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.

SEO isn’t rocket science – but neither is playing the piano.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that successful SEO is easy. It isn’t. It takes commitment and hard work. This is probably the single biggest mistake that people make – believing that it is easy. But most people that do fall away and those of us that are left know it’s not easy. So what – apart from thinking it’s easy – are the most common SEO mistakes that we make and how can we avoid them?

These are some of the top issues that are most often overlooked. We all make mistakes but if we learn from them they’re not mistakes, they’re lessons.

1. SEO Optimized Domain Name

Just because Google, Apple and WalMart have quirky brand names – it doesn’t mean that your idea for a funky brand will be any use. Incorporating keywords into your domain name is a highly valuable  SEO technique. It’s much easier to rank highly with pizzadelivery.com than it is PapaPizza.com. Papa Pizza might sound like a great name for a Pizza business but it won’t help to get you orders online.

And get your domain suffix right. .com is best if you have a global market, but if your focus on Canada for example, .ca will outrank .com. And don’t be too dismissive of other suffixes either. pizzadeliver.biz is likely to outrank new-pizza-delivery-online.net

Consider the domain name carefully balancing the pros and cons of the keyword you are target, the use of hyphens and the suffix.

2. Content Quality

Sites copied from others, bought content, poorly presented content and non expert content are irrelevant to the reader and the search engines know this. You risk losing rank severely if you adopt these approaches to producing content. There is no substitute for good quality content and no short cuts. It’s best to stick to a niche that you have some expertise in or enthusiasm for. Read SEO Lesson4: Face Up to it. Some People Just Don’t Like You and SEO Lesson 3: Never Mind the Quality – Feel the Width

3. Quality of Backlinks

Backlinks are important but rather than concentrating time and effort on posting in every forum and commenting on as many blog posts as you can find, spend some time being selective and make sure you get links from quality, highly ranked sites. Post in very poor quality sights and you’ll be seen as spammy.

4. Meta Description

You may have heard that the meta tags on your site will have little or no effect on your ranking. You might want to put some keywords there anyway just in case because it can’t do any harm – Right?

Wrong. The meta description of your site is the text that appear in Google Search results. If you don’t have a meta description, Google will present an extract from your page. If you have a well written and compelling meta description, you won’t improve your ranking but you will certainly improve your CTR from the Google.

Page 1 on Google is only useful if people then click on your site. Ranking is of no use if your click through rate (CTR) is poor.

5. Image Tags

Images are grea to enhance content but the search engines can’t read them. Alway ensure that description and alt tags are included that use keyword appropriately.

6. Wrong Anchor Text on Internal Links

“Click Here” is a wasted opportunity. Always use keyword anchor text when linking internally

7. Keyword Ambiguity

This is subtle, but take some time to consider keywords and phrases to understand how they might be used by search engine users. You may want a keyword or phrase that is search very regulalry but be careful in case it is being search for different reasons than you think.

For example: you want to set up a company offering to organize office parties – a kind of mobile DJ set up. You think that “dance in the office” might be a good keyword phrase. Your research tells you that that phrase is used quite often. Perhaps there’s lots of demand for office party DJs. Stop and think about it. Try putting “dance in the office” into Google. When you see Ricky Gervais staring back at you, you realize that, while people often use that phrase in Google, it’s not for what you were thinking.

8. Spend Too Much Time Checking Your Ranking?

Measure your tomato plants every day and feed them once a week and watch them die. Water them once a day and measure them once a week – they’ll thrive. Read SEO Lesson 2: Don’t Count Things That Happen – Make Things Happen That Count

9. Respect the Guidelines

Don’t buy into Black Hat techniques. A Black Hat career will be short lived. You may not be stupid, but compared to the might of Google, Yahoo Bing and the honest internet community – you are. Read SEO Lesson 5: Google is Your Friend

10. Over Ambitious Keyword Choice

Always check the competition for a keyword and never believe that because there are lots of searches on a keyword that you can get a piece of it. You can’t – not unless you have real money to invest. Read Fundamentals of SEO Lesson3: Choose Your Fish and Pond Size