SEO FAQ
So yesterday I had a bit of a rant about SEO and I’ve gotten a few common questions so I thought I’d try to answer them. Here goes.
Gosh you seem angry.
Damn right. I publish a magazine and I know a lot of magazine publishers. And they are forking over embarrassing sums of money to charlatans who say they can raise their search engine rankings. These magazines can barely pay their writers. That’s wrong and it has to stop.
If you’re a company that’s about to pay some SEO expert, please, I beg you, take that money and hand it to a talented writer or competent web developer instead. It’ll be much better spent.
Did you just quit smoking or something?
Yes.
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.
You shouldn’t call people names.
You should read more Hunter S. Thompson.
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.
[Insert irate defense of SEO here.]
You sell SEO, right?
If you’re so smart, prove it.
I’m not that smart. But I can say that I am Google’s third result for “Derek” (I was number one until Wikipedia came around). And after less than 24 hours, my post about SEO is the ninth Google result for “SEO”. (Logged out, so no personalization. I’m not counting the indented sub-results or the Google in-site promotions.)
How did I accomplish these magic SEO feats? Exactly how I said I did: Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again. I’ve been doing that (or at least trying to) since 1995.
In this case, I wrote a passionate post. I posted it to Twitter and Facebook. And I sent one email to a friend about it. That’s it!
I’ve done this thousands of times. Usually the only thing that happens is I feel happy to have written something that my dozens of readers might enjoy. This time, it blew up. Guess I struck a nerve.
SEO is needed because of bad web design.
Wouldn’t it be better to make competent websites in the first place?
It’s easy for you – you’re an expert.
I’m using WordPress (which is free software) and the DePo Skinny theme (which I designed and released for free). You can download both of those and have a site just like this in a few minutes. No need to pay anyone for SEO.
Then comes the hard part: Spend over a decade making things. If you do that, you’ll be an expert, too.
[Insert personal attack here.]
I may have tarred a so-called “industry” but I didn’t attack anyone personally. I don’t allow personal attacks in my comments, especially when they’re attacking me.
This may be obvious to you, but it’s not to everyone.
You’re right. I regret saying that this stuff was obvious without explaining what I meant. Here’s what I meant: Good SEO techniques are just good web development techniques. They should be obvious to anyone who makes websites for a living. If they’re not obvious to you, and you make websites, you need to get informed. If you’re a client, make sure you hire an informed web develper.
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.
So what’s your suggestion?
I’m so glad you asked.
CLIENTS: If someone approaches you about optimizing your search engine placement, they’re running a scam. Ignore them. If your site isn’t showing up in Google, fire whoever is making your web pages and hire someone better. Sign up for social media services (Twitter, Facebook, etc) and participate there. Pay for quality writers and designers – that’s what will actually raise your ranking in the long term.
WEB DESIGNERS: Learn to code your own pages. If you can’t, hire someone who can, and listen to them when they tell you why putting all that text in an image is a bad idea.
WEB DEVELOPERS: Educate your designers about proper web development. Educate your clients about how the web works. Follow Google’s advice. Read A List Apart. Writing good code won’t just help your Google rank, it’ll make certain your site is accessible to screen readers, mobile devices, and all the browsers out there.
SEO SPECIALISTS: If all you do is SEO, you need to expand. Hire a visual designer and some kickass coders and become a real web agency. Start making sites good from the get-go instead of cleaning up other people’s messes. Besides, if all you do is SEO, your days are numbered. Social media is rapidly becoming much more important than Google. (Number one referrer to my site this week? Twitter.)
GOOGLE: Would you look at all the crazy you’ve created? You could fix this by making your engine more inclusive of websites with common mistakes, introducing some randomness to the order of results (why should everyone’s results be in the same order?), and unforgivingly punishing the businesses that have sprung up to exploit your popularity. Get on it.
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One more thing: I’m not going to allow my comments to become ad space for SEO providers. If you link to an SEO business from your comment, it will be deleted. Unfair, I know. But it’s my site. I get to decide what’s fair. And, in case you haven’t noticed, I think what you’re doing is evil and wrong. I’m not going to allow you to use my site to promote it.
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UPDATE: The Green Hair Theory
links for 2009-10-13
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Social study into lucky/unlucky people shows that how you see yourself is more important than how you actually are.
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The New Yorker provides a look at the process of designing their recent unique triple cover.
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The oft-referenced but little-factchecked "tragedy of the commons" gets a well-deserved smackdown.
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Flickr's 4 BILLIONTH photo.
Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
First came the web, and it was a mess. Servers went up everywhere, the net connected them all, pages bloomed like flowers, and no one could find a damn thing.
Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google with its rankings of most-linked pages, we were finally able to find the pages we needed, mostly.
The ascendency of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.
And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.
Do. Not. Trust. Them.
The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web. I’m going to tell you about the problems, and then tell you the one true way to generate traffic on the web, based on my own 14 years of hits and misses.
1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.
Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you’ll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It’s so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.
Occasionally a darkside SEO master may find some loophole in the Google algorithm to exploit, which might actually lead to an increase in traffic. But that ill-gotten traffic gain won’t last long. Google changes the way it ranks its index monthly (if not more), so even if some SEO technique worked, and usually they don’t, it’ll last for a couple weeks, tops.
And when they do reindex, if they determine that you’ve been acting in bad faith (like hiding links or keywords or other deceptive practices) they’ll drop you like a hot rock. So a temporary gain may result in a lifetime ban.
In the end, you’re sacrificing your brand integrity in a Faustian bargain for an increase in traffic that won’t last the month. And how valuable was that increase, anyway? If you’re tricking people into visiting your site, those visits are going to be bad experiences.
2. SEO is poisoning the web.
Google’s ranking algorithm is based on links. So the most effective way to game their system is to plant links on as many sites as possible, all pointing to your site, linked from specific keywords. This is called Google bombing.
SEO cockroaches employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers to blanket the web with link spam. 99% of spam comments to blogs are these kind of links. The target of these links is not the blog readers, it’s Google.
SEO bastards are behind worms that attack blog services like Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type. Some hack into the blog templates themselves to insert links that are hidden from the readers of that blog, but visible to a Google crawler.
And they create programs to grab expired domain names, automatically create websites, filling the pages with content stolen from RSS feeds, creating billions of bad results for users.
It’s a game, and every link is a score for the SEO jerkwads and their disreputable clients. And every time they win, those of us trying to create quality work and good experiences on the web lose.
Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers. It dumbs-down the content, which turns off your real audience, which ultimately makes you less valuable to advertisers. If you want to know why there’s so much remnant advertising on online news sites, it’s because you’re treating the stories like remnants already.
Remember this: It’s not your job to create content for Google. it’s their job to find the best of the web for their results. Your audience is your readers, not Google’s algorithm.
The One True Way
Which brings us, finally, to the One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web. It’s pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:
Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.
That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.
Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.
Then do it again. And again. You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.
It’ll take time. A lot of time. But it works. And it’s the only thing that does.
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UPDATE 1: SEO FAQ
UPDATE 2: The Green Hair Theory
links for 2009-10-12
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Fun, yes, but also a great example of how interface can change group behavior.