The Art of Gentle Optimization
I’ve never believed in crowding the envelope with optimization. Partly because to do so costs my clients more, and requires close monitoring, and always runs the risk that you’ll be the next victim of the trap of changing rules.
So I’ve always been a fan of common sense, and logical optimization strategies. They rely on content first, and on appealing to people first.
Lately, the philosophy has proven itself to be as valuable and effective as I have always thought. I mean, my own sites did well, and most sites that I build do well. But recently I’ve had the chance to optimize some sites that had never been optimized, and to re-optimize sites that had been overoptimized and penalized. The results are now showing, and they are good.
It has been a reinforcement of the rule that if it doesn’t sound natural, don’t do it! All we did on the sites we reoptimized, was to make the word usage natural. The results were dramatic, and very good.
Knowing how far to push it isn’t an issue when you optimize for people. You just focus on the real goal, which is to attract and invite people to enjoy the site, and the optimization rules become quite clear.
Living Without Google
The changing arena of SEO begs some questions. I don’t know how valid they are at this point, but I think they are ones that if we are not asking ourselves now, we should be. Because while the answers may not be relevant today, they may be soon, and some forethought may be to advantage.
If you were banned tomorrow, would your website survive?
As Google gets harder and harder to compete within, you must also ask the question, is Google optimization always going to be the most important thing for a microbusiness?
Are there businesses now, that might actually do better optimizing for everything else, and kissing Google goodbye?
Is 1% of 50% better than 50% of 10%? In other words, if you can only get 1% or less of the traffic from a particular search on Google, and Google gets 50% of the total traffic for that term, is it wise to go after that 1% to the exclusion of all else (which some gurus do), or is it better to let that 1% go and optimize for the 50% of the traffic you could get from another search engine (or two) which get 10% of the total traffic? In some SEO issues, you DO have to make that choice (not in all), and I think that many people just ASSUME Google is going to deliver more, without factoring in competition and ease of optimization.
These are not things I am recommending, only suggesting that we ought to be thinking about them. Instead of making assumptions based on our perceptions of a year or two ago, we ought to be taking a long hard look at where Google is going, at the fact that most of the competition focuses on Google exclusively, and on the fact that Google is slowly losing ground in the American markets at least. It begs some reassessment, and a watchful eye.
Google may recover. They may decide to play by rules that at least have common sense behind them, and they may go back to a more open search engine marketing philosophy. But I doubt the second two will happen – companies rarely go backward once they start down the corporate big-brother road. If you believe, like I do, that their chances of recovery are tied directly to the second two, you may also doubt that they WILL recover their market share in the US search markets.
It is worth thinking about implications – and alternate strategies, and ways to gain a balance between new businesses and old that does not depend on Google.
The Object of Obsession
SEO can drive you nuts. It is an industry of extremes in theory, and of judgment calls that have no set rules. You do your best to devise common sense strategies based on what you know, balanced with your philosophy of good business and your concept of fair play and ethics.
Somewhere, there is a line. Step over it, and you crash. Avoid it too much, and you can’t compete.
Determining that line, is what can drive you nuts. You can end up obsessing and second guessing, and chasing yourself in circles.
Testing and comparing and analysis gets you only so far with SEO. Beyond that, you are into the realm of interpolation. The educated guess.
An educated guess, is, none-the-less, a guess. And if you are not careful, and if you do not have confidence in your own judgment, you can topple into the realm of second guess. Fine to adjust when evidence suggests it is prudent. Not fine to waffle in a morass of indecision that paralyzes thought.
Balance is the only answer. And it is an answer you have to find for yourself.
Tired of Writing About SEO
I’m tired of it… I’m tired of the controversy, I’m tired of explaining the same things over and over, and I’m tired of being handed a bunch of incomplete information and being expected to draw a useful conclusion from it. I’m tired of clients who have been harmed by others – I’m not tired of the CLIENTS, just made sick by the situations that harm them.
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.
A Joke of a Quiz
Took the SEO Quiz at a site that shall remain nameless. I was not impressed by it, in the least.
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…
Optimizing for Conversions
Traffic isn’t enough. It has to be GOOD traffic.
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.
SEO and Private Domain Registration
Another one of those things that is whispered in corners online… can Private Registration affect search engine ranking?
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.
Under Construction, or Coming Soon
I’ve had more clients that have suggested that we put up an “under construction” notice! I can’t blame them, most of them do not realize that they have not seen a notice like that on a website for at least three years. It is a logical thought – my site isn’t finished, shouldn’t I warn people that I’m in the progress of creating it, that there is more coming?
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.
Are Metatags Dead?
It is late, we have an IT Summit to attend tomorrow, and the last thing I feel like writing about are MetaTags… But we have a lot more stuff coming up, so I really have to get ahead on some blog posts.
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.
SEO Vandalism and the Google Penalty
We are still battling it. Our best information tells us that after we complete the work of cleaning up every single page in the site, that it will take a minimum of 6 weeks for the penalty to be lifted by Google, IF they do so without the site owner having to submit a personal request for them to do so. It could take much longer.
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.