SEO FAQ (or why you shouldn't hire an SEO "expert")
powazek.com
powazek.com
Then you’re called a Web Developer. Good web development includes using proper formatting (like putting headlines in H tags) and understanding how the web works, search engines included. Valid code also has the side-effect of making your pages more accessible for your users, which is the point. Making your pages more accessible to robots is for robots.
I've been trying to put that idea into words for a while. I visit a lot of forums and freelance sites to prowl for good work, and I see many discussions about page rank, inbound links, three-way links, hosting pages on different IP's to get more PR juice for all of them, etc etc.
It just seems like it's a backwards way of going about things, like building a super highway to a place you hope there may be a city in the future.
Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers.
Just an aside...
Did you just quit smoking or something?
Yes.
I just quit cold turkey.. it sucks. Wish I'd never smoked in the first place.
That's a touch simplistic. Spread the word where? To whom? How?
The issue of getting customers is so complicated that we are all here, reading, learning and coming up with ideas to be a success.
What is "needed" to get customers varies by market, by demographic, by expected return, by quality of product etc etc.
To be a success, a site needs to serve a customer base and then MARKET TO THAT GROUP. SEO may be imperfect, but what SE have is every demographic, identifying themselves clearly, by the keywords they use. Missing out on that traffic is just crazy.
SEO is the catch all term for "spreading the word" on the internet (I do some SEO) - we don't limit it to search engine baiting (!) there is a lot more to it.
One can see things very simply - a bit of widget bait, an active forum, a good product, these can all create great inflows of PR and visitors. Then of course you've to optimise your landing pages, ...
SEO is built into the sites I design/write but there's always more one can do. Good inlinks go a long way.
If you build a store away from civilisation and just wait for customers - you may have an awesome enough product and enough capital to sit it out. But, sending a few flyers, issuing a press release, having promotions, a TV advert, some on-street ads, etc. are all going to help.
Ditto building a website - if you build it and your product is awesome I think it'll get out there eventually (probably as a copycat site by someone who pays for some SEO!?!) but using some PPC, gathering good inlinks, being part of an authority link community, getting blog coverage, getting diggs, etc. are all going to help.
Good web dev does include _some_ SEO. But SEO is too big a field for a web developer to do properly by themselves, a web dev team would have an SEO. Like expecting builders to have painter-decorators, if you want trompe-loeil rather than a slap of magnolia then you're going to need a dedicated expert.
This is the same BS that gets spewed about everything "If you have a great product, you don't need marketing", "If you're a great writer, you don't need an editor" etc etc
A web designer / developer is someone who builds web pages and/or sites. They can be good designers, bad, indifferent. They can know some SEO, none, or all of it. They can focus on server code, front end code or both, again to varying degrees.
But SEO != web designer is simple to prove: if I rank 10000000 for a term, the web designer still did his job :)
Whether this mythical "you" needs to hire an SEO expert or not depends on so many things.
And lastly this comment is just bizarre: "Social media is rapidly becoming much more important than Google." Seriously? Really? The $$ made from a Social Media click > an SEO click? Seriously dude, you need to get you some Google analytics and an ecommerce site.
Social Media is to SEO what a park is to a mall. People may prefer parks, they may prefer having fun, but when they want to buy, they go to the mall, and most smart businesses would surely rather be situated in the mall.
I suppose you wouldn't hire a UI expert for a GUI program either?
a brilliantly designed site offering a useful service too far away from me is a bad search result
How far is too far? Depends what you're buying right? That's a complex algo. How about if you happen to be travelling there anyway? How does the SE know? What if it's the only place in your country that sells it, would you go further now?
Effective marketing is a good thing. Wasting money on crap? Not so much.
Say, by developing tech that actually gives you what you were searching for, and not what you were lead into reading via various search "hacks."
I dunno. Seems cheaper, to me, to get a decent web dev at market rates than a verbose "SEO expert" at inflated worth.
When I go to a restaurant I like to have the barman to make my drinks and the to chef cook for me. The barman is cheaper(!) but he tends to cook worse than the chef and his repertoire sucks.
Depending on the product or service your offering, the traditional (if time-consuming) direct outreach to the intended audience may still be better than hiring the services of an SEO "expert."
If by better you mean something involving a smaller ROI, then I guess you're right.
Concrete examples:
1) Over 25% of searches are globally unique, and the results for these are often suboptimal. (Google has a very good handle on what [credit cards] there are, but does not necessarily know a [good class activity for Halloween].) Proper SEO for your site to target those things is mostly just about getting links and writing your onpage content better, and creates value for the searcher.
2) Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.
This was the #1 page for [biology bingo] three years ago:
http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/blankbingo.html
(Its a blank bingo template which says "biology" on it. Yaaaay.)
This is the #1 page for [biology bingo] for most searchers now:
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/biology
There are 43 activities there created by a teacher to mesh well with common lesson plans (people really like the Parts of A Cell one for whatever reason), and an option to tweak any of them to exactly what you need for your lesson. Those 43 activities have helped teach well in excess of 80,000 students. And they all exist because I saw SEO value in creating new stuff.
Could be, but are "SEO experts" actually doing the content creation?
You should not be paying someone more than 5$ an hour to tell you to "create good stuff". Like the article says, most of this isn't hard to figure out. Did you have to hire an SEO expert to get your biology page built?
Also, marketing is about much more than just 'selling stuff'. It's about identifying potential customers, understanding their needs, and shaping the direction of development to meet those needs.
(More broadly I think that most people should not hire "SEO experts" because any one you are able to afford is less competent than you need, but that is another discussion altogether.)
There are many people around these parts who think SEO is useless, dirty, dirty-and-useless, or totally obvious. Those people could benefit enormously from broadening their perspectives a little bit.
For example: I have over 700 bingo activities. I suppose they could have been posted chronologically, like a blog, or alphabetically, like a directory. They aren't -- they're "siloed" into categories, with each category being thematically coherent, and category pages linking to related activities and activities linking to related categories. That is sort of the tip of the information architecture iceberg for my site. It has clear usability and SEO benefits. (If you're looking at Parts of a Cell bingo right now, you're rather more likely to be interested in other Biology bingo activities than Japanese culture bingo.) You might think this is obvious, and indeed, it is that special kind of obvious that no one in my niche bothers to do.
There is also an algorithm for promotion of popular content. (If you took a quick gander around my site right now, you'd notice nearly every page links to a Halloween bingo activity. That is not an accident.) Does "build good stuff" imply to you "You should probably make the link graph on your website dynamically change in response to market conditions and analytics data, because that will maximize conversions and also deliver great SEO benefits"? No, thats just solid SEO -- a bit of marketing, a bit of usability, a bit of tech, and a bit understanding how to play an important game whose umpire makes unquestionable calls according to a rulebook only they can read.
Once again, trotting out Halloween specials in October is not something you need to hire an SEO expert for.
> unquestionable calls according to a rulebook only they can read.
That's something else that bugs me about the whole "SEO expert" business. They're on the same playing field as you are, and since Google changes and adapts as well, "years of experience" don't really count for a lot.
No one is questioning the value of paying some attention to this stuff - you ignore it at your own peril if you operate on the web. What people find dubious are the "SEO experts" who sell that and only that. If someone's a good web developer, they're going to be able to tell you the same stuff anyway, and probably add more value elsewhere to boot. And all of this commentary is ignoring the genuinely shady operators who have also taken to using the "SEO" moniker, who further muddy the waters.
If you're trotting them out in October you're about five years too late if you're aiming at the top spot on Google. You need those pages to gather authority; part of that is from longevity, partly from past inlinks you've gathered, your linkbait for halloween last year ..... Reuse a page created for "Halloween 2009" from several years ago - which pages looks most authoritative, the one created in Oct 2009 about the subject along with 2 Million others or the one that is 5 years old and has established inlinks perhaps from .edu sites, perhaps one hop from pages with millions of "halloween" inlinks. Oh but your competitor has "halloween2009.com", oh well.
A/B testing is easier than knowing what to test especially if you need to keep ahead of competitors and ontrack with the changes to the search, discovery and marketing environment online.
I don't find the answers to questions like "how much should I spend on getting a higher listing, I'm top 10 now, what's the ROI", "how can I get my competitors indented SERPs links removed", "how can I get a second top 10 listing", "does PR scuplting work", "should I tweet to improve my blog's visibility, what sales return will I expect", "how can I optimise my landing page", "will a shallower link structure increase CTR, revenue?", "will that outlink hurt me? help?", "what's the most important ranking factor?" etc. that obvious.
I must be a klutz.
Oh and do you think years of experience as a tailor will help one make good suits? Every customer is a different size ...
There is more than one company selling stuff for halloween. The top spot on Google gets 85% of the entire SE traffic (say). Remind me why one guy selling crappy plastic tridents, witch masks and pumpkin shaped buckets deserves to get all that traffic and the other guys don't?
And the author of the post misses that completely. He seems to think that web designers and web developers can ensure a proper SE ranking, which is ridiculous. Given the above, the best SEO specialist is someone that can rewrite/expand your content. Make sure the right keywords are dropped in the text, that the content is reachable for the SE and that there is plenty of content available.
SEM, on the other hand, is link-building, keyword targeting, PPC campaigns, quality content, et cetera. Basically, anything designed to manipulate behavior towards visiting your site.
SEO is perfectly understandable as a legitimate business provided it is services defined as above. It's just about making sure that the technical aspects of your site are in order. Still, I believe that this segment is shrinking, as search engines are getting better at understanding the sites and developers are getting better at optimizing their sites in the first place.
SEM is where the debate should be taking place. For lack of a better definition, SEM is about 'tricking' people into visiting your site, or otherwise 'gaming' the system. Those words might not be the best, but I hope their point is taken. (Note: 'Trick' could be read 'manipulate' or 'encourage'.) Quality content 'tricks' people into visiting your site. Link-bait titles 'trick' people into clicking. Back-links 'trick' Google into ranking you higher, which in turn 'tricks' others into clicking on your results more.
Point of order: I am not a professional web developer, and I don't sell or know personally anyone who sells any sort of SEO/SEM services.
If you lack a better definition, try "sponsored demand fulfillment". It isn't an industry that started with the internet.
With my post above I really just wanted to say that the broad term 'SEO' would be better divided based on the type of work done. SE Optimization is on-site. SE Marketing is off-site. I think the current definitions are too broad.
Why should the web dev have worked to get you a diverse range of keyword rich inlinks from authority sites? Oh that's right they shouldn't that's nothing to do with web dev. What is the top ranking factor (according to the SEOMoz crowd anyway)? "Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links"
Indeed the top 3 factors are all off page.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors?2009 - note it's a study of peoples opinions not a direct scientific study of the factors themselves.
I agree that inbound links (and many other off-page factors) contribute significantly to SERP rankings. I would just rank them under the SEM tasks.
> Just because something attracts a lot of links doesn’t mean it was linkbait. This is my personal site, where I talk
> about things I’m passionate about. That’s all I did here.
Shades of Bill Hicks there.
I like that bit, especially with the links to "fray" a couple, diverse anchors and then the big landing page button "buy or subscribe" on the Fray.com page. I don't believe he's naive enough to think this is not gaining him rankings for Fray.
From what I can see he's saying we don't need SEOs, we need webdesigners to do SEO and SEOs should do webdesign. I guess he likes one person to do everything for him rather than have experts do what they are expert at.
SEO is self selective, want to be top of Google? Google for "SEO", the top guy knows how to get the top position better than anyone else! For me in the UK that guy is below Wikipedia (surprise!) but has Wikipedia style site-spotlight links and so he's up to date too ... wonder what black hat stuff he's doing ...
By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.
You shouldn't have to hire someone to tell you what you can find out for free.
Also, you registered just to make this post?
I would suspect that a fair number of users have registered to make a post, so I'm not entirely certain what you're getting at. (Unless it's just curiosity, in which case I'll allow YorkSEO to speak for themselves).
Do companies hire you just to help build the number of links to their sites from other sites? How do you do this? Isn't that just plain old "marketing" at that point?
I'd label what you are referring to as more of online marketing to build a site/brand's presence and reputation, which is something that then influences a search engine ranking.
It shows up in hours on github because github has a lot of authority. It shows up high on google because I'm guessing you're searching for pretty long keyword strings. So if your ok with people finding your code when they search for "ruby gem for mysql connections" thats cool you don't need to hire an SEO professional. Hell you never need to hire an SEO professional. But if you want someone who knows more about it to help you with making sure Google and yahoo and bing can find your information then you can.
I really don't get the hatred on this site for SEO in general. I'm not an SEO professional myself but I know quite a few and now a days most people in the profession that are active and well known are all above board. They help you structure your information to make it easier to find and help you build relationships with other sources of traffic. Hardly evil stuff.
The goal of SEO, good SEO, is to build a site that caters to both users AND SEs. After all, users make you money, and ignoring one over the other is silly.
A classic example is AJAX. SEs can't pass it, and neither cana lot of users. A "good" designer may know this and buid a site to cater for these users, but how? Will it use forms (invisible to SEs) or an alternate structure?
Sure, a great web designer may "get" all this, but can you be sure? Given that SEs provide the largest, ongoing form of traffic online, why take the risk?
"I make something, like some small open-source software, put it on GitHub, and it shows up as the first result on Google within hours if you are searching specifically for something like it. I didn't have to hire a SEO."
Fallacy of dosage: ranking for a service with little competition is pretty easy. Capturing the whole raft of traffic available on a topic: difficult!!
Put down the coolaid.
Seriously -- Google is a business. They make money by selling the results of an algorithm. There's nothing magic or sacred about Google's algorithm. It makes mistakes. They blackball people. Even more critical, links are not a necessary and sufficient reason for an article to be the best thing I want to see. It's just a guessing game that works most of the time for most people.
If I had a cure for cancer that worked, and I put it on a website with a new domain tomorrow, and never SEO'd it, who do you think would come by?
Bupkis. Zero. Zilch. Nobody.
Good SEO is marketing. Marketing is a good thing. We need people to do things to bring to our attention stuff we might like. Google is not about to take the place of all marketing -- maybe that was a dream years ago but it's turned out to just be a fantasy on Google's part.
But if you also mentioned it to a few people (especially a doctor or cancer victim) then it would be featured in news articles, broadcast, tweeted etc. because it's a big deal. Soon your website would appear first in any relevant search.
That's the thing -- sure, perhaps all good ideas get great publicity and links simply because they're good ideas.
And perhaps all good business ideas make their owners lots of money simply because they're good ideas.
And perhaps all articles get referenced and linked based on their degree of usefulness to the world.
But in the real world, somebody has to go out and peddle ideas. That's marketing, sales, networking -- whatever you want to call it. Nowadays google is forcing us to go comment on other people's blogs, link-trade, and lord knows what else.
Good ideas simply don't always become popular simply because they're good and you tell a few people. It takes a lot more work than that.
Here's my take on the whole thing:
The www was getting along fine without all the bottom feeders and people 'gaming the system'. Now it's an arms race, and like in any good arms race the people that make the money are the ones selling to both sides.
Poor unsuspecting bystanders in the middle, who still believe that 'content is king' don't stand a chance amidst all that violence.
If all the so called-seos would lose their net access for the next two decades or so I think the quality of the net - and of search engine results - would go up dramatically.
The only reason that google was able to get their foot in the door in the first place was because altavista was too easy to game. Now it's an expert matter, so lots of money is to be made because traffic is 'king'.
Fortunately for me search engines are only a very small %age of my traffic. And no, that does not mean I could be doing a whole lot better if I hired you.
No, but increasing your number of search engine visitors would increase your revenue would it not?
One of the main tenets of SEO is that everybody will profit from traffic from search engines.
Very few people actually take the time to see if that statement holds true for their site.
The major keywords that my site is found on indicate that the users that come through that route are freeloaders, eating up bandwidth and never ever signing up for the premium package.
I can't blame them, I wouldn't either but that's a different story.
Targeting different keywords would be possible but it would require unethical behaviour wrt to building links and I don't go for that. My competitors do, I wish them best of luck.
The users that support the site are not in the hit-and-run category, they've found the site because their buddies are on it, and they stick together.
So, that's why more search engine traffic wouldn't help much, if at all. After all, if (increase-in-sales - (cost-of-acquisition + cost of freeloaders)) leaves you with a net loss then there isn't much point.
And if it would, then I probably would still find using SEO an unethical thing to do.
Maybe that's strange and maybe I should be going all-out to squeeze every last penny out of the internet but I prefer to get my users through references.
(Spoken as a former SEO who could prove his clients' ROI was well in excess of his substantial consulting fees.)
The problem is proving that any change in sales is due to SEO activity and nothing else - "you say our 100% up turn is due to your optimisations but my wife reckons it's my new toupe, now those cable ads are drawing them in droves to the website ...".
If your sector fell by 10% but you only fell 5% did they do a good job?
Part of the SEO on one site I worked on was to optimise to ensure it was better geo-targetted, ie decrease the visitor count from jurisdictions where that site is not valid. Why? Bandwidth but the a result is cleaner SERPs elsewhere. I guess I'm just pure evil?
I do things like name URLs for the content they contain, not /item?id=887743 but /why-not-to-hire-an-SEO - letting people know the content of a link before they click it; evil I guess?
Then there's optimising for speed to improve user retention, gzip enabling, trimming needless scripts and CSS, ... (WW looks like it could be leaner). I consider this part of "SEO".
It's not all bad you know.
And I reckon you could do better ... ;0)>
To be an expert at something normally requires that you specialize in that area. For a start-up you need to be a jack-of-all-trades but as a company grows it makes sense to have staff that specialize in different areas.
My background is in pay-per-click marketing and a lot of companies do very well managing their own Adwords campaigns. But for large companies or small companies that don't want to deal with learning a new skill, the cost of hiring/outsourcing to someone who specializes in that is justified by the time saved and the improved ROI. This applies to SEO as well but also to any area where the work involved has a significant impact on the business.
SEO is a bit more of a novelty, especially since the 'SEO professionals' aren't middlemen between you and Google.
I did all the web development things properly (certainly all the headings and what not - I even have RSS feeds and a Twitter bot, and of course sitemap and so on). It didn't help.
To get an impression (all in German): this is my site http://mondhandy.de and this is a typical search result from the Google top 10: http://www.bunkahle.com/astrolog/mocal.cgi
Edit: I even have a widget that people can include on their blogs, though admittedly it could be prettier.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors?2009 http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...
Yes I do SEO, no I don't work for SEOmoz.
I must admit to one mistake, though: at one time I entered the site in some web catalogs. I guess I'll try to get it out there again, which might become difficult.
It's clear to me that if you do SEO you will eventually need to be certified by a neutral body.
You will notice regardless of industry that it's only 5% of the bad actors (black hats) that cause 95% of the problems.
A certification process forces these guys to clean up their act or move on. Social network consulting anyone ;<)?
An seo is not a mechanic that fixes your car, an seo is a person that will lead lots of people to your store (so they say) because everybody else is also hiring hustlers (so they say).
They don't fix anything that was broken before they arrived on the scene, but once one person starts misbehaving in this way everybody else that's purely in it for the money will have to follow suit.
I do SEO consulting in addition to web design and development consulting. And most of what I do in this area is exactly that: fixing what's broken.
Almost all sites we encounter have one or more of the following problems:
- Content that is unreachable by crawlers
- Improperly used HTML tags, or lack of semantic tags in general
- Poorly designed, or non-existant, information architecture
- Lack of meta descriptions, alternate text, etc
- Keyword research and targeting
- Load time optimization
- Internal linking optimization
- Content creation
- Link building
By selling services to party 'A' you can temporarily upset the balance, which then immediately gives you a new customer in parties B through to infinity because they all would like to be in that 'top' spot.
So, the 'scarcity' of the positions on the first few pages for any given set of keywords are what drives that whole market with all of these clueless companies shelling out tons of money for something that only benefits the SEO and the temporary holders of those 10 slots.
I'ts like with lawyers, stoke the fight, everybody loses but the lawyers win.
It's a classical example of an arms race.
btw, the funniest thing you can do when an SEO approaches you is ask them if they have a website, then type 'SEO services' in to google and see if they come up in the first 10 results, if not (and that's a 99% chance) enjoy hearing them squirming to explain why not.
First, 'SEO services' isn't self-evidently the most important keyword phrase in the industry. Why pick that one? That's just a gotcha.
Second, SEO is extremely competitive. The agencies on the first page for high profile SEO-related keyword phrases charge at least several hundreds of dollars per hour in consulting fees. Most businesses can't afford that.
Third, incumbency is a huge advantage for placement in competitive SERPs, both by itself and because it implies the accumulation of important ranking factors you can't just gin up at a moment's notice. (Don't read too much into that though. There are plenty of opportunities for less competitive phrases and a long campaign can build up to more competitive terms.)
Because it is the set of keywords that any SEO would like to be found under.
> Second, SEO is extremely competitive.
ANY business is extremely competitive, not just SEO, why do you think SEO is some kind of magical special case ?
> Third, incumbency is a huge advantage for placement in competitive SERPs, both by itself and because it implies the accumulation of important ranking factors you can't just gin up at a moment's notice.
That we agree on for the most part. I've seen relative newcomers do some amazing stuff, without SEO simply by getting their users energized. There isn't any SEO strategy that will work as well for you as a couple of hundred thousand uses creating buzz for you.
> There are plenty of opportunities for less competitive phrases
That's the low hanging fruit though.
> a long campaign can build up to more competitive terms.
And that is where we agree again, but most SEOs are people making very large promises that they find hard to fulfill. The whole industry has an extremely bad reputation because of this, and it's not just a 'few bad apples' either.
I'm sure there are 'good' SEOs, just like there are 'good' lawyers, but for the most part I wouldn't want to be associated with any of that stuff.
Search engines are for the most part doing everything they can to look at the web through an SEO neutral lens.
Fixing stuff that is obviously broken is fine with me, but don't get me started on 'link building'.
Gaming the system is where I draw the line and there isn't an SEO out there that wouldn't game the system given half a chance.
To take your lawyer analogy further consider this: you could say hiring a lawyer is gaming the system (i.e., being found innocent when you are in fact guilty). Or you could say that hiring a lawyer is ensuring that your case is presented as well as possible, allowing it to succeed or fail on its own merit.
Similarly, you probably view SEO as gaming the system, whereas I view it as ensuring that your content is presented in the best way possible.
Either way, your issue is with the Google/the court, not with the SEOs/lawyers or their clients/defendants.
btw, the funniest thing you can do when an SEO approaches you is ask them if they have a website, then type 'SEO services' in to google and see if they come up in the first 10 results, if not (and that's a 99% chance) enjoy hearing them squirming to explain why not.
Sure, and if a company calls to sell you marketing services and you've never heard of them, you should ask why. And if a company wants to make you a website and their's looks shitty, you probably don't want to hire them either.
If you're bringing in SEO as a band-aid until you can hire an honest to god full time developer/designer or build up a real web department, or whatever, that's probably okay as long as you're admitting that.
If you're bringing in an SEO guy to do nothing but turd-polish, and you're calling it "optimization," something's wrong, and from experience and conversations I've had about SEO with friends, unwilling-to-admit-that-we're-polishing-a-turd seems to be an extremely popular reason to bring in SEO guys.
now i'm a web analyst at a large retail site and at least 1/8 of orders is directly attributed to natural search traffic on a last touch and many more on a less direct attribution window.
if you don't think natural search is a marketing channel that needs attention, great- it'll leave more opportunity for the the rest of us.
Is it just me, but when I did a google search for 'SEO', it seems that his position is ~40...