) and not really aiming to rank high on that keyword. But with such good placement, that only shows that best practice SEO isn’t always done in a scientific, drill down, hardcore research and evaluation. Simply, provide what people are looking for and serve it nicely on your web pages.

SEO Bragging

2005-08-24T18:00:00.000+08:00

One thing that I notice about SEO providers as posted on their web sites is that they guarantee search engine placements as if they own search engines
that whoever pays the biggest bid will be on top. As said many times, nobody knows exactly how search engine algorithms work, let alone guarantee search
engine results.

I investigated one provider based in South Asia. It was funny because the sample keywords purportedly used for their client are, yes, number one in major search engines!

Too bad, nobody searched for such phrases according to Overture. So I can have one client believe in me when I say he/she should be number one in Google, Yahoo! and MSN for out of these world keywords like supersonic high efficiency double a battery" or "organic shoe shine box insecticide".

Don't Follow This!

2005-08-16T21:39:00.000+08:00

Just as Microsoft prefers the cure rather the prevention, an analogy can be deduced in search engines ability to treat every links equal. Of course they aren't. Some are high valued as links hosted in great, popular sites. That is why it pays to be listed in Yahoo! Directory because one can be assured that Yahoo! keeps a credible list of sites. There are low valued as those links coming from a web page browsed by less than twenty unique visitors everyday.

But there are links that are so annoying that even calling them low valued is not enough. If high valued links have a score of 8 or 9, and low valued links 2 or 3, such annoying links should have 0 value.

What are these links that are annoying? They are the links that are placed on a web site A linking to another web site B just to dupe search engines that web site B is popular and are therefore being linked. How can you tell a web site is practicing this? Simple. You can easily track them in a web page that contains more than ten links pointing to one single web site. Why do we need ten links in a web page to emphasize the importance of a web site? When this is detected by search engine robots, a red flag is raised and the site (not just the page) is penalized by blacklisting it from appearing in search engine results.

So spammers have found a way to get around this: the blog. It used to be known than blog is a very important element in determining popularity of a site. What interests people interests the search engines. Afterall, search engines were made for the people. And the uncanny individuals cash in to the popularity of the blog, making it appear they did the same online journal. Wanna see an example?

http://kks202.blogspot.com/

It's obviously rubbish to humans but was thought to be important to search engines. Until a tag was introduced to get rid of this pollution: the nofollow attribute.

Format is Some Website

While many blog providers such as MovableType uses this, many still do not. It remains to be seen when spam bloggers will realize what they're doing does not do them any good as much as to the annoyed others.

Search Engines Want Websites to Be Like Wine

2005-08-14T18:29:00.000+08:00

Newly launched sites are often finding it difficult to find their niches in organic search engine result pages (SERPs) especially in Google. This prompted many of us to derive a term called "aging delay" in an apparent reference to this phenomenon.

It won't be a phenomenon if Google explained how its search algorithms work; obviously Google wants to keep this one a secret although one golden rule to be followed is to keep page quality high so as to draw interest from visitors and high rankings on search engines will follow. In other words, the way to Google's heart is through a happy visitor that comes to your page.

But this approach does not effectively rank young websites on the top. It typically takes six months to get the rankings going. I believe at the first few months of launch. The site does not generate much traffic and lack visitors who may be interested enough to link to the site. At this point, I'd suggest pay-per-click marketing to be enforced. This approach not only directs targeted audience to the site, it also gives a decent amount exposure. Another is a press release which will detail the purpose of the site, what people would benefit in coming to the site and the upcoming features.

In a nutshell, new websites are often not as credible sites and so they have to endure a few months of being hidden away from the mainstream web traffic and at this time these websites should be aggressive in gathering resources to make their presence felt in a competitive Internet world. As sites start to gather links pointing to them, they gain popularity, and therefore deserve a worthy notch higher.

This is not always the case as popular brands always have the advantage at their hands. For example, even if Hong Kong Disneyland is just a month away from launching and its website is up for just a few days, its website may have been eagerly anticipated by many people for booking, theme park attractions, etc. so that linking and blogging come freely and most of the time unsolicited. Remember, Google loves links and its one basis of their PageRank service.

And so to conclude, search engines are like humans who don't want to drink recently fermented wine; it must be aged to obtain the desired flavor.

Needing To Hide Client List?

2005-08-13T21:05:00.000+08:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies tend to display their credibility through a list of big name companies who have sought their services to help improve their rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

The earlier the company recognizes the importance of search engine optimization (which they can do it themselves anyway), the better their rankings become and will make their competitors play catchup on their online marketing efforts.

But there are cases when SEO companies prefer to hide the list of clients. I suspect that these companies are curious competitors will look at the list drill on the code to see how this company performs SEO. Apart from linking efforts, quality copywriting and user friendly layout, it's the way they implement titles, use of tags, and anchor text that gives hints to the others. My company should not hide our client list, even if we no longer work for them. Afterall, I am proud of the portfolio we have.

Another reason client list cannot be displayed is that the clients themselves disallowed such companies from putting them in the list. This could be an internal policy imposed by the client so as to be wary of their competitors. Nosy competitors could easily look down the code and implement it on their very pages. Competitors should be warned though, that if they are careless their sites could disappear from SERPs instead of going up in the rankings.

My first SEO Stuff Article

2005-08-13T11:30:00.000+08:00

I have been tasked to do search engine optimization for several sites that we develop. And for that reason I got to learn lots of things. Here are five of them.

1. That websites who were built by people who have less preference on SEO or did not know about this stuff are much more difficult to optimize.

2. That clients are more inclined to see results in a field where nothing is guaranteed. Analogous to stock quotes where advisors see the trend but other factors influence the stock prices. With this in mind, a common understanding must be clearly stated in every signed contract the scope and limitation of the project and remind clients that the ultimate goal is not number one ranking in Google but to improve site traffic in hopes to generate more revenue.

3. That clients who have spoken to various vendors find themselves confused as to what is the real score; it's a fact that many SEO providers adhere to a variety of beliefs when it comes to optimization. One says linking is important in Google than Yahoo!, no it's otherwise, says the other. They disagree on the thought that putting targetted keywords to domain names make their websites more vulnerable to closer scrutiny by search engines. Or understanding that letter case and pluralization is not a big issue. And so on.

4. That Search Engine Optimization is an art and not rocket science. There are checklists on how to do them, therefore nothing is secret. Tags, titles, descriptions, backlinks, quality content, yes everyone knows that. But what varies from one provider to the other is how someone performs SEO creatively.

5. That clients are less inclined to perform SEO on documents that are sensitive for fear of being disclosed by us to other clients. Of course, we honor contracts and we won't do such rip offs. The larger company the client is, the bigger bureaucracy we come across at, and the clients whose sites are the ones we built, stand the best chance of adhering to my recommendations. In that sense, I feel assured I get the blame if the performance is weak after 4 to 6 months, and not that company style guide that prevents them from doing my layout recommendations.