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Here's the situation -- an 85,000 page site designed to cover localized searches for a nationwide industry. While developing the master template, the vendor couldn't or wouldn't do a few variable tags I thought were crucial. Vendor didn't think they would matter. Turns out they did and the project fizzled. I built a site to support the mother site with link juice, and those pages ranked better than the ones on the mother ship!
Spent 03-04 as the online marketing manager for a three-site network selling satellite Internet access. The sites were painstakingly keyworded, aggressively SEO'd and strategically linked to get double SERP listings. On term after search term, we'd routinely get four to six results in the Google Top 10. One other site (a resource aggregator) used to get double entries in this field, so we put a big ad on that site and used this search engine domination to fuel a $7 million a year company.
I'm routinely asked, after a site has been nearly completed, to dress up the meta tags and make it SEO-ready. And I have to say no. It's like pulling a cake out of an oven, handing it to a chef, and telling him to now make it great. It's not the tags, it's the interplay between the tags, the content and the entire site architecture that moves the needle. Good SEO starts in the DNA.
I make people money by combining Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with effective online marketing messages and techniques.
1. There's a difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and SEO. SEM is all about paying for clicks in paid listings. SEO says let the other suckers pay for the clicks – that if you know what you're doing and you put in the work, you can get Web sites into top rankings and get the clicks for free.
2. Once people find your site, you have to convert them into customers, which means giving them the information they need and the motivational push needed to click to buy. Organizing Web content is known as Information Architecture; apply it to commerce and it's called Persuasion Architecture.
IMPORTANT NOTE: In the SEO world there's the notion of black hat / white practices, that is, whether you cheat to achieve top rankings of whether you give Google what it wants to see -- timely, relevant content -- and gain your top results the old-fashioned way (by earning them). My first experience seeing cheating punished came with Yahoo in '98, and I lived through Google's massive Florida algo update in 03. Just to be clear, when I'm talking to you about SEO, it's white hat all the way.
One thing a lot of SEO companies forget is that search engine robots don't buy products. People do. You have to find a way to integrate all the stuff needed for the bots without alienating the human. You've probably encountered a spammy, trick-the-search-engine page and left feeling aggravated. Just remember that page wasn't done by me.
Simple, really. Lots of people in the SEO world see optimization as a game, a matter of techniques and tricks to manipulate search engine returns (the most anchor text wins!) Considering one of the founders of Google once made a working printer out of Legos, good luck thinking you're going to outsmart brainiacs like that. My approach is simple. Google, and other engines, are designed to confirm relevance and reward quality. So I start with quality, not trickery.
Of course there is. There are certain tags and certain ways to coordinate information in those tags, but that's not only too geeky, it's too close to a magician giving away his secrets. So let me put it this way: Seems to me that not many people stay in SEO long-term -- that lots of people move on to something else when some of their tried and true techniques aren't so tried and true anymore. If you focus on quality instead of techniques, you can stick around a lot longer. And get better.
... I got scoreboard. Want to know how I've done in the SEO world? Put up solid numbers.
In the SEO world you never want to make guarantees because there are so many variable beyond your control. That being said, I've been at this long enough to start tripping on the line between cocky and confident. Because here's the deal: Once I've had a chance to scope out what's possible, I have yet to fail. That doesn't mean I can take the home page of Timmy's Garage and make it rank higher than Ford.com. It means I can do a really good of estimating the chance of success, and if that means I have to say no to your project, just remember it's nothing personal. I'm not going to take your money if it's a longshot to produce a good result.
Quick story: thanks to my girlfriend, I got roped into a conversation with a fella about helping with his site. I asked him what he did and he told me he was a florist. Told him immediately I couldn't help him. Kind of shocked, and probably thinking me rude, he asked me why. "Because I'd be competing against myself."
It's been years since I did that work, but go to Google, type in "roses" or "flowers" plus any city in the Tidewater region. You'll see one site over and over. Always nice when your work holds up.
*With every page on this site being a design test, credit here to goes to the Blueprint CSS project.
Not like I'll use Blueprint forever (or maybe even ever again), but I have to compliment the really excellent thinking behind it. Good work, y'all.