The 6 Things SEO “Experts” Won’t Tell You, But I Will…. (The BIG SEO Lie)

It’s all over the Internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the hottest topic out there.  Bloggers think that if they write “7 Tips on How to Improve Your SEO” for the 800th time, they will get millions of hits. Companies are – suddenly – feeling the need to create whole SEO departments. Webmasters are compelled to write their content just for the search engines.

And everyone else? They just don’t care. But I have something to say to all of you….Here is the most important thing you should know about most of the stuff you read:

IT’S ALL GARBAGE!

In this economy (and don’t get me started on that) if there is a general misunderstanding about a topic, EVERYONE is going to try and take advantage of it on it. Have you noticed how many career “experts” have suddenly popped up during the recession? Well capitalizing on the same type of confusion, these so-called SEO “experts” have popped up all over the place claiming that they know the answers to make all of your internet traffic dreams come true.

A company with which I did some consulting has 10 million dollars in revenue. The guy spent 1.5 million a YEAR on ADWORDS thinking it would improve his search engine placement.  (Adwords are those little advertisements on the side of Google that you never click on…) I almost cried. And then when I tried to find his site, it was nowhere to be found in any search engine. This type of thing is a marketing travesty and it shouldn’t be happening.

My goal here is to make sure you understand the reality of modern search engine optimization. So when you go to “optimize” your site, or hire someone to do it, I want you to make sure you take the right advice and know that there is specific experience you should be looking for that can help you do this job correctly.

So without any of my further blabbering, let me get to it:

1. SEO takes a LONG time: There are no shortcuts to getting your content to the top of Google, Bing, or wherever else…. especially in the popular categories. A major category in determining where your webpage comes up is how long it has been there, also known as Aging. Don’t believe me? Run a search for a popular topic. Try “How to Network.” Even though I humbly think some of my networking articles are MUCH better, Google proudly displays a page from 2005. The first article isn’t even from the past two years and with people losing their jobs left and right since 2007, networking has been a subject of research that has exploded the last few years. Additionally, search engines are reading through billions of pages. If your site is not important, it takes a loooong time to update in search engines.
2. The Actual Algorithms Are Secret: Algorithms in this sense are the complicated methods search engines use to determine what pages should be shown for each search. It has been said that no one outside the actual search engines actually has a copy of the algorithm that determines search engine result pages (SERPS) and it is constantly changing. So how is it that these “experts” know what to talk about? Well, actually, it isn’t really true that nobody has a copy. Most of the basic algorithms are patented or in provisional patent phases and patents are public but you have to know where to look for them.
3. The Days of the Meta Tags are Long Gone: A website owner used to be able to talk directly to the search engines by using “hidden” codes called meta tags. However, the only use for the tags at this point is in order to declare the title of the page. It doesn’t matter what your tags say the subject of the page is. In fact tags, if repeated on your site could hurt you. In fact, Google added a keyword tracker in their webmaster tools. It seems to me that they are trying to suggest that they are reading the actual text content of the site? Additionally, writing content that repeats repeats repeats repeats the keywords doesn’t work either. You will get a site banned from a major search engine that way and that is an awful thing.    Amendment: The “description” tag is also still pertinent as it describes your page to the search engine.   (I forgot to include this)
   
4. Not just any backlinks will do: Backlinks are when websites link to yours.   Many know that an important factor in SEO is how many links you get coming to your content. What some don’t know is that they must be high quality links. As we previously established, there are plenty SEO companies and individuals who will gladly take your money to submit your page into spammy links directories and link schemes. They may work temporarily, but because this is not the way search engine companies want you promoting your site (it’s considered spam), your site could be quickly removed from search engines. There are quality directories that still exist such as the DMOZ and Yahoo and if you can get your site onto one of these, that’s a bonus. These are human edited and search engines give credibility to this characteristic. This brings us to my next point:
5. Search Engines are Meant To Work For Humans: Back in the beginning days of search engines, it was possible to simply “optimize” your page to attract the search engine to the page. Seeing this as an opportunity, many took advantage of this and found ways to cheat the system. They wrote sub-par (and downright bad) webpages designed to get top results through spam-like tactics. As a result, search engines, which, ironically, happen to be written by some of the smartest people in the world, were redesigned and none of these old techniques work anymore. There is NO way to search optimize your page legitimately aside from producing quality content and getting others to link to it – EXCEPT to utilize:
6. Good Coding Practice: You know all of those SEO changes that people are willing to come in and make for you? Guess what. They shouldn’t need to.  Code should be free of errors that would otherwise prevent search engine “spiders” from being able to crawl through it.  Think of it this way: you wouldn’t want to read a book littered with grammatical errors. Search engines hate reading webpages with grammatical errors too.  These errors could make your ranking suffer.   There are tools such as the w3validator that will help you identify these errors. One change you can make immediately is to make sure the titles of your pages contain the key words for your page as well as the URL (also known as a permalink). This is VERY important.      Thank you to James Allen of St. Louis for assisting me with this point. 
   

Real SEO People are Hustlers and Great Networkers in Real Life. From my rants we have established that quality links to your site, age, and good coding practice are the main ways to influence your search engine rank. Well once you register a domain and have your code written properly, then establishing quality links is the only thing you can do. There are only two ways to get these, and one of those is pay major advertising dollars to get them from high quality sites. The other is to get someone who is VERY good at networking, both online and off, who can get out there and meet the people who run these sites and convince them of a reason to link to you. It’s a very specialized practice that few are good at. But that’s an article for another day. Let’s hear what you all have to say!

Update: As of 12/04/09, evidently Google is making all searches personalized.   This means that it could become possible that you will no longer discover sites that you didn’t know you were looking for.   This could have a HUGE effect on the SEO world.   I would love to hear your thoughts and discuss here as well.   This news is from the google webmaster blog.  

Directly quoted:

Extended Personalized Search
Starting this week, we are extending Personalized Search worldwide to users who are signed out of their Google accounts, and in more than 40 languages. Now when you search using Google, we will be better able to provide the most relevant results using 180 days of Google search activity from your browser. For example, since I always search for “ADA” and often click on results about the programming language, Google might show you those results before the American Dental Association results.

Further Update: Yesterday, (1/21/2010), Google released official tips for beginners for SEO on their webmaster blog.  They copied the stuff in my article.  Thiefs!