SEO Lessons

I’ve written before about quality. (See: Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width) Quality comes with a budget and inevitably, there will have to be compromises, particulalry if you are a SMB or individual working at home. But there is never a good excuse for sloppy delivery. Whatever you deliver, have a little respect for your customer – especially if they have parted with cash for what you claim to offer.

I am not going to bad mouth either Michael Roberts or Ed Dale, but … Traffic Bug?

(The background: Michael Roberts is behind Traffic Bug. It seemed like a nice idea – not great but OK, for newbies, at first glance. It claims to help get your site indexed quickly and it will create backlinks while you sleep. Ed Dale is behind the Thirty Day Challenge. I like Ed and I like the Thirty Day Challenge. Ed recommended the use of Traffic Bug during the 2009 Thirty Day Challenge. Traffic bug didn’t live up to the claims made. You can read about it on the many forums where its failing have been discussed.)

I gave Traffic Bug a try in 2009. I became suspicious early on. The site was down without adequate explanation for a while – some excuse about software upgrade. The support pages were full of spelling errors and poor grammar – it didn’t even feel like a beta program. Yet they  where asking for money! But I was patient and I gave it a proper trial. Afterall, a recommendation from Ed Dale has some credibility. But eventually I gave up and paid them nothing. It simply wasn’t adding any value.

Today I got an email from Michael. The email begins:

“Well there is no doubt that Traffic-Bug is working better than ever”

This is untrue. There is a great deal of doubt that Traffic Bug is working better than ever? It isn’t working. As Michael explains in his email:

“The bad news is Google visited our site …. and put a warning up on our site”

This warning says that Traffic Bug may harm your computer. It goes on:

“So this morning we have requested another review from Google to scan the site and remove the warning but they are taking their sweet time with it”

Like it’s Google’s fault? Their sweet time? Like they’ve got nothing better to do than try to dig Traffic Bug out of a hole?

Michael says in his email, by way of explanation:

“On Sunday morning a hacker attacked our server trying to shut us down. Well they failed miserably and no damage was done”

Are you kidding? No damage was done? Traffic Bug is Toast! The hackers seem to have achieved their objective perfectly.

The SEO Lesson

The 3 worst internet marketing mistakes you can make.

• Don’t Respect your customers. Issue “software” with support pages that look like an early draft of a pre beta project that doesn’t work.
• Host your software in a vunerable place so that disgruntled customers can piss on it.
• While explaining/apologising for faults, tell lies to your customers.

Seriously, you have to respect your customers. If you are expecting them to part company with their money, do them the service of working for it. And if you are unlucky enough to suffer the ultimate humiliation – admit defeat. Accept you screwed up. You failed. Give up.

But start again – Immediately. This time, do it properly.

Remember – failure is temporary. Giving up is permanent.

Good luck.

After a brief and torrid relationship, it’s appearing not to have been a marriage made in heaven.

There is speculation that the reported removal of Google Search from the iPhone OS 4 heralds what could be one of the biggest upsets in internet search. Yahoo and Bing already close to Microsoft, are hardly great bedfellows for Apple to consider as an alternative and without Google, what will Apple do? Develop their own search capability?

For years now, search engine optimization has focused around Google. Yahoo has been important and Bing is becoming more important, but with Google off the iPhone and increasing use of mobile devices for search, the future of SEO is looking less certain everyday.

The SEO Lesson

Always look to see how the rules evolve and develop SEO strategies that are agile to embrace change and adopt new methods. Take great care not to invest too heavily in a single approach

As they say, adapt or die.

In the 1990s, one of the performance tricks to speed up a web site was to load all images on the front page but to shrink their size and hide them somewhere near the bottom. The home page would take quite some time to load but after that, once images were cached, the site seemed to perform at blistering speed. In the days of 14,400 modems when only the super nerdy geeks had access to a T1, speed of performance was important.

This seems terribly primitive today but that was in the day. Much of the content we use today was simply impossible in 1994. YouTube wasn’t so much invented in the 21st century – it became possible in the 21st century. Bandwidth used to be actually rationed in order to prevent it being swallowed up by what was seen as excessive multimedia usage.

So when I see that Google now officially scores web page speed (in the great Weblinx as well as many other places) it is no surprise – indeed it is a surprise to see it has taken so long. The search engines add value by filtering and prioritizing according to relevance. And user experience is rlevant to just about everybody. If there are two equally relevant pages for my search, I am pleased that Google now prioritizes the one that will load more quickly.

But is this news to the Web Designers? Should this be something we attend to urgently?

Answer: No!

Putting it simply, if you had to be told that user experience was important, you have some more fundamental things to learn. Whatever your website aims to achieve it will achieve it better if your users don’t have to wait for it. This is more fundamental than ranking – it is the most basic of very basic usability.

The SEO Lesson

There are somethings that will make an incremental change to your ranking and, as we all know, incremental changes to ranking can make a huge difference. But don’t be blinded to the obvious. Good content, good layout and good performance are absolutely critical.

Enhancing your site for speed to get a better ranking is like filling your gas tank and calling it fine tuning.

Duh!