[David Strom's Web Informant] 3 May 2010: The great SEO swindle

[David Strom]

Web Informant 3 May 2010: The great SEO swindle

I have been writing about the Web since it was nearly invented in the
early 1990s and one of my continued sources of amusement is the snake
oil search engine optimization vendors. Repeat after me: content is
king. Everything else is just a shell game.

In our rush to better our rankings, we tend to forget why people are
using search engines to begin with: to find the best content. Those
search sites that don't deliver (remember Altavista? Or Yahoo, for
that matter?) are going to find out really quickly that their users
will go elsewhere.

What does that mean for you as a Web site owner that is trying to move
up in the charts? It means you first have to focus on your content,
and deliver what your visitors want. It is a matter of managing
expectations, but also about making sure that your content is
continually tuned and adjusted to meet the needs of your ever-evolving
audience.

What it doesn't mean is hiring some SEO firm to tweak your meta tags,
flog your links, and hire a bunch of offshore keyboard pushers to
promote your pages.

I got a PR pitch for an SEO company that I would rather not promote
here, but the essence of their existence is that charge their clients
only after the desired rankings have been achieved, with a sliding
scale depending on whether you end up higher or lower than your goals.
This is just utter nonsense, although the company is growing by leaps
and bounds.

I coincidentally was meeting with a young entrepreneur here in St.
Louis last week who runs a real business that is based on carefully
tweaking search engine results. His name is Mark Sawyier
(mark.sawyier at offcampusmedia.com), and his business is in listing
apartments near major colleges around the country.
(Movingoffcampus.com is just one of dozens of domains that he owns.)
He is the cyberspace version of a major urban real estate developer:
he understands SEO, Google Analytics, and how to play in a game where
you live and die by your rankings and page views. He has managed to up
his pay per click rates from his sponsors because
a.	He has tons of content – in this case apartment listings,
b.	He has tons of relevant content – the apartments are listed by
proximity to campus and other things that students are searching for,
and
c.	Results – because the people searching actually end up as renters
more often from his site than his competitors.

He told me: "The fact is that the combination of the constantly
changing algorithms search engines use to calculate rankings with
increased competition from other websites, guaranteeing someone a rank
and still playing by the rules, to me, is almost impossible. They
would need infinite resources and time and have to have a ridiculous
amount of startup capital to get it going."

I offer my own modest example to buttress what Mark says. I have a
page on my Web site that I have maintained for more than a decade. It
is a simple list of dozens of Web conferencing vendors, with some
basics on what they cost and what client platforms they support. I
spend about an hour a year on maintaining this listing.

A few years ago, I started getting unsolicited emails from vendors of
conferencing products who wanted me to list them on my list. Then I
realized why: a quick Google search on the term "web conferencing
services" has me in the top ten results. Did I stuff my page full of
keywords? Did I abuse my meta-tags? Did I hire a bunch of third-world
keyboarders to hit my page? Did I pay some SEO firm to work their
magic? Did I have some special insight into how Google ranks my page?

No, no, and no. I just doggedly set out to provide good content, week
after week. And gradually, this got results. It may take years, but
eventually, as Mark says, the best content will win.

So instead of gaming SEO or hiring someone to push you up the page
charts, think about making a quality website with tons of content.
Mark reminds me: "search engines are ALWAYS trying to connect people
that use them to search for information online with the absolute best
websites to provide it - the minute any of them lose sight of this
objective, they will stop being a good search engine. This is the core
concept behind all of the variables and algorithms that go into
calculating search engine rankings. And while external links and
proper SEO coding are certainly important elements in the battle, at
the end of the day, the most important thing is having a website that
provides the right answers and information to the searchers."

And if you really must hire someone to do your SEO, think of hiring
Mark. Off Campus Media offers campus, social media and search engine
marketing services using his own experience with building his own Web
sites.

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