SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part V. The Part of Tens

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In this part …

Destroying myths

Keeping current

Taking care of tips

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Chapter 22. Ten-Plus Myths and Mistakes

In This Chapter

Understanding common mistakes made by site developers

Deconstructing harmful myths

Knowing the problems that hurt your search engine rank

A lot of confusion exists in the search engine world — a lot of myths and a lot of mistakes. In this chapter, I quickly run through a few of the ideas and omissions that can hurt your search engine positions.

Myth: It’s All about Meta Tags and Submissions

This is the most pervasive and harmful myth of all, held by many Web designers and developers. All you need, many believe, is to code your pages with the right meta tags — KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION, and things like REVISIT-AFTER and CLASSIFICATION — and then submit your site to the search engines. I know Web designers who tell their clients that they’ll “handle” search engine optimization and then follow nothing more than this procedure.

It’s completely wrong for various reasons. Most meta tags aren’t particularly important (see Chapter 7), if they’re even used by search engines at all. Without keywords in the page content, search engines won’t index what you need them to index. (See Chapter 7.) Submitting to search engines doesn’t mean they’ll index your pages. (See Chapter 13.) Moreover, what about links? (See Chapters 16 through 18.)

Myth: Web Designers and Developers Understand Search Engines

I’m a geek. I’ve worked in software development for over 30 years. I still work closely with software developers (these days, mostly Web-software developers) and Web designers; I build Web sites for my clients (so I work with developers and designers on these sites); my friends are developers and designers, and I’m telling you now that most developers and designers do not understand search engines to any great degree.

Most Web-development companies these days tell their clients that they know how to handle search engines, and even that they’re experts. In most cases, that’s simply not true — no more than it’s true that I’m an expert in neurosurgery. This makes it very hard for business owners when they hire a Web development team, of course, though I hope this book will help. It will give you an idea of the sorts of questions you should ask your developers so that you can figure out whether they really do understand search engine requirements (see also the Web Extra from Part IV,How to Pick an SEO Firm (Without Getting Burned!).

In addition, many Web developers don’t enjoy working with search marketing experts. They think that all search engine experts want is to make the site ugly or remove the dynamism. This is furthest from the truth, and Web developers who refuse to work with SEO experts may just be defensive about their lack of knowledge.

Myth: Multiple Submissions Improve Your Search Position

This is perhaps one of the biggest scams in the SEO world; the “submission” service, a promise to “submit” your Web site to hundreds, nay, thousands of search engines.

As far as the major search engines go, multiple submissions, even automated submissions, don’t help. Someone recently told me that he was sure it did help because his position improved in, for instance, the Open Directory Project when he frequently resubmitted. This is completely wrong — in the case of the Open Directory Project, there’s no way it could possibly help, because all entries have to be reviewed by a human editor, and submitting multiple times is more likely to annoy the editor rather than convince him to let you in! (On the other hand, it’s very hard to get into the Open Directory Project these days, so submitting to several, appropriate, categories may help.)

Submitting to search engines — requesting that they index your pages — often doesn’t get your page indexed anyway. Far more important is a link campaign to get plenty of links to your site (see Chapters 16 through 18). And you should definitely be working with XML sitemaps (seeChapter 13).

Some of these multiple-submission services don’t even submit where they claim to submit; on a number of occasions, I’ve reviewed the “here’s where we submit your site to” lists for some of these services and found out-of-business search engines included.

Mistake: You Don’t Know Your Keywords

This is also a major problem: The vast majority of Web sites are created without the site owners or developers really knowing what keywords are important. (That’s okay, perhaps, because most sites are built without any idea of using keywords in the content anyway.) At best, the keywords have been guessed. At worst — the majority of the cases — nobody’s thought of the keywords at all.

Don’t guess at your keywords. Do a proper keyword analysis. (See Chapter 6.) I can almost guarantee that two things will happen. You’ll find that some of your guesses were wrong — people aren’t often using some of the phrases you thought would be common. You’ll also discover very important phrases you had no idea about.

Just recently, I talked with a company that ranked really well for the keywords it was interested in. The only problem was that there was another group of keywords the company simply hadn’t considered, which were almost as important as the ones it had — and for this second group of keywords, it didn’t rank at all. So it doesn’t matter how well you play the SEO game — if you didn’t consider keywords, you might as well not bother.

Mistake: Too Many Pages with Database Parameters and Session IDs

This is a surprisingly common problem. Many, many sites (in particular, sites built by big companies with large development teams) are created with long, complicated URLs containing database parameters or session IDs. (See Chapter 9.)

My favorite example used to be CarToys.com, a large chain of electronics stores. This site had thousands of products but fewer than 100 pages indexed by Google, and most of those were Adobe Acrobat files, pop-up ads (“Free Shipping!”), or links to dynamic pages that wouldn’t appear when a searcher clicked a link in the search results. Luckily for CarToys.com, someone at the company figured it all out, fixed the problem, and Google then picked up tens of thousands of pages.

The chance that your site won’t get indexed if you have clunky URLs is far lower today than it was in the past. However, there’s still a problem. Every URL is a keywording opportunity, a location that search engines give lots of weight to when ranking pages; so if you don’t have keywords in your URLs, your site is missing out on a huge opportunity.

Mistake: Building the Site and Then Bringing in the SEO Expert

Most companies approach search engine optimization as an afterthought. They build their Web site and then think, “Right, time to get people to the site.” You really shouldn’t begin a site until you have considered all the different ways you’re going to create traffic to the site. It’s like starting to build a road without knowing where it needs to go; if you’re not careful, you’ll get halfway there and realize “there” is in another direction.

In particular, though, you shouldn’t start building a Web site without an understanding of search engines. Most major Web sites these days are built by teams of developers who have little understanding of search engine issues. These sites are launched and then someone decides to hire a search engine consultant. And the search engine consultant discovers all sorts of unnecessary problems. Good business for the consultant; expensive fixes for the site owner.

Myth: $25 Can Get Your Site a #1 Position

You hear a lot of background noise in the search engine business from companies claiming to be able to get your site into thousands of search engines and rank your site well for $25 a month… . Or a $50 flat fee … or $75 a month … or whatever.

The truth is that it’s more complicated than that, and everyone I’ve spoken to who has used such services has been very disappointed. They often don’t get into the major search engines at all, and even if they get included in the index, they don’t rank well. Search engine ranking is sometimes very easy — but other times it’s complicated, time consuming, and tedious. Most of the offers streaming into your Inbox in spam e-mail messages or displayed in banner ads on the Web aren’t going to work.

Myth: Google Partners Get You #1 Positions

If you receive a spam e-mail or even a telephone call telling you that the sender has a “special arrangement” with Google and can get you a #1 position within hours or days, delete it; it’s nonsense — a scam. It’s true that you can buy a top position on Google through its AdWords PPC (Pay Per Click) program, though you’ll be bidding against your competitors. In fact, that’s what most of these companies do; they quickly set up PPC campaigns for you, though that’s generally not clear from their sales pitch. And, while PPC isn’t the subject of this book, I’ll just say that the campaigns set up by these companies are likely to be slipshod attempts to merely show you top positions, without regard to whether the advertising campaign will actually bring you business.

Mistake: You Don’t Have Pages Optimized for Specific Keywords

Have you built pages optimized for your most important keywords? I spoke recently with a firm that ranked pretty well — #5 in the search results — for his most desired keyword phrase, but not well enough (obviously, the site owner wanted #1).

The funny thing was that he was doing very well considering the fact that he didn’t have a single page optimized for the keyword phrase he desired. Sure, he had pages close, pages that had the individual words in the keyword phrase scattered throughout the page, but not a single page that was fully optimized for the phrase.

Therefore, think about your most important phrases. Do you have pages fully optimized — that is, you have the phrase at the beginning of the <TITLE> tag, at the beginning of the DESCRIPTION tag, in <H1> tags, scattered throughout the page, and so on — for all these phrases? If not, maybe you don’t deserve the #1 spot!

Mistake: Your Pages Are Empty

This one is a huge problem for many companies; the pages have nothing much for search engines to index. In some cases, the pages have little or no text that a search engine can read because the words on the page are embedded into images. In other cases, the words may be real text but are very few and aren’t the right keywords. This is a particular problem for many e-commerce sites, which often just have a short paragraph of information for each product. I encourage clients to find ways to bulk up their pages with more product information, which provides more opportunity for useful keywords in the content pages.

Remember, search engines like — need — content. To a search engine, content means text that it can read and index. Whenever you provide text to a search engine, it should do the most for you — help you to be found in the search results. And the more content, the better.

Myth: Pay Per Click Is Where It’s At

Pay Per Click (PPC; the small “sponsored” ads you see at the top of the search-results pages) can be a very important part of a Web site’s marketing strategy. It’s reliable, predictable, and relatively easy to work with. But it’s not the only thing you should be doing. In fact, many companies cannot use PPC because the clicks are too expensive for their particular business model (and click prices are likely to keep rising as search marketing continues to be the hot Internet marketing topic).

The growth in PPC has been partly caused by the lack of search engine optimization knowledge. Companies build a site without thinking about search engines and then don’t hire professional expertise to help them get search engine traffic, so they fall back on PPC. Many companies are now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on PPC each month; they could complement their PPC campaigns with natural search engine traffic for a small fraction of that cost.

The wonderful thing about PPC advertising and SEO is that the two work hand in hand. If you want to know whether a word is important enough to optimize, get a hundred clicks from your favorite search engine through PPC and look at the conversion rates and the return on investment (ROI). Want to expand your PPC keyword list? No problem; look at the words that people are already using to find you as a baseline and grow your list from these words. (For example, if they are using rodent racing to find you, buy ads triggered by the words mouse rodent racing, rat rodent racing, and so on.) Many companies are using PPC profitably; just don’t assume it’s the only way to go.

Many companies actually use PPC and SEO in combination. One client of mine has high organic-search positions, yet still buys PPC positions. Overall, he gets more business than he would if he did only one or the other.

Mistake: Ignoring Site Usability and Aesthetics

The changes implemented in Google’s Panda update introduced a totally new concept to search marketing. Pre-2011, the major search engines attempted to match search queries with the best page based on page content; essentially the question was, “Does the content in Page A match the search query better than the content in Page B?” With Panda, however, Google moved to the next step and tried to answer the question, “Even if the content is a perfect match, will the searcher like this page?”

In other words, a page that is a perfect match as far as the content of the page goes may not be presented to the searcher because of things that Google believes the searcher won’t like once arriving at the page — things like too many ads near the top of the page. It’s not just Google, either; Bing introduced a similar concept to the Panda update called (more prosaically), Content Quality, which looks at Web pages and asks the questions “Is the content useful and sufficiently detailed,” and “Is the content well-presented and easy to find.”

From the perspective of conversions — converting visitors to customers — usability and aesthetics have always been important. Now, and more so in the future, they are also relevant to reaching visitors, because the search engines are going to pre-approve sites, rather like sending your butler to visit a hotel before you deign to stay there. (You do have a butler, don’t you?)

Mistake: Believing Everything You Read

Just because something’s “in print” — or on a Web site — doesn’t mean it’s true! I see all sorts of incorrect information on this subject all the time. This field is full of misinformation, ambiguousness, and outright nonsense. I often hear my clients say, “Well, I read x the other day,” and I have to convince them that x is quite simply wrong. It’s hard to do, though, because so many people think that if someone said something in a forum, or on a blog, or even in a book on SEO, it must be true. Let skepticism be your byword.

When I’m told that something is undoubtedly true, I want to see the evidence. Did Google say it, for instance? If not, and if it doesn’t seem to make sense, then it’s probably not true.

I’ll sometimes check for the veracity of an SEO claim by searching for the concept along with the words matt cutts. Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s webspam team, and is the de facto liaison with the SEO world. He maintains a blog, has published numerous videos (seeChapter 23), and is often interviewed; if I want to get to the truth of a particular SEO claim, I try to find out what Matt has said about the subject. (However, be careful when you read that “Matt Cutts” said something; often, when I trace a claim back to the original Matt Cutts statement, it’s very different.)