SEO FAQ (or why you shouldn't hire an SEO "expert")

by mcargian • 17 years ago

85 82 17 years ago

timf• 17 years ago

Interesting tidbit on the flickr page he links to: "Google can customize your search results based on location, recent search activity and/or other, logged out or not.... Adding &pws=0 to your query turns of personalization."

YorkSEO5• 17 years ago

As an SEO "expert" I take exception to this post, Yes there are a lot of bad companies out there selling snake oil, just like there are in most (all?) industries. That does not mean that all SEO companies are evil and it certainly doesn't mean that all SEO techniques don't work. Lots of people spout the "content is king" mantra, and while i'd agree content is the most important part of a website, you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it? Unlike the author, most people can't afford to wait 10 years for their site to become popular. The fact is, to get to the top of the results pages you generally need a lot of links, and link building is HARD. This is why every major company has an in house SEO team or hires an agency - because SEO is one of the most effective ways to increase your ROI.

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

Spammer.

brown9-24• 17 years ago

"you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it?"

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?

gloob• 17 years ago

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).

YorkSEO5• 17 years ago

Ok, what about new companies entering a competitive niche? You can have a perfectly optimised website but still not get any traction in the search engines. These days a good cms will do your on page optimisation for you, but links are what you need to make your site visible. Yes you could build links yourself, but it probably isn't the most efficient use of your time as your success rate will usually be lower than that of an experienced seo. And yes I'm a long time lurker who registered just to post this

sanswork3• 17 years ago

I could find out for free how to do a lot of things. Make my own whisky, fix my car. However I'm not a distiller or a mechanic so I leave those tasks to people who know what to do without having to read a manual every time. Someone who also knows what not to waste time on(meta tags for example which for some reason still seem to feature high in all entry level seo step lists).

DanielBMarkham2• 17 years ago

By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.

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.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

I'll give you one thing, at least you're up front about it.

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.

YorkSEO5• 17 years ago

"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?

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

Jacquesm , I suspect you're being inflammatory here.

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)>

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

> This article is linkbait/SEO.

> 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.

Steve0• 17 years ago

Bill Hicks on Marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

qeorge3• 17 years ago

If you don't like paying your mechanic, you can learn to fix your own car. That doesn't mean he/she is ripping you off.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

But that's not how it is now, isn't it.

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.

qeorge3• 17 years ago

But you're not understanding SEO, are you.

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

And almost all sites we review could benefit from:

  - Keyword research and targeting
  - Load time optimization
  - Internal linking optimization
  - Content creation
  - Link building

How exactly you equate that with hustling is beyond me.

ja2ke• 17 years ago

You pay a guy to build your deck. He does a shitty job. That's the web developer you shouldn't have hired in the first place. You then pay someone else to come and paint it. That's the SEO guy you're now paying to band-aid your busted crap and make you feel like it's all okay.

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.

3dFlatLander• 17 years ago

But I use SEO for good.

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.

motherwell3• 17 years ago

"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."

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.

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."

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.

sekizaru2• 17 years ago

The argument that web designers, web developers etc. should understand everything related to their work is fine at a small scale eg. creating a personal blog/small website. But it's a stretch to say that nobody should focus on just one area.

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.

blasdel• 17 years ago

Except that you're a drop-in replacement for an existing middleman -- the broadcast/print media ad-agency. Companies weren't really doing the low-level management of their ad campaigns before.

SEO is a bit more of a novelty, especially since the 'SEO professionals' aren't middlemen between you and Google.

sekizaru2• 17 years ago

Point taken. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy is the PR industry. I know the PR industry gets almost as much criticism as SEO. But the argument that we shouldn't use specialists in whatever field because we could do it ourselves is very damaging. Here's another example. If I run a coffee shop and 50% of my customers are walk-ins from the street, it makes sense for me to hire a sign-writer to attract more people. Even though my coffee might be the same as always I get more customers because people can find my shop. I could paint the sign myself but hiring an expert to do it will likely pay for itself. If I run a website and 50% of my customers come from search engines then it makes sense to invest an appropriate amount in making sure those customers can find me. If I have a small site, that investment might be of my time or I could outsource it. So the important thing is that we need to invest in what brings new customers. If you think that an SEO professional doesn't deliver enough value that's a perfectly valid decision but I think it's a big mistake to extend this to not investing in SEO itself.

dkokelley3• 17 years ago

I think people are splitting hairs between SEO and SEM. SEO is what good web developers should have done. It's proper formatting, crawler accessibility, et cetera.

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.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Huh? SEM can be as simple as running an ad campaign. People search stuff, and click on your ad instead of a result. Is that a trick?

If you lack a better definition, try "sponsored demand fulfillment". It isn't an industry that started with the internet.

dkokelley3• 17 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is. 'Trick' could be read as manipulation. An ad campaign could be considered a form of manipulation. The advertiser is manipulating the behavior of the viewer by convincing them to take action. It's driving users to your site because of something off-site.

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.

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

SEO is what good web developers should have done. It's proper formatting, crawler accessibility, et cetera.

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.

dkokelley3• 17 years ago

That's why I defined it as optimization. SEO in my opinion is NOT (or rather, should not be) getting links. That's SEM. Optimization is the technical aspect of things (headers, etc.). Marketing involves getting others to link to you. That's the manipulation, or 'tricking' that I talked about.

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.

JCThoughtscream2• 17 years ago

I recall some time ago that the concept of SEM/SEO-based marketing had actually become somewhat unnecessary - the major search engines (ie: Google) were working to deliberately curtail the demand for such services in the first place.

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.

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

And how do Google curtail demand? By adding complexity to the algos that compile the SERPs ... and what do we need SEOs for? To decompile the complexity in the algos used by the SEs. Google add brand weightings, my ranks go down and sales are through the floor, do I say "oh well I'm not a brand I'll just quit" or "how do I show Google I'm still worth ranking"?

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.

JCThoughtscream2• 17 years ago

Except that, if we take your restaurant staff analogy seriously, you're actually bribing the bartender to get the chef to put your product on the menu.

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."

motherwell3• 17 years ago

Bah! What dross.

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.

gaius• 17 years ago

The point is that there are only two ways to "optimize" your site: 1) hire a better designer and 2) game the ranking algorithms. The latter is what SEO "experts" do. From the search engine's perspective, they want their ranking to accurately match which site is most useful and relevant to their user. The ideal search engine, once things like location are discounted (a brilliantly designed site offering a useful service too far away from me is a bad search result) is going to rank on how good the site actually is.

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

So is, say, a better onsite link structure, an optimised description on each page, SERP indented listing, ... (1) or (2).

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?

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

I'm confused. Nowhere in the article did I see a recommendation against doing any marketing at all; instead I saw a quite sensible debunking of a bunch of snake oil that's known either not to work or to actively hurt your site's visibility in search engines.

Effective marketing is a good thing. Wasting money on crap? Not so much.

tpiddy• 17 years ago

i did audience acquisition at a large established media company and in the span of about a year helped increase their traffic from natural(as opposed to paid) search over 90%.

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.

davidw4• 17 years ago

I'm not really in favor of SEO in that it seems to be a zero-sum proposition (if ten companies hire ten SEO "experts" to get the number one position... nine of them aren't going to get what they wanted). Also, it's not about building new stuff, creating new wealth, but more about (in the non-evil cases) repackaging something that already exists. That's not really my cup of tea.

patio112• 17 years ago

That depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're competing for #1 on [credit cards], yep, its a zero-sum game and most people will lose. SEO is about so much more than just winning on one term, though. (Do we say marketing is a zero-sum game because There Can Be Only One, e.g., pizza shop for any given delivery?)

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.

davidw4• 17 years ago

> 2) Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.

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.

Confusion• 17 years ago

Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.

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.

netsp• 17 years ago

If ten companies bid for the no. 1 position in sponsored search or advertising of most kind, nine will be disappointed. If ten washing powder companies advertise, they are probably not going to sell much more powder between them, they are just fighting to divide the pie. Similar could be said about much if not most economic activity. Along the way, value gets created.

skuvnar• 17 years ago

"And after less than 24 hours, my post about SEO is the ninth Google result for 'SEO'."

Is it just me, but when I did a google search for 'SEO', it seems that his position is ~40...

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Google pushes new results to the top, then they slowly fall off. In certain cases, anyway.

philfreo• 17 years ago

and also in some cases shows results based on your own browsing history

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

QDF, but then that's obvious apparently.

redorb• 17 years ago

I have to say it, this guy is a smug asshole. Right or wrong about seo; his writing is smug.

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

You’re just looking for work/promotion/love. Please, God, no. I’ve got two clients that keep me busy full time right now, and I work on Fray when I should be sleeping. I have no reason to promote this site. I make no money from it. And I’m married, thanks.

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 ...

tptacek• 17 years ago

You could make that same comment about his commercial links to anything he says. Derek is pretty famous. I don't think he needs to stir up controversy to get attention. But even if he wasn't, this comment is almost content-free.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Bullshit. I have an astrology site (moon calendar) that is now not even among the first 10 pages of Google search results for the main keyword. Believe me when I say that most of the results that show up before my site are decidedly not better than my moon calendar. SEO has nothing to do with it?

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.

pbhjpbhj14• 17 years ago

I looked for 10seconds tops at the two pages .. first thing, they "mondkalendar" have keywords in title first, you have your domain, switch that around. Yes it matters. Yes I'm sure there are more "obvious" things too.

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.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Thanks - I don't know if I should invest more energy in that site, but maybe I'll try the title rewrite :-(

rmason• 17 years ago

I worked in another industry that got regulated and watched the cycle.

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 ;<)?

SEO FAQ (or why you shouldn't hire an SEO "expert")

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