I think part of it is because of the recent rather rapid and catastrophic changes in SEO. I don’t think that many gurus have caught on that there has been a fundamental shift in the assumptions that are safe to operate within. They are seeing the recent changes as more minor changes in a long line of minor changes. But they aren’t that at all. They change the rules in a fundamental way. A way that begins to really tie the hands of people who are responsible for helping clients get good traffic to their websites.

Part of it is that I have four blogs. This one is a dominant one - topics come up regularly for it. I have a list of them, but often by the time I get to writing the topic, I’m tired of it. I’ve already had to explain it elsewhere, and explaining it one more time irritates. I also have to produce SEO pages for our trade association site - it is hard to cover the topics without repeating.

But I also know that I am going to regularly feel like this. When you blog, sometimes you force yourself to write even when you don’t exactly feel like it. That is part of the price of blogging. Churning out articles at a rate of a dozen or more a day is purely exhausting. But that is what my marketing and my clients’ marketing demands. I do it because it is part of what is required. And usually, I get excited about it again. But I wouldn’t mind once in a while if someone else took over for a day or two, so I could take a break. I suppose if they did, I’d get lazy though!

It really is the nature of blogging. And the nature of a demanding topic like SEO. The one thing that is sure though, is that in this arena, there will never be a time when there is nothing to talk about.

The quiz was designed so that you could not leave an answer blank - clicking an answer moved it to the next question. Fine with me, I didn’t want to leave anything unanswered. It apparently did. Four of my correct answers were marked as blank, and therefore wrong. One, I might excuse. Four was a bit much.

Six of their “correct” answers were anywhere between 2 months, and 2 YEARS out of date. I don’t know if they continue to perpetuate myths about SEO in order to keep people thinking they need the service to “fix” problems which are no longer an issue, or whether they are just inconsistent about keeping their site up to date. I’ve heard a complaint from another individual about this also.

About 10 of their questions were not SEO knowledge. They had nothing to do with a pro’s ability to optimize a page, they were irrelevant trivia. Just because they had to do with search engines or SEO technology does not mean they were relevant to skill.

I could ace the test if I took it again. But I’d be dishonest if I did - make myself look like an expert to meet someone’s incorrect standard? No thanks.

We may just make our own SEO quiz…

Often, after an optimization, traffic can actually drop. But if conversions rise, then the optimization was on target.

If optimization occurs though, and there is no increase in conversions, or worse, a drop in conversions, then the optimization was not done correctly.

See, correct optimization has less to do with how well the keywords are used, or where they are used, or how much. It has to do with selecting keywords to begin with which are used by the people who want to BUY the product or service. And that isn’t something that comes from keyword research – it is part reasoning, part understanding the available data. If no data is readily available for analysis, then it may come down to experience and intelligence of the person doing the optimization. In the MicroBusiness arena, prior data or extensive research may not be an option.

You’ll get a clue after about a month. Two months should provide ample evidence to know whether you are on track or not.

Generally, optimization can be tweaked, and any harm undone quickly. The only time that is not true is when you have been slapped by Google. And generally, you will see a rise in traffic before you see a drop if that happens. It may or may not be good traffic though.

The good stuff will lead to an increase in conversions. Optimization, when done right, helps you earn more money. If it does not, then it must be adjusted until it does. That can take some experimentation, especially on a MicroBusiness budget, but after the initial optimization, you should be able to start moving in a positive direction. Never let someone persuade you that you have to wait six months or a year ot see improvements – while it is true it can take that much time to see what the full results may be, you’ll get a clue long before.

If improvements are not visible within 3-4 months, find another pro.

This is another “who knows” issue, because there is a great deal of controversy, and Google isn’t saying either way.

It is generally accepted that Google looks at Whois information to determine ownership of domains, to influence how they rank interlinked sites, or a bevy of sites that shows up overnight on a single topic, etc.

So, the SEO manipulators said, let’s use PRIVATE registration to cloak the real ownership. Then let’s scatter them across a bunch of webhosts.

Google WOULD try to put a lid on that. Someone suggested recently that Private domain registration could negatively affect SEO – because it is another tactic that has been abused. And as we know, if something is abused, the door gets shut on it. So it is not illogical to assume that it might be a tick against you. Maybe a very tiny one – maybe one that only influences the site if there are other elements where Google has reason to believe that the Private registration is a cloak for excessive interlinking.

Personally, I see no reason for Private registration. It makes my customers uneasy, and doesn’t really help me anyway. There are other ways to get the same advantages – but I’ve always found that transparency is a better enhancement to business than concealment anyway.

I’d not worry about it though, unless you have a large number of sites that you cross link, or unless you are in a business arena that is inhabited by a large number of scammers or internet marketers.

No. You should not.

Not online, anyway. It isn’t as though someone might forget a hardhad or trip into a hole if they wander around and happen to stumble onto your site. In fact, if you do your job right, they’ll see what you have, and never see a sign of the new stuff until it is there – unless of course you have a sidebar announcement of an impending launch date of a new product line, or similar thing that you want to build up to, and even then, NO “under construction” pages!

Pages like that make you look unprepared. They make you look LESS professional, not more. And they don’t do any good for SEO either. I don’t know that they actually HURT, but I’d bet they do, because a search engine is perfectly able to tell when a page has nothing on it but a huge “coming soon” notice.  So they not only don’t bother indexing the page, it is conceivable that it might affect the indexing frequency or relevance of the rest of your site. It is a potential “influential factor”. They are looking for content rich sites, not space holders.

Whether it hurts SEO or not, it does for certain look bad to your customers, and influences whether they will return or not. If a page is not ready for people, don’t show it.

The title is just a question I spied online recently. Cannot remember where. One source said they were certain metatags had no value anymore, and that their sites did better without them.

I’ve noticed for a long time that sites that we forget the metatags on (hey it happens), don’t really do any better after adding them. But I’d not decide to stop using them yet, simply because SEO is incredibly complex to measure.

No two sites are equal. It is the nature of search engine indexing and rating that they CANNOT be identical. So they are always different – different content, different tags, different page coding, different structure, different topical focus, etc. And it would be VERY hard to pinpoint any kind of “doing better” to a lack of metatags, when there are so many factors which can influence performance between two sites.

I don’t sweat the tags anymore. We pay more attention to strategic content, title tags, and intelligent alt tags. Meta tags are just something you do – but it isn’t where I concentrate my effort. Usually, if you’ve done those other things right, you already have the keyword list anyway, and you have enough other text that whipping out a logical description tag isn’t very time consuming.

The one thing I can say for certain is, do not look at metatags as the first line of work for SEO. But then, we always have said that you create good content first, and a good title tag second, and that both of those should be included in a site that is structured well. Those tactics get you further than any degree of metatag optimization, because they are the essence of the website.

It is rather sad. The site owner didn’t do anything wrong. They just hired the wrong person. We call them an “SEO Vandal”. Because what they did was the electronic equivalent of vandalism. The site was destroyed by removal of all meaningful content, and the content was replaced by keyword strings, commas and all. One unintelligent act on the part of someone who had been hired to help, and now the site owner is paying for it in having to pay again to have the site redone, and in lost business.

If your site is penalized, you cannot just bring it back to where it was. You have to clean it until it squeaks. It seems that Google will ignore a site until it raises a red flag – even borderline things will be ignored until enough of them mount up, or until something really over the line occurs. If they slap it, it goes down hard. It won’t be restored to grace just by making a gesture. The whole thing has to be polished with no signs of anything borderline.

That is really hard to do. Especially in the current equivocal and changing SEO environment. When you have to get a penalty removed though, the best approach is a highly conservative one.

It means using words less aggressively than you might otherwise. It means making every single thing on the page not only completely natural, but making sure that there is no reason why anyone would ever consider that it was the least bit manipulative.

Whatever the rules usually are about how many keywords to use, set them a little lower. Whatever the standards typically are about optimization, reign them in a notch.

It is a hard thing to do. Especially for someone trained to push business to the limits to get all out of it that you can. But it is the best option.

It is far better to regain part of the lost ground than none of it. Only time can bring the whole back, and it has to happen through conservative action, and a great deal of patience.

Not only are such sites deadly to a business because they lack personality, they also are deadly to SEO, for a number of reasons.

1. They are likely to use Flash and heavy JavaScript in the site template. They do this to look impressive, but in fact, it is usually NOT the most efficient way to achieve the impact needed, and so much is used that the code is bloated and cumbersome for people and search engines to utilize. Search engines may time out before they even get to the content.
2. The templates are identical, from one site to another. Usually, the only thing that changes is the individual page content, and the images in the template (still shared by many sites). Search engines do pay attention to that, but ONLY if they get through the code to the actual content.
3. You cannot control the code of the page at all, or any template elements. If it is inefficient, too bad.
4. Once you build in one, you cannot move it. If you wish to move it into something more SEO friendly, you will have to rebuild it – and your individual page URLs will likely change in the process. Regaining ground lost from that can take some time.
5. Most have a way to put in metatags, or control alt-tags. But those are not the most important parts of page coding.
6. Many times, people will pay a monthly fee for this kind of site, taken in by the illusion that “it is so easy anyone can do it”, and will end up with an ineffective site, and never know why. For the same money, they could have got a much better site, that actually worked to help build their business.

The silly thing is, typically a good quality site costs the same, or only a very little more. And the difference in performance pays for the difference in price, many times over.

I wish there were a simple solution. But every one that we have seen has been a disappointment, and as new clients come to us, asking for help in getting their site functioning, this impression has been reinforced over and over, and it is clear that when a site that is built in this kind of system does not work, half of the blame falls squarely on the system itself.

It seems though, that search engines pay attention to it when they want, and ignore it otherwise. So as a protection, which it was originally intended as, it is practically useless. Google has thought of another use though.

They say you should use it on all links going off your site that are irrelevant (though they can’t tell you just what that means), or which were paid for (even though they don’t know what THAT means either), or which they feel are not otherwise suitable (good luck getting them to define what that is).

Now, the problem here, in my judgement, is that Google has dictated that people must DO something that is not intuitive, in order to not be punished for not having done it. The average person has no clue what a “nofollow” tag is, or how to use it. And there are a lot of average people out there building websites.

Google didn’t used to punish people for not knowing the rules. They just rewarded them if they DID know them. A person of integrity, with no intent to deceive, would not be caught in a trap of SEO rules they knew nothing about and accidentally violated. That has flipped though. Now, everything is fair game in the world of Google roulette.

Nofollow tags are just another in a long line of fussy, inconsistent, and illogical recommendations that Google has released. It has become worse and worse in the last year. Not only do you have to act against human nature, according to a set of very fussy rules, it appears that Google expects people to be gamblers or mind readers. There are those who will disagree with me, but some of those who would have disagreed last year have found themselves on the receiving end of the Google stick, and no longer think that it only takes intelligence and integrity to succeed in the SEO world.

There are still things we do to pages to make them better. And we still keep the people first rule in mind. But I can no longer say with any confidence that if you just try to see that your pages are accurately indexed that you won’t be caught out. Google has left logic behind, and has crossed the line into unreasonable dictation and autocracy. Their rules, which once made sense, no longer do.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I have never been in favor of manipulative tactics, and never will. But I am in favor of smart strategies where people can learn to do things in a way that helps their business grow on a budget – and I’m in favor of rules that do not reward people on the basis of money, instead of on the basis of merit.

So recently, with some of the things Google is saying, one has to wonder just what their goal is. And just what sort of intellectual schizophrenia is causing them to talk themselves in circles trying to explain and justify their policies! It is clear that they really have no idea of what “good” linking really is, or how to define it as opposed to “bad” linking.

Too many links is bad. How many is too many? Maybe more than 100 a month. Maybe more than that, maybe less.

Paid links are bad. Only what is a paid link? Paid directories, paid links on private sites, any link you gave something of value for, including template links, and any other kind of viral links, presumably, because, after all, where is the difference between a template link and an article byline link? Someone liked your work – they picked it up, and helped you promote your site in return. Fair, and certainly a recommendation since they’d not republish bad work. Only Google doesn’t think so.

Irrelevant links are bad. But what is irrelevant? Who is to judge that? Computers are notoriously bad at language use, and even worse when it comes to human nature. Is a homeschool link on a work at home site irrelevant? The topics do not match! But ask any homeschooling work at home mom and she’ll tell you they are very relevant!

Cross linking is bad – though I cannot see why it should be. It is natural that anyone who owns more than one site would want to leverage the marketing of one to benefit the other. To NOT do so is bad business. So Google is punishing people for being wise business owners? Sure, it can be abused – when you have 50 trashy sites with no content interlinked, that’s bad cross linking. But when you have 20 sites, each filled with high quality, custom written content, with topics that overlap, where is the abuse?

Reciprocal links are devalued. If the sites are high quality, and the links coming off them are similarly high quality, they should not be. Links are supposed to be a recommendation – a trade is a fair recommendation for a quality site. Good sites don’t link to bad ones. That means the link passed inspection and was worth recommending. And that is bad, why?

Good quality links still count. Though I don’t know what that could be… After you eliminate viral linking, link trades, directory links, cross links, anything Google’s computers think is not an exact match, and put a cap on how many you can build each month, then throw in all of the fussy and picky rules about how pages can be optimized now, and what it means is this:

A new site has no tools with which to promote itself other than paying a high price for traffic. Little sites cannot begin to catch up with the competition unless they have a high budget – which means, effectively, that they cannot hope to compete, because most have limited funds.

Google gave the impression that they were about accurate indexing of the web. That what they cared most about in a site was whether it added to the substance of the web. We now know, they only said that as long as saying it added to the substance of their bank accounts. In a shakier economy, when the easy ad dollars are gone, Google has changed from the “Equalizer” to the “Terminator”.

The web was the one place where someone could get ahead by sheer hard work and by a good idea and good ethics. If you did it right, and worked it smart, you could compete against anyone because your idea was good and your execution of it was intelligent.

No more. Google has decided that the dollar should rule. If you have a good idea, and a low budget, linkbuilding is now such a minefield of inconsistencies that you’ll need a pro to optimize your site just to have a fighting chance and getting found.