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I saw this on Jeremiah Owyang’s web strategy blog and it cracked me up, so I had to include it here. The next time you’re talking to one of those people who’s all abuzz about Digg, social bookmarking, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, Second Life, etc., (okay, someone like me) just know you’re talking to a New Media Douchebag!

Getting top search engine placement isn’t impossible, but it’s hard typically. It’s hard because you have to do it right, and to do it right is to create a site that is architecturally optimized (clean code, hierarchical navigation and organized content) and writing content that your target audience not only wants to read, but finds helpful and authoritative.
 

Myth: Top Search Engine
Placement Can Be Achieved
By Stuffing Keywords

No. No, no, and no! You can’t reach search engine success-ville by sticking keywords all over the place. If you’re a wedding planner, you can’t just stick “wedding planner” all over your site. There’s more than one way to refer to a wedding planner: bridal consultant, wedding consultant, event planner, etc. In addition, someone searching for “wedding planner” could be looking for a bridal consultant, a wedding planning guide, or the Jennifer Lopez movie.

To get top placement on search engines for your vertical, you have to carefully construct your site. You have to write your content in a way that allows you to convey to humans and non-humans that you are a consultant who helps brides plan weddings. You have to provide valuable information to your audience about what you do, why you do it better than other consultants, and the geographical area in which you serve. You have to provide free information to your users about planning their wedding, without giving away the whole store, while still giving them something they won’t get elsewhere. Doing so will provide value and therefore incline people to link to you. This helps with search engine placement much more than just sticking some keywords into crappy copy.
 

Myth: Getting a High Rank In Search Engines Can Be Accomplished By Friends Linking To Me

Links aren’t bad. Typically, I take what I can get. However, links for the sake of links do very little. Search engines know the difference between a “links” or “friends” page and a blog post where someone is talking about how much they were blown away by the information they received on your site. Search engines know the difference between a page that has 100 outgoing links on it versus a page that has 1 or 2 outgoing links. Search engines know how to follow links and determine the importance the writer was putting on the page he or she has linked to.

Another thing about links… having your Uncle Carl link to your photography business from his auto body shop’s website is not going to be as good as having your DJ friend link to your site from his site. You’ll gladly take the link from Uncle Carl, but it’s not as valuable as your DJ buddy (as long as your DJ buddy isn’t linking to every other photographer in the area.)

Lastly, when someone links to your website, it’s much better for you if they add a link to some text that describes your business instead of linking your company name. For example:

For landscape design services in Atlanta, I highly recommend Pollock and Associates

is much more valuable to you, from a search engine perspective, then this:

Check out Pollock and Associates, Inc.
 

 

Myth: I Can Just Launch This Site With Little Effort and Make Money When I Land at the Top of Google

Uh, no, that’s not going to happen. I’m helping someone currently who is starting up an online store selling some supplies. They’ve spent a lot of time entering products into the system they’ve purchased. The problem is that these products can work with several different kinds of machines. They’re entering the products so that each product is entered only once, has a vague product name (that is mostly useful to them for quick identification), and includes all of the machines the product fits in the description for that product. They’re also not wanting to upload photos for each product.

The problem with this is that the product is far from optimized. I’ve recommended entering the product once for each machine that it fits, using the name of the machine and the product as the whole product name. The company owners do not want to do this because it would take a LOT of time (there are thousands of products.) Here’s the problem…

Let’s say you’re selling alternators. You have hundreds of alternators, but each of those could fit any one of 100 cars. You could enter each alternator once, but that’s not optimized. If you do that, then someone searching for “1965 Ford Mustang Alternators” isn’t going to find a product entered as “Alternator 2304″ in Google, even though that Alternator works for a 1965 Mustang. What they WILL find is someone else’s product who took the time to enter the product separately for a 1965 Mustang (their title tag says, “1965 Ford Mustang Alternator”, as does their <H1> tag.) The guy who took less time and entered the product as “Alternator 2304″ now has a title tag and an <H1> tag of “Alternator 2304″, and only someone searching for Alternator 2304 will potentially find it.

By the way, the friend in question does not sell alternators. At 1 in the morning, it’s the only thing I could come up with!
 

Yes, Top Search Engine Placement Requires Work

It’s just not easy. You have to be willing to put some time into making sure your site is right, your content is well organized and optimized, and then you have to be willing to measure the results and make changes as needed. Too many people want to take shortcuts. I understand that to a degree, but you have to make yourself think differently. Otherwise, high search engine rankings will just be a pipe dream and the money you spent on your website, ecommerce package, etc. will have been wasted. I’ve seen it happen lots of times.

Yet another story about a bad, unethical SEO company messing over people - but this time they got caught.

Why do people (okay, some of you guys out there) believe it when someone calls you or sends you a SPAM email promising, “top search engine rankings… GUARANTEED!” Or someone else says they’ll, “optimize your META tags!” Or they’ll, “submit your site to the search engines!”

Oh Goody - please do. And by the way, here… have some of my hard-earned money!
 

How Do Blackhat SEO’s Still Get Away With It?

That fact that companies and individuals still get away with stupid promises about search engine marketing is nuts to me. I got away with selling stupid SEO services several years ago, and I actually thought I knew what I was doing! But I wasn’t trying to screw people over. And I never guaranteed top search engine placement. Even then I knew the only way to actually fufill those stupid guarantees of ranking was to peddle shady SEO practices - which were over my head, anyway.
 

Shady SEO Companies Can and Will Hurt You

The company I now work for got messed over several years back by a crappy, shady, blackhat SEO company called Traffic Power. As a result, their site got knocked from Google for a while.

Why did this happen? Because people in the company wanted so badly to get to the “top of the search engines” that they wanted to believe the junk TP was shoveling. Therefore, they hired Traffic Power and watched their tactics work for a short period of time only to crash and burn eventually, falling completely out of Google’s index.
 

And the Answer Is…

The reason companies still get away with selling out-of-date practices and blackhat tactics is because the people they are targeting…

1. don’t know any better,
2. want to believe its possible to get there for $49.95/month (or much more) and therefore,
3. allow themselves to be suckered instead of educating themselves!

Moral of the Search Marketing Story

Promoting your website is an ongoing effort of education, analysis, adjustment, education, analysis, adjustment… an on and on. I don’t profess to know it all. The point of my blog is to help wedding professionals and owners of small businesses to understand some basics that they can control and to guide them as to what to do and what not to do.

DO: Educate yourself and check references of anyone trying to sell you SEO services

DON’T: Believe that anyone can get you to the top of ORGANIC, natural search results.

No, you’re not stupid. Your web designer probably isn’t either… but ignorant, maybe.

The title tag of a web page is an actual tag in the HTML code of your page:

Once entered in the HTML code, it’s what is displayed at the top of a user’s web browser:

More importantly, it is one of the most basic, and yet most critical, SEO elements. Sadly, it is also one of the most overlooked tasks in the development of a website.
 

Wow, Check Out the Title Tag in the Red Dress Across the Bar!

The very first thing that a search engine sees on your page is the title tag. Before they analyze a single word of content, they check your title tag. The title tag is like the initial introduction of each page on your site to the search engine. It’s the ever-important “first impression”. Unfortunately, the majority of small business websites screw that first impression up… badly. (Actually, a lot of big sites do, too!)

Title tags are supposed to represent the rest of the page - it’s supposed to tell search engines (and users viewing results in search engines) what they’ll learn on that particular page.
 

Oh, Title Tag… Where Did We Go So Wrong?

There’s a few ways that website title tags get screwed up. But first, in a new browser window, I want you to go to Google and type into the search bar the following: site:mywebsite.com (only replace “mywebsite.com” with your actual website address.) Now check out the results - the title tag for each page is the larger, blue letters:

Once you have your results as they appear in Google in front of you, see if any of the following apply to your title tags:

• Putting the same title tag for every page of the site
• Leading the title tag with the company (or website name)
• Vague title tags that are far from optimized

In truth, a lot of developers use WYSIWYG editors (”What You See Is What You Get“). These editors make it a little easier to create sites. By default, if you haven’t set the title tag yourself, some of these WYSIWYG editors either take the first few words from the web page and prepopulate the title tag with them, or worse, they add something like “Untitled Document“.

Developers then reuse that first page (which took them a long time to create) for all of the other pages because it’s faster. They just change the text and photos, and then resave those pages as new pages. If they don’t think to check the title tags, then the same title tags now exist for all pages of the site. Here’s an example of a site where this apparantly happened:

I’ve done it myself… it’s not that anyone is intentionally trying to wreck your chances at achieving good results. They just don’t know any better.
 

Please, Google… Just Give My Title Tags One More Chance!

Okay, so now that we know your title tags are all the same, or they’re labeled, “Untitled Document”, or they’re simply not optimized, how do we get them back on track?

Using the examples of title tag mistakes above, it’s really quite simple to correct:

• Make each title tag unique and brief but descriptive of the content for the page it represents (60 characters is about the maximum)
• Unless you’re an Amazon or an Ebay, there’s no need to lead your title tag with your company name. If you feel you must have your company name in the title, put it at the end, AFTER you put a brief but descriptive title tag
• If the subject of your page is “services” and you’re a photographer in Atlanta, don’t just have”Services” for a title tag. Try “Atlanta Wedding Photography Services” or something specific.

Is It Really That Simple?

I think it is considering most small wedding professionals I’ve run into have this problem! Here’s an example of a site (not a wedding site, but it was honestly hard to find a good example from most wedding vendor sites I could find) that has unique and optimized titles, descriptive of the content on each page:

Okay, maybe it SHOULD be a little more complicated than that. I could go on and on about the steps that should go into planning a site, researching terms, and carefully, methodically sculpting the title tags (and other elements) of a website. But this post is geared toward people who have an existing site and need some “quick wins”.

If you currently have a site and you find that your titles are either duplicated, focus too much on the name of the company and not enough on summarizing the content of each page, or they’re are simply too generic (”About Us“, “Services“, “Products“, etc.) then removing the duplicates and creating an optimized and unique title tag could very well work wonders for you!