Category: SearchEngines

16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors

By Jill Whalen

In my day-to-day reviews of client websites, I see lots of things done to websites in the name of SEO that in reality have no bearing on it.

Useless
Photo Credit: Bitterjug

In an effort to keep you from spending your precious time on supposed SEO tactics that will have absolutely no effect on your rankings, search engine visitors, conversions or sales, I present you with 16 SEO tactics that you can remove from your personal knowledge base and/or SEO toolbox as being in any way related to SEO:

  1. Meta Keywords: Lord help us! I thought I was done discussing the ole meta keywords tag in 1999, but today in 2011 I encounter people with websites who still think this is an important SEO tactic. My guess is it’s easier to fill out a keyword meta tag than to do the SEO procedures that do matter. Suffice it to say, the meta keyword tag is completely and utterly useless for SEO purposes when it comes to all the major search engines – and it always will be.
  2. XML Site Maps or Submitting to Search Engines: If your site architecture stinks and important optimized pages are buried too deeply to be easily spidered, an XML site map submitted via Webmaster Tools isn’t going to make them show up in the search results for their targeted keywords. At best it will make Google aware that those pages exist. But if they have no internal or external link popularity to speak of, their existence in the universe is about as important as the existence of the tooth fairy (and she won’t help your pages to rank better in Google either!).
  3. Link Title Attributes: Think that you can simply add descriptive text to your “click here” link’s title attribute? (For example: <a href=”page1.html” title=”Spammy Keywords Here”>Click Here</a>.) Think again. Back in the 1990s I too thought these were the bee’s knees. Turns out they are completely ignored by all major search engines. If you use them to make your site more accessible, then that’s great, but just know that they have nothing to do with Google.
  4. Header Tags Like H1 or H2: This is another area people spend lots of time in, as if these fields were created specifically for SEOs to put keywords into. They weren’t, and they aren’t. They’re simply one way to mark up your website code with headlines. While it’s always a good idea to have great headlines on a site that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it’s wrapped in H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings.
  5. Keyworded Alt Text on Non-clickable Images: Thought you were clever to stuff keywords into the alt tag of the image of your pet dog? Think again, Sparky! In most cases, non-clickable image alt tag text isn’t going to provide a boost to your rankings. And it’s especially not going to be helpful if that’s the only place you have those words. (Clickable images are a different story, and the alt text you use for them is in fact a very important way to describe the page that the image is pointing to.)
  6. Keyword-stuffed Content: While it’s never been a smart SEO strategy, keyword-stuffed content is even stupider in today’s competitive marketplace. In the 21st century, less is often more when it comes to keywords in your content. In fact, if you’re having trouble ranking for certain phrases that you’ve used a ton of times on the page, rather than adding it just one more time, try removing some instances of it. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
  7. Optimizing for General or Peripheral Keywords: You’re not gonna rank for a one-word keyword. You’re just not. You are likely not even going to rank for a 2-word keyword. So stop wasting your time optimizing for them, and find the phrases that answer the searcher’s question. For example, most people seeking legal help aren’t putting the one word “lawyer” into Google. They have a very specific need for a certain type of lawyer as well as a specific location in which they hope to find said lawyer. So rather than throwing the word “lawyer” all over your site, ask yourself this: There are people out there who want what you’re providing. What are they typing into Google? Now focus on those words instead. And don’t even get me started on people who put words on their pages that are barely related to what they do “just in case” someone who types that into Google might be interested in what they offer. You won’t rank for those phrases anyway, but even if you magically did, they won’t make you any sales.
  8. Targeting the Same Keywords on Every Page: The keyword universe for any product or service is ginormous. (It really is.) Even if there are one or two phrases that bring you the most traffic, why the heck would you want to miss out on the gazillions of others as well? Stop focusing every page on the same handful of phrases and start targeting each page to its own specific set that most relate to what you’re offering there.
  9. Focusing on Ads as Links: Banner ads, Google AdWords links and most other forms of online advertising do not create links that count toward your link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use this form of marketing – just don’t be deluded into thinking that it will have a direct effect on your organic search engine rankings and traffic.
  10. Mad-lib Doorway Pages: While you may offer lots of products or services that are extremely similar to one another with just one minor change, it’s not a good idea to create separate pages for each of them and making only minor keyword changes to each of them. While this may be okay for paid search landing pages, it’s a duplicate content spammy nightmare for organic SEO purposes. (In fairness, I do sometimes still see this technique work, but it’s still not advisable to do it.)
  11. Linking to Google or Other Popular Websites: It’s the links pointing to your pages from other sites that help you with SEO, not the pages you’re linking out to. ‘Nuff said.
  12. Redirecting a Keyworded Domain to Your Real One: So you have your business name as your domain (as you should), but you have noticed the unfortunate fact that Google seems to really like domains that have keywords in them. Buying one (or more) and redirecting it to your actual website can’t provide you with any advantage because a redirected website (and its domain name) is never seen by the search engines. And besides, even if there were something magical about doing this, again, you’re only talking about one keyword phrase.
  13. Republishing Only Others’ Stuff: While it’s fine to republish an article that someone else published first, if that’s all your blog consists of, it’s not going to help your search engine rankings. Instead of republishing entire articles, discuss them in your own posts and provide your thoughts and opinions on what’s good / bad / ugly about what the others are saying. It’s all about adding value.
  14. Making Minor Changes to Freshen Content: This is not going to help a thing. If any old articles or posts need to be updated, then update them. But just changing a date or a few words will not have any effect on your search engine rankings or traffic.
  15. Nofollowing Internal Links: Perhaps you’re not looking for your privacy policy page to be followed by the search engines, so you add a nofollow attribute to it. That’s all well and good, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that this will somehow control your PageRank flow and get you better rankings. It won’t.
  16. Main Navigation That Links to Every Page: If linking to pages in your main navigation gives them more internal link popularity and therefore more possible weighting with the search engines, then surely linking to every single page of the site in your main navigation should be a good idea, right? Wrong! It isn’t. All it does is spread your internal link popularity too thin and confuse the heck out of your site visitors. Don’t do it. Choose to link only to top-level categories and perhaps subcategories (if you have a reasonable number of them) in your main navigation. This allows users to drill down further when they’re in the category sections themselves.

Did I miss any? I’m quite sure I’ve just touched the surface on waste-of-time SEO tactics. How about you? Do you agree with the above? Disagree?

Jill Whalen

Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston, MA area since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen

AOL taking its lead from Demand Media

Business Insider hit the news with LEAKED: AOL’s Master Plan. The master plan sounds eerily like what’s going on at Demand Media. They leaked the entire master plan. Details of the plan leaked by Business Insider include:

AOL is using this document to train editors right now. It is an illuminating look into how AOL, a company with hundreds of millions in dollars in annual funding, is trying to turn itself into a 21st century media giant on the fly.

Some tidbits:

As a result of AOL’s new policy, Paul Miller decided to leave Engadget after five years as an editor there. He explained his last day at Engadget in Leaving AOL. I wrote about my almost-relationship with Demand Media in Changes at Google will Reduce Spammy Search Engine Results. AOL seems to be following in Demand Media’s footsteps in their attempts to rake in financial gain with volumes and volumes of content. Notice I didn’t say quality content.

Content Farms vs. Content Strategy

Compare that with the goings on at A List Apart, that bastion of web quality, where they are preparing to publish their third book: The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane. I suspect that Erin’s approach to what good content is and what a content strategy that will sustain a business should look like doesn’t sound exactly like AOL’s master plan. In fact, I contacted Erin and asked her what she thought about this move by AOL. Here’s her response.

AOL’s current editorial strategy seems related to their old marketing tactics from the early 90s, when they indiscriminately flooded the mail with all those install CDs. They’re competing with content factories like Demand Media and, to some extent, the Huffington Post, and they’re trying to win by cranking out reams of SEO-ed up content with no real substance.

Contrast that with the notion of giving readers and viewers content that they genuinely want and need that drives publications ranging from web pubs like A List Apart or The Awl to international print brands like The Economist. Those publications are successful because they’re producing things people can use, rather than useless fluff that will only make it harder to find content of substance.

Where this touches content strategy as it’s practiced in a UX context is the decision to publish a limited amount of useful, well written content vs. a huge volume of search-engine bait or content designed to “feed the beast” of blogging and social media. Unless you really want to join the content mills as they race toward complete crap, it’s pretty clear that focusing on user needs and editorial quality produces much better results.

Crap Overload

Part of the overload we are faced with today is an abundance of cheap crap. But the problem is, people willingly consume cheap crap. That’s why there are so many more reality shows than quality scripted dramas like Mad Men or The Good Wife. It’s cheap to produce, and people are willing to consume it. The problem isn’t just that there are content farms churning out cheap crap. There’s also the willingness of the search engines to reward sites that produce it and willingness from readers to consume that sort of content. Like reality shows, content farms make money. As long as the cheap crap brings in a profitable bottom line, we’ll see more and more of it produced.

The New York Times talked about teens leaving long form writing behind and moving to Twitter. The reason? It’s too much work to write something long. Extrapolate that into it’s too much work to read something long, or something deep, or something meaningful.

Is that it? Is it just too much effort to do quality work, or to invest quality thinking into what you’re consuming? If that’s it, I think we’re doomed.

Are you old enough to remember the days when we scoffed at anything “Made in China” as being worthless junk? Well, China has since surpassed us in many ways, including education. Is “Content Produced in the USA” going to be a joke before long?

Any Googlegangers in your life?

You’ve searched Google for your own name. I know you have.

Did you find other people with your name? That’s a Googleganger.

Here’s one man’s story about finding his Googlegangers.

Years ago in the early days of the web, I was contacted by another Virginia DeBolt who was also a writer. I never met her in real life. Sometimes when I’m looking for my name I find someone who is deceased who shared that name. Usually a teacher, as I am.

With a Googleganger, you don’t necessarily expect to be related to anyone who shares your name.

I frequently hear from someone whose last name is DeBolt and we compare genealogy to see if we might be related. So far there hasn’t been anyone who connects within the few recent generations I know something about. But it’s not a common name, so there probably is a distant connection somewhere.

The way we find out history and locate relatives is changing rapidly. See Roots Tech: The History of Your Family is in the Future, which describes how Family Search does genealogy. Or perhaps you’ve seen those TV programs called Who Do You Think You Are? that explore celebrity genealogy using high tech tools.

Are you using high tech to find your history? Do you have any Googlegangers?

Changes at Google will Reduce Spammy Search Engine Results

There have been complaints. Loud complaints.

I’m talking about complaints about Google’s search results being full of spammy links that lead to nothing of value. The complaint department window at Google was open for business, because they were listening and they’ve made some changes.

Complaints and Alternatives

Before we get into the changes, check out these examples of the complaints that Google was returning too much search result spam:

Most of the complaints mentioned that Google search results were filled with spam results from content scrapers, marketers, or sites that consisted of nothing but keywords surrounded by useless crappy content.

Often mentioned in relation to spammy results are content farms. Demand Media is a name that come up often when talking about poor quality content. Yet at the same time, many articles like Demand Media Valued at More Than $1 Billion Following IPO also appear. People are investing in Demand media at the same time that people are asking to have its articles removed from search results. In the article about Demand’s IPO, Adam Ostrow said,

Early indications suggest that concerns over Demand — which owns sites like eHow and Trails.com — being at the whims of Google’s search algorithms are not worrying investors. The company increased the size of its offering by nearly 20% and also raised the offering price, with investors pushing shares another 40% higher when they debuted.

Last week, Google wrote about its plans to take on search engine spam and so-called “content farms,” a category that Demand is often lumped in with because of the way it produces its content, with thousands of low-cost freelancers authoring stories that target popular search terms.

I have a few personal things to say about Demand Media, which I will get to in a minute.

As for alternatives to Google, Michelle Rafter organized a chat for writers in WordCount Jan. 26 chat: Google, search spam and search tools for writers that suggested alternative ways for writers to find dependable search results. Her chat announcement:

It follows a series of posts on search skills for writers I’ve done recently, including one on alternatives to Google, an update on Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the website that matches reporters’ requests for sources with companies that could provide the information that Vocus acquried last June, and how to get the most out of a HARO query.

Sounds like a great chat, I’m sorry I missed it.

Alternatives to Google have been popping up regularly. One is a new search engine, Blekko, which specifically claims to remove spammy results from your search. See Blekko De-Spams Search Results with Slashtags. Just yesterday, Blekko announced it will block some sites completely. See Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media’s eHow from its Search Results.

Someone made an extension for Chrome (Google’s browser) that blocks spam results. See Search Engine Blacklist Prevents Spam Sites from Ever Appearing in Your Search Listings.

How Google Stepped Up

As I mentioned, Google was taking note of all this. Their response appeared on the official Google blog in Google search and search engine spam. Here’s part of that announcement.

To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.

The Google announcement also reaffirmed Google’s principles that buying Google ads does not increase site rankings and having Google ads does not prevent a site from violating Google’s content guidelines.

Christina Warren quotes Google’s Matt Cutts in Google Changes Algorithm To Penalize Site Scrapers, saying the

“net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

Demand Media and Me

For a while, I worked for eHow.com as their expert in the Internet category. I’m telling you this story because eHow is owned by Demand Media. I wrote several hundred articles for eHow that I stand behind as being of comparable quality to anything I’ve ever written for my own blogs.

While I was well paid for each post I wrote at eHow, there were also writers there who were not paid per post but through a system of rewards based on traffic. Eventually, eHow dropped its experts who were paid by the article. I stopped writing for them at that time. Now, writers only receive rewards based on the traffic their articles generate. eHow also wanted people who were writing there to move to writing keyword laden posts for Demand Media. I chose not to do that.

Personally, I am happy about my relationship with eHow and I’m proud of my posts. I’ve read enough articles there to know that the quality is uneven – some are excellent and some are not.  But I think Blekko’s announcement that they are going to block eHow completely is an overreaction. There is some good material on eHow, especially from the various experts who wrote there. A better choice would be to filter eHow results for quality.

I’ve never looked at any of the content produced on the Demand Media side of the business, but I know they generate vast amounts of it. And its making them money, as you saw from the story on their IPO.

The Results

The changes in Google’s algorithm will affect the profitability of content farm sites like Demand Media’s, because it will bring higher quality results back into the top ranked search results.

The changes will also be helpful to many bloggers who are frustrated by sites that reproduce entire blog posts without permission. If the changes are effective, an original post should rank higher than any scraped content reprinted elsewhere.

Cross-posted at BlogHer in slightly different form.

Useful links: LinkedInMaps, using HTML5, CSS3 logo, LinkedIn button, Foursquare badges, Blekko

Hubs and Connectors: Understanding Networks Through Data Visualization talks about LinkedInMaps. Very interesting stuff.

Get familiar with HTML5 at Opera Dev is another great post from Chris Mills that explains what HTML5 offers and why teachers should be using it now.

CSS3 gets a new logo is a new look at the HTML5 logo event. This whole versioning number/logo thing is getting pretty funny.

The LinkedIn Official Share Button – Why Should A College Care? explains why you should care.

Foursquare’s University Badges Now Available at All Colleges & Universities now available for every college and university around the world.

Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media’s eHow From Its Search Results The new search engine that promises no spammy search results takes a big step. Google is taking steps in a similar direction. Watch for an article from me about this tomorrow. (Or today, on BlogHer)

Terri Jenkins: entrepreneurial woman in tech

She’s been in the SEO and PPC business for 16 years. Sixteen years! You don’t find that kind of longevity and expertise in many web-based businesses. She owns a company that enables her to do the thing that is closest to her heart: find young women with marketing backgrounds and train them to be both expert marketers and technically confident and authoritative, too.

Terri JenkinsWho is this woman? Terri Jenkins, the owner of W3PR.com. She and her husband, Mark run the company from Albuquerque, with a second office in Los Angeles. Their business involves internet marketing, advertising, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, website conversion, and Google Analytics.

Terri describes herself as a hybrid – both a technologist and an advertising guru. In order to do her work with PPC campaigns, SEO and marketing, she has to keep current with leading edge technology and the technological implications of new developments to her industry. She says her first love was technology and talks with fond memory of having a beta account at CompuServe and being one of the original advertisers on AOL.

Terri and her husband started their business in L.A. During the dotcom boom, they had over 25 employees. After the dotcom crash they struggled, but didn’t give up. They made their office a virtual workplace, with all remote employees. Now their work takes place in the cloud. Recently they moved to Albuquerque, where Terri’s parents live. Their business consists of Terri and her husband, three women who work remotely full time, and one man who is part time.

When we met to talk, she was delighted to share the news that she’d just hired her first new full time employee since 2008, a young woman with a marketing degree. She said the young woman is smart and eager to learn. Terri looks for employees like that. She says, “As part of their training with me, I want to make sure they a cross-trained with the technical knowledge, too.” She adds, “That gives them and me something extra other ad agencies don’t have – a well-rounded knowledge that we can offer.”

Terri said she sees a lot of insecurity and lack of confidence in young women. She enjoys nurturing them and helping them “own what they know and use it unapologetically. Young women need to value their own opinions to be effective and authoritative.”

Sixteen years on the front edge of relevance is impressive in a world of rapid change. I asked how she does it. She said, “I feel like I read for a living.” Her reading is designed to make sure she understands everything in the Internet world that’s being talked about. She uses the knowledge to improve her own business as well as that of her clients. Virtual phone service, cloud based meetings and document sharing, and online project management tools are all concepts she’s incorporated into her business.

She shared a few of her clients. W3PR works with Red Bull to implement SEO and PPC ads for sites like Shawn White and others. They work with Atari on the re-release of old video games from the 80s. They’re working with AMC Theaters on the promotion of the new dine-in theaters going in around the country. There are many other examples from their client list that testify to their success.

In 2010, the New Mexico Technology Council awarded Terri Jenkins a Women in Tech Award, recognizing her longevity and her talent for inspiring others. A perfect award for someone who says nurturing young employees brings her a great deal of satisfaction.

You can follow Terri on Twitter @TerriJenkins. She likes to share what she knows there.

syndicated on BlogHer