Hating on SEO

Today I’m hating on SEO. For those of you that are not aware, SEO stands for ’search engine optimization’.

In short it’s the practice of optimizing your website so that it ranks high in search engine results. There are normally two main focuses – the actual content itself and technical optimization.

Let’s face it; search engine traffic is a BIG DEAL. Just one quick look at the web stats for one of my sites shows that Google is responsible for 68% of my visits in the last 30 days. Mind blowing really…

So it’s easy to see how we’ve become obsessed with SEO. Get it wrong and your site could just be one of a billion floating around in internet ghost town. Get it right and it can blow up your site and translate into significant revenue (depending on what type of site you run).

So why am I hating on SEO you ask?

Firstly, because people just seem to have become utterly obsessed with it. They sit there hammering out key word rich content and building incoming links on a daily basis and seem to launch a new website or blog every week. If only they spared a thought for the poor souls that have to read this nonsense?

And of course, most are too lazy to do it themselves, so they just farm it out to an SEO company promising top page results.

The sad thing is that because there are so many SEO cowboys out there, there’s a good chance that they will do something silly (duplicate content, dodgy code or using suspect software to short cut work) and this will actually result in one of the important search engines penalizing/blacklisting your site.

The end result? Uninteresting, inaccurate content, poor quality incoming links, a website which normally looks a bit odd to the reader (because it has been optimized for the search engines over the reader) and a good chance you may get blacklisted.

EPIC fail.

Now to be fair, those obsessed with SEO normally do build higher levels of visits to their site. So, it’s all good right?

Maybe not….

What’s the point in just having more visits if it’s just numbers in your web stats? Surely you want people to actually find your website content useful and maybe even enjoy it? Surely you want to be able trigger some type of call to action or to be able monetize your audience in some way?

This is what people forget. Purely building more visits is useless if when people go to your site, they quickly leave when they realize it’s a bit…. eh…

The other factor in all of this is when people get so obsessed with SEO, they normally put more time and energy into it and then neglect the actual content, service or product they want to offer and if you don’t have this, you’re dead anyway.

Ok, so I’ve hated/ranted enough, so in my bid to give you some good, useful content – here are my top tips for what counts in SEO land. This stuff can get fairly in depth, so I am keeping it pretty short on purpose (I have a day job too!), if you have any questions about it, just ask in the comments.

1. Title Tags and Descriptions

First of all, get your titles and descriptions in good shape (these actually reside in the code of the page). The reason these are important is because when you do a Google search this is what is displayed to the user and ultimately plays a big part in their decision to click through to your site or not.

Here is an example:

Don’t get all bent out of shape trying to craft the most perfect titles and descriptions, just keep them meaningful (they should be an accurate representation to the content), key word rich and concise.

I normally go for the following format for the title tag:

Page Title | Site name

So using the picture above as the example, an article on my Wannabebig site called ‘Eating Optimally for Massive Size and Strength’ would be:

Eating Optimally for Massive Size and Strength | Wannabebig

And my description is normally a short sentence which helps sell the article and summarizes what the content is about. So, for the ‘ Eating Optimally for Massive Size and Strength’ article it looks like this:

If you can control daily insulin releases by eating the right foods at the right time, you can start to unlock your true growth potential!

And that’s it. Leave alone and resist the temptation to keep fiddling about with them.

2. Search Engine Friendly urls

Keep your urls key word rich and a sensible structure and leave it at that. So for example the url for my article referenced above is http://www.wannabebig.com/diet-and-nutrition/eating-optimally-for-massive-size-and-strength/

3. Frequent, good quality content

Search engines like frequently updated, key word rich content. The trick is making sure that first and foremost your content is something that your reader base will enjoy and find useful and/or effectively sells your product or service.  In fact, I would urge you to write it for your reader first before evening thinking about SEO.

Once you are happy with it, give it a key word rich title (not the same as the above title we talked about, think chapter in a book title) and then go back through the content and see if there is an opportunity to make the body of the content a little more key word rich (without sacrificing the quality/flow).

Lastly, aim to update your site with new content a couple of times a week. Search engines like sites who update frequently and on a simpler level the more content you have, the more content that can be indexed.

If you run a reasonably static site, consider adding a blog as this will give you an excellent way to create short pieces of content on a frequent basis.

Bottom line – frequent, good quality content builds high quality traffic – that’s the plain truth.

4. Quality incoming links

Incoming links are very important and there are two factors here – quantity and quality.

There are normally two ways to build good quality incoming links. Strangely enough, high quality content organically builds incoming links because you will find people will read your content and then WANT to reference and link to it form their site.

You could also go out and ask for them for a link back or trade links with other sites (just bear in mind external links on your own site can affect your search engine rankings). The bigger and better ranked the sites linking to you, the better your search engine benefit.

And that’s it.

Just focus on those 4 things and again don’t get all obsessive about it, it should only be a small part of what you concern yourself with. Producing a good looking, usable site with frequently updated, high quality content is 98% of the battle. So why spend huge amounts of time on the other 2%?

And don’t always worry about the pure numbers. HIGH quality traffic means more than just pure traffic. Care about things like the length of site visit, what content people are reading more often, the most exited piece of content and the level of interaction from your readers (comments etc). It’s better to have a small, loyal and interested reader base, than just big numbers of people landing on your site, but leaving after 5 seconds.

A Great Example

I want to leave you with a good example of a guy who I think is getting it spot on.

Nate Green runs a lifestyle blog called The Nate Green Experience, and to be frank I’m in awe (but not surprised) of how he has built a really high quality online following. I doubt his overall site numbers are massive, but you can tell from the comments on his blog that his reader base really enjoy and appreciate his content.

His blog posts often get 50+ genuine comments and his site is one of a handful that sit in my Google Reader.

Nate is nailing it, check this out:

- Good looking, usable site – check
- Sensible title and description tags – check
- Frequent, good quality content – check
- Incoming links – to be fair, I haven’t checked but my guess is that he has some decent people linking to his content and I know he writes exclusively for a very popular online magazine which links back to his site – bingo!

And I bet if you asked Nate what he does from a search engine perspective, he would probably just tell you he doesn’t focus on it too much, he just focuses on good content.

If there is one thing you take away from this post it should be that everything has a habit of falling into place when you just create a good looking, usable site with frequently updated, high quality content