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SEO is hot.
And it's no surprise why. SEO – search engine optimization – is what you do to your web site to get it on page one on Google and the other search engines. That matters. A lot. Get on page one and your site gets viewed and business follows. Get on page five hundred, or even on page five, and your web site and your business may as well be the Invisible Man. Your site gets no traffic and your website investment goes largely down the drain.
But what exactly is search engine optimization? What (if anything) can you do to get your web site to rank better?
Well, there are so many things you can do to optimize your web site that that isn’t an easy question to answer. A book could be written about it. Several have.
But the rock bottom basics are that search engine optimization involves modifying and re-writing the code under the surface of a web site, and the text that people read on the surface, so that they both are more agreeable to search engines, and the ranking criteria they go by, than the code and text of competing pages.
Search engines also rank sites according to how many sites link to those sites, and (to a lesser degree) vice versa. Optimize the site code itself, optimize the text content, and develop incoming links, and do it better than the competition and voila. It all comes together to kick your page to the top.
I plan to write some coming columns on all three areas, so stay tuned. But the first thing you need to learn about SEO isn’t any of the above. The first thing you need to learn is to unlearn some of the myths surrounding it.
For instance?
1. "Google Is The Only Game In Town”
Afraid not. True, Google is the 800-pound gorilla. But Yahoo is a 350-pound gorilla. MSN is a 240-pound gorilla. And there are a whole score of 200-and-under-pound gorillas out there who are pretty hefty monkeys themselves! Contrary to myth, not everyone uses Google. Google always accounts for more than half of searches, Yahoo generally comes in under a quarter, and MSN and Ask.com usually get above five percent and below five percent respectively.
But let’s be realistic. One study last year indicates that there were roughly eight billion internet searches being done per month. Well, if there are something like two billion searches being done on Yahoo monthly, half a billion on MSN and Ask, what sane advertiser is going to ignore that?
On top of this, some sites that show up on Yahoo and elsewhere don’t show up at all on Google. And vice versa. Engines rank pages differently too. The site that appears on page one of Google may be on page four of Yahoo and on page two of MSN. That’s not great news if Yahoo and company make up a third of the market.
Then there are the niche search engines – Cuil, Dogpile, digg, del.icio.us, and literally hundreds of others. And nationalist search engines in Russian Cyrillic or Bosnian or Swahili, and even censored engines behind national firewalls like the Chinese. Compared to Google, the number of searches on some of them are microscopic – which is to say, merely in the millions. But if your target market uses them, do you optimize for them or not? Of course you do.
And – no less important – markets and searches vary from search engine to search engine. Some markets uses non-Google search engines more than the Google search engine. Why? No one really knows. But they do, and it matters. Did you know that one study shows more people over 55 use MSN than any other search engine? That’s relevant if you’re targeting that demographic. Did you know that over 48% of people clicking ads in MSN buy, as opposed to roughly 42% in Google? Or that 43.1% of women click such ads as opposed to only 36% of men? Relevant again, if that's your market.
Just because there are multiple search engines doesn’t mean searches are not evenly distributed among those engines. Far from it! A lot more people may be searching for your product or service on Yahoo this month than on Google. Or not – you need to do the research and see.
If you’re on page one of Google, that's never bad. But it doesn't mean you’re necessarily exploiting your market to its fullest. And if you’re not on page one of Google, it doesn't mean you’re dead in the water. You can do very well indeed focusing purely on the other engines. You should work for a good ranking on every engine that’s relevant, of course. But if the majority of searches are being done on non-Google engines, the last thing you should do is ignore them. Work on getting good rankings wherever rankings count.
2. “SEO is only about your web site”
No no no. You can optimize your press release and get it on page one. You can optimize your Craigslist ad and get it on page one. You can optimize the articles you write, you can optimize your blog entries and your commentaries on other people's blog entries, you can optimize your Amazon book reviews, your eBay auctions, your Adsense ads – in fact, you can optimize just about anything you put out onto the web. There are things to can do to optimize even images and audio and video to make sure they come up higher in searches. And you can use all these non-web-site items to help build higher page rank for your web site and generate more traffic (which boosts your web site ranking too).
So while the web site is still the main element in most every internet marketing campaign, SEO is far from being a web-site-only tool. If you’re not using it as a critical part of your whole internet marketing effort, you’re under-using one of the best weapons in your marketing arsenal.
3. “Our company’s name is on page one so we’re already optimized.”
This one makes me wince.
What people new to search engine use do not always realize is that people search with terms that they use, not terms that the company thinks they use. If someone needs a Rochester copywriter, for instance, they don’t type in ‘David Pascal’ or ‘davidpascal.com’ into Google. They don’t know who ‘David Pascal’ is, or anything about davidpascal.com. They type in ‘rochester copywriter’ because that’s the location and the service they’re looking for. I come up #1 because my page has been optimized not for my name but for the terms people use to search out my services.
It’s very easy to optimize the (fictitious) ‘John Q. Public & Associates Law Partners of Pittsford NY’ because there’s only one such company with that name. There’s no competition for the phrase. But if most people needing the services of the John Q. Public firm are typing in ‘DWI lawyers Rochester’ or ‘bankruptcy Pittsford’ or ‘divorce help Monroe County area’ and the John Q. Public pages are not optimized for those phrases, the John Q. Public site may not turn up at all, much less on page one.
In short? Clients see the web sites of firms that optimize for the keywords that clients use.
How do you find those keywords? That's a subject in itself. Amateurs guess. So does the general public, and so do designers unfamiliar with SEO. Be smart: don’t guess. I use Wordtracker and other keyword analysis services to ferret out what people are searching for. Believe me, and it can be anything but intuitive.
Imagine that you own a pizzeria. Obviously you would want to optimize a pizzeria web site for the term 'pizzeria,' no? That’s sounds sensible, doesn’t it? I went to Wordtracker to see. The term ‘pizzeria’ was searched for 46 times that day. Not bad. The misspelled version, ‘pizzaria’, was searched for 44 times that day.
The term ‘pizza’ was searched for 5,191 times that day.
So optimize for that term and you'll get over a hundred to one more searches, literally thousands of more searches, daily.
You can overdo it in the other direction too. Say that the John Q. Public law firm specializes in divorce cases, so they want to get to page one for ‘divorce’. Sound reasonable? It may sound reasonable but it’s a mistake. Optimize for a bland general term and you get a hundred million competing pages to beat, a few of which are professionally optimized to the hilt. And if, insanely, you pay your optimization firm the exorbitant amounts needed to get the site to page one in that situation, what you get is often not the attention of the focused target market you want, but traffic from millions of page viewers who will never use your product of services.
Yes, the term ‘divorce’ may be searched by local clients who want a divorce. But it can also be used by a globe full of people who want to hear about Madonna’s latest divorce. Or that want divorce attorneys in Alaska or Nepal, but click on John Q. Public’s link and tie up their phones unprofitably because they glanced casually over the John Q. Public site and missed the location. It’s a great way to run up cell phone charges and overload your inbox with email inquiries from people who will never ever use your services. It’s an awful way to use SEO.
4. “SEO Means An Ugly Site”
Wrong. In fact very wrong. Search engines, it’s true, have no more aesthetic sense than Arnold Schwartzeneggar in Terminator. They can’t tell pretty from ugly or (much, much more important) whether the visual elements of your site support and further the overall goal of your site, and the brand image you want to project.
But let’s be fair. They don’t insist on a bad or inappropriate visual look. It’s just as easy to have a beautiful, memorable, right-on-target look as an clunky geeky one.
But you don’t have to have a good-looking site to end up high in the search results, and that’s the origin of this myth. SEO experts are hired to get you on Page One, not to make you look good once you’re there. So as a rule they don’t. And why should they? They’re not designers. It’s not their job. The price the client pays, of course, is a less attractive, less appealing site, which makes a poorer impression and results in a lower overall conversion rate of viewers to buyers. It’s too bad. The moral you should take away from this? Good design and bad SEO is bad. Bad design and good SEO is not too great either. Good design and good SEO? Bull's eye.
How do you do it? Cross-pollinate: get good designers and people who know the marketing implications of design, and get people who are SEO savvy. Don't segregate them. See that they work together, and that they work well together. If you can find all three in one tight agency or (even better and more affordably) in one person, you’ve really struck gold.
Another reason for the myth of ugly SEO is, of course, Flash. Search engines do not like Flash. Many web designers and all agencies love Flash. Its effects are spectacular, its look can be stunning, it’s trendy, it’s cool, and people who do it can often charge a mint for it (even though “Skip Intro” is still the second-most clicked button on the internet). So Flash providers invariably howl when you bring up the fact that Flash is SEO-challenged to the max. But what you hear is Freudian denial: Flash does have its virtues, but it’s never an SEO plus.
Can you optimize even for Flash? Yes you can. Can you get even a Flash site on Page One? Yup. But it’s like teaching a pig to do the Macarena. It’s possible but it just ain’t easy. In fact it’s so not easy that clients and designers should pause and reflect before employing it. If there’s a truly critical reason to use Flash, then your search engine optimization efforts will just have to work with it and work around it. But if there isn’t? Think twice before using it. Eliminate Flash (and reduce Javascript) and your site’s rise to the top will be far faster and far easier.
But whether you use Flash or not, don’t think a web site optimized to the max has to be ugly as sin. Optimized sites can be as attractive to humans as can be, and not lose a single machine admirer in the process.
5. “SEO Sites Are All Text, Text, Text”
Wrong wrong wrong. Content may be king, but it's not an absolute dictator. You can have the best content on the net and get booted off Google totally if you violate its guidelines. (Already legendary is the story of Google booting BMW’s web site off their search engine results for over a month. They optimized their site in ways that violated Google guidelines, and content be damned: out they went.)
Granted, there is a grain of truth in this charge. Sites optimized for search engines do tend to have more text than non-optimized ones. No surprise there. Search engines search for content, and while quantity doesn’t have an absolute edge over quality, for search engines the amount of content is definitely a factor. Is having a lot of text on your site the same as being text-heavy, however? That depends on what you mean by text-heavy, and on how smart your content layout person is.
Pages you need to scroll down five miles to read, pages with no images or white space, pages with fly-speck type size and grunge-style green-on-pink fonts, paragraphs stretching one side of the screen to the next – well, sure: these are marketing poison! They may be rich in keywords, but they won’t be rich in readership. Studies are definitive: people just won’t wade through text unless the text is eye-friendly. Search engines may give such pages a high ranking, but search engines don’t squint or suffer eye strain. People do. And while you have to take the machine readers into consideration, ultimately you are writing for people, not machines.
But, as with design, search engines are not hostile to readability. They don't insist on being reader-unfriendly. Indeed, search engines like things like helpful sub-headings, topic-specific pages and well-laid-out site maps. If you make the font elegant and large enough to be readable, ease and guide the eye with white space, use sub-heads, sprinkle in an occasional image and a caption or two, break the same amount of content up into multiple on-topic pages instead of one mammoth catch-all, and in general, arrange your content so that the visitor can go right to the information he or she wants – then you can have your cake and eat it too.
This mistake happens for the same reason that many SEO-related mistakes do. The site owner gets focused only on search engine optimization. Getting the search engines to like you becomes more important than getting the site visitor to like you. A major, major error. And one that's unnecessary. SEO and good looks and readability are entirely compatible with each other.
But to reach all three goals you need to strive for all three, and not for just one.
6. “SEO Beats PPC”
Two of the worst SEO myths are PPC – pay-per-click – myths. One is that organic search results are better than paid, because ‘nobody clicks on ads’.
That's not true People click on ads. According to one study, thirty percent of internet users click on pay-per-click ads. Granted, 30% is not as good as 70%, but it ain’t bad. Who wants to pass up 30% of billions of searches in a global market?
And bear this in mine: people who click on an ad know it’s an ad. So even if they’re not completely pre-sold, they’re predisposed to listen to a pitch and predisposed to buy. The people who don’t click on ads because they’re ads do not want to buy. That’s their privilege, but that doesn’t mean they’re good traffic. Would you rather present to thirty people interested in your product who made the effort to walk in your door, or seventy who aren’t interested in buying and who avoid you like the plague?
Another myth is that when you use pay-per-click, you lose money, because you pay for each click. Since you don’t pay for organic clicks, you don’t lose money. Big savings!
Baloney: the idea that SEO is cheaper than PPC is a joke. It can take months of labor-intensive work to build the linkages and code revisions and develop the content to really build good organic SEO results. It’s worth it, and even little changes can have big positive effects, but it’s neither easy nor cheap. Who pays for al that work? The client.
The client pays for each click with pay-per-click, but does it really cost more? Sometimes it might. Sometimes it might not. It’s not that easy a call, and it’s wisest to experiment. Don’t get me wrong – better organic results through SEO are good. But pay-per-click results are good too. I personally prefer to develop them together for a client. Better to get on Page One with pay-per-click today and stay there till organic SEO results catch up later, than to spend money optimizing and nonetheless stay hidden in the wings unnoticed, possibly for months, till organic results click.
7. “Get On Page One And You Stay On Page One”
Another strange view I sometimes hear is the notion that once a site is optimized, the owner can take a snooze and let it run on automatic for the next year or two. Good grief, no! In the first place, Google changes its tune more times than a politician addressing different constituencies. Google’s infamous algorithm for determining Page Rank is altered incessantly and at the drop of the hat.
Everyone wants to crack Google, and Google knows it, and Google does its best to frustrate them, by keeping its criteria secret and altering them endlessly. The rules that put you on Slot One Page One today can put you on Slot Two Page Two tomorrow.
You need to track such changes, and to keep your eyes open for upcoming changes too. It’s more than just Google’s ever-changing algorithm. Unaltered sites tend to gradually drop by themselves. Search engines likes frequently updated content, and if ‘optimized’ means ‘static’ if won’t stay optimal for long.
In addition, new competitors moving in are actively at work trying to get the top slots and push existing competitors down. And markets themselves change! There’s many a search for ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘foreclosure’ in dim economic times like the current Great Recession. But as the economy recovers, searches for those keywords will drop as searches for other keywords mount. Sites optimized for those keywords will need to change their strategies.
What to do? Monitor monitor monitor, and be prepared to change when the markets and the searches change. Rest assured, they will.
And is that all there is? No, there's one more misunderstanding that ranks above all the rest:
“Getting Attention Is What It's All About”
I don't class this as an SEO myth because it’s a mistake that stretches far beyond simply misunderstanding search engine optimization. It’s an error of perspective responsible for bad marketing and lost revenues across the board. Why? Because it’s not enough to get on page one, or on the biggest billboard, or on TV and all over the newspapers. It’s what you present once you’re there that's needed to complete the picture. Sure, SEO can get more people to see your site. But if they don’t like what they see, your marketing dollar is worse than wasted – it may well lose you business.
One of the dirty secrets of marketing and advertising is that it can not only fail, it can backfire. Poorly marketed or advertised products or services can alienate, if not bring down the whole brand. Getting attention matters, but what you do with that attention matters just as much if not more.
SEO has to be integrated into the overall marketing picture, and the product is the hero of that picture. The product (or service) has to be desirable, it has to be addressed to an interested target market, the price or service has to be perceived as affordable, and so on and so on. The best marketing strategy is to have something good to market.
Marketing and advertising are not a sort of magic fairy dust that marketers and advertisers sprinkle on a thing to make it universally desirable. Good marketing uncovers desires, rather, and aims to satisfy them with appropriate products and services. It sifts and identifies the individuals having those wishes into targetable segments, and shows them how the product or service in question meets their needs better than any other alternative.
SEO firm after SEO firm promises to get the client’s site a higher ranking, but all too few look at whether that higher ranking impacts positively on the client’s brand image or reputation or bottom line. Even initially higher conversions and sales can be deceptive, as the recent New Coke campaign illustrated. Marketing was deployed to get more people to try it. People tried it. And didn’t like it. And thanks to the widespread word-of-mouth, sales plummeted disastrously. Back to Classic Coke!
The value that good SEO can add to a business is not small. But it needs to used thoughtfully. Optimizing for search engines reaches deep into site layout, deep into underlying code, deep into text content, and deep into many of the social aspects of maintaining an online presence. It can be tricky, and, yes, it may require expert help. Unless you’re prepared to drop whatever else you’re doing for six months and sift data and crack open tech books, don’t wing it. Get a professional.
But remember that success is about more than simply getting on page one of Google. It's about what you say to to the world once you're there. And if you hire someone to help you get up there, be sure it’s someone who understands that, and who knows marketing as deeply as SEO.
David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.
Email:
davidpascal@gmail.com
Company Profile:
Pascal & Associates
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