Every few months, someone seems to attack search engine optimization. SEOs are often quick to rise in defense of their profession. I’ve done that plenty myself, in the past. But a barrage of recent cold-call SEO pitches in my inbox even has me hating SEO.
Of course, I don’t really hate SEO. That’s because I know the difference between:
SEO and search engine spam
SEO and snake-oil promises
SEO remains the act of gaining free traffic from search engines, and also to me, gaining that traffic in ways that don’t put you at risk of being banned or penalized by those search engines. It’s a perfectly acceptable activity that even the search engines encourage. That’s why Google itself offers a guide to SEO.
Of course, I don’t really hate SEO. That’s because I know the difference between:
SEO and search engine spam
SEO and snake-oil promises
SEO remains the act of gaining free traffic from search engines, and also to me, gaining that traffic in ways that don’t put you at risk of being banned or penalized by those search engines. It’s a perfectly acceptable activity that even the search engines encourage. That’s why Google itself offers a guide to SEO.
For years now, so-called SEO experts have been preaching a rhetoric of “Content is King” philosophy, backed by little substance, few or no examples, and without reference to analytic reports. Grassroots search engine optimization involved website optimization, which later became the poor stepchild of modern day SEO after years of over-analyzing ranking signals. I believe that content is not king. What is king and will continue to be the primary driver of long term SEO success involves the following:
Webpage and Website Performance (Not-So-Secret Code)
Convincing Landing Pages for “Intent Content”
Useful Landing Pages for “Interest Content”
Outreach Capabilities & Response Rate Optimization
Content Vs Code
The difference between content and code was first explained to me in 1998 when I was a webmaster with a talent for creating over-sized buttons with 90′s style bevel and emboss features (okay, and possibly some annoying animation too).
Content is anything displayed to the user in their web browser. Code is anything within < tags > not displayed to user. Simple, right?
For the greater part of the 2000 era, we as webmasters (website optimizers) focused on code structure and website-level performance focal points; later injecting our keywords into the framework and earning top placement in MSN (now Bing.com) in a matter of weeks. Once we placed #1, we knew that all that would be required to earn the same position in Google was links, since links were Larry Page’s legacy PageRank scoring system.
Enter “content is king”. Since nobody will link to awful content (at least not naturally or without an incentive), webmasters have become obsessed with forcing business owners to deliver writing and digital media that go beyond the scope of what a typical business owner could possibly create themselves. In fact, the last quinquennium or so we’ve become convinced that it’s this keyword content that’s required to beat Google updates such as May Day, Panda and Penguin.
Webpage and Website Performance (Not-So-Secret Code)
Convincing Landing Pages for “Intent Content”
Useful Landing Pages for “Interest Content”
Outreach Capabilities & Response Rate Optimization
Content Vs Code
The difference between content and code was first explained to me in 1998 when I was a webmaster with a talent for creating over-sized buttons with 90′s style bevel and emboss features (okay, and possibly some annoying animation too).
Content is anything displayed to the user in their web browser. Code is anything within < tags > not displayed to user. Simple, right?
For the greater part of the 2000 era, we as webmasters (website optimizers) focused on code structure and website-level performance focal points; later injecting our keywords into the framework and earning top placement in MSN (now Bing.com) in a matter of weeks. Once we placed #1, we knew that all that would be required to earn the same position in Google was links, since links were Larry Page’s legacy PageRank scoring system.
Enter “content is king”. Since nobody will link to awful content (at least not naturally or without an incentive), webmasters have become obsessed with forcing business owners to deliver writing and digital media that go beyond the scope of what a typical business owner could possibly create themselves. In fact, the last quinquennium or so we’ve become convinced that it’s this keyword content that’s required to beat Google updates such as May Day, Panda and Penguin.
White Hat, Black Hat & No Hat SEO
Search engine spam, to me, isn’t SEO. Some who practice it may disagree. “Black Hat SEO” to them remains SEO. Just because they don’t want to follow the rules a search engine puts down doesn’t mean they aren’t doing SEO.
OK, then we have two types of SEO, “white hat” and “black hat.” And it’s black hat SEO alone that cause all the problems, right? Nope. That’s because you’ve also got some supposed “white hats” who don’t violate any rules but also don’t actually provide any SEO value. Let’s call them “no hats.”
The No Hat Pitch
I’m pretty sick of no hat SEOs. That’s because they send me crud like this:
The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means holidays, parties, family, friends, and a lost chance to save money on search engine marketing, Website Designing/Development.
We saved the best promotion for the end of the year! ONLY $50!! HuRRy UP!!
Search Engine Optimization. Love your website? Save initial SEO setup fee and see your website on first page of search engines.
No Black-hat methods.
Take a trial for just $50 and get linked with 100 quality websites having page rank up to 5.
Our team works directly with you to meet our target which is #1 position on search engines. We sincerely believe that the above services will merit with the requirements of your Organization
I’m pretty sure spending $50 will do absolutely nothing for me or anyone using this firm. Maybe they’ll somehow place 100 links on the web, and maybe, just maybe, they really will do it without “black hat” methods.
But those links probably won’t really give my site any benefit. What’s the anchor text going to be? If it’s the same for each page, going up all at the same time, might that trigger some unnatural link warning from Google? And even with low cost labor being used, $50 simply doesn’t cover the necessary time to understand what a site is about, to research other sites and then engage in communication to obtain quality links.
Another No Hat Pitch
Here’s another, sent to me and all the Marketing Land editors through our contact form:
I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough organic & social media traffic on your website.
I would like to update you that your website is still not ranked on the top pages of Google SERPs for your popular keywords (Products). Your loss is your competitor’s gain i.e. the traffic which could have generated quality sales for you goes to your competitors as they rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) organically. Reasons:
HTML and other on-page errors are present on your website.
Low number of internal and external quality links present on your website.
Duplicate or low quality contents present in your website without any regular update.
Need to update fresh contents on your website and blogs as per the latest Google guideline.
Broken Links and Poison words might be present in your website.
Social media profile needs to be updated regularly.
Long gone are the days when Google used to give priority to websites of keyword based domains or websites with huge number of links. Now Google counts each and every detail to verify if your website is relevant to the keywords you are promoting for. A single un-wanted link or a duplicate content can lead your website to be penalized by Google.
We are a leading website promotion company providing online promotion, SMO, Reputation Management, Content (both web and promotional content) fixing services to clients.
We have a team of 240+ SEO professional working 24*7. Our team of dedicated Google Analytic and Adwords certified professionals excel in promoting and increasing the visibility of a website in various search engines (including the latest Google Panda and Penguin updates), which will directly help in increasing traffics for your website.
Unlike other SEO companies we do not believe in talking rather we believe in delivering what we promise to our clients. We provide guaranteed services or money back-guarantee to all our clients who consider working with us.
If you are getting rigid by paying a huge amount in PPC then Organic listing by using white hat technique will be definitely a right choice for you. As the rate of conversion is more in organic listing as compared to PPC, eventually it will be an absolute gain for you.
This email just tells you the fraction of things we do, our optimization process involves many other technical factors which can be sent to you on your request. If you would like to know more about our services then please write us back else you can give us a call us in our number below.
The email is crap right from the first sentence, given that the person sending this has no idea what keywords are important to our site.
The itemization of problems isn’t correct, but then again, neither is some of the grammar in the itemization. But some people might believe this, in the way they might believe someone pitching an unnecessary product to remove mold in their home or to prevent a car from developing rust.
If this company really does have a team of certified Google Analytics and Google AdWords people, I’d hope Google would pull those certifications, which mean nothing in terms of guaranteeing SEO results. It’s like saying you have a team of certified carpenters and electricians who are going to try and fix your plumbing problems.
The Terrible Public Faces Of “SEO”
Pitches like these cause some people to hate SEO simply because they’re so so damn annoying. Others end up hating SEO because they’re taken in and waste their money on something they thought was SEO but wasn’t. Either way, it’s not a pretty public face that some associate with SEO.
This leads to what I’ve called crap hat SEO. Crap hat SEO produces the second terrible public face that people see.
Crap Hat SEO
A crap hat SEO doesn’t give a damn about anything. They may be generating hundreds or thousands of pages of nonsensical copy using software, then using more software to comment spam the hell out of sites and pretty much not caring about what type of mess they leave behind, as long as they rank.
And mess it is. Publishers who own those comment spammed sites have to deal with the garbage, and they blame the damn “SEOs” for causing it. You also have some searchers who encounter junk pages that don’t really deliver what they’re looking for eventually realize there’s this “SEO thing” that screwed everything up.
The SEO Reputation Problem
I wish I had an easy solution for these things, but I don’t. What I can say is that SEO is not alone among industries where some bad actors can give the entire profession a terrible reputation.
For example, anyone who’s ever taken out a home loan knows that in the following weeks, you’ll get inundated with “official letters” of all types, stamped “time sensitive” or “important notice” and sounding authoritative by listing your loan balance or lender.
These pitches for insurance policies or refinancing offers are crap, public facing crap that give the insurance and mortgage industries a bad name.
But both industries provide necessary services, and there are good people and companies in those industries. That’s why they continue on, and it’s why SEO continues on despite every few months someone writing an article declaring that it’s going to die.
Search engine spam, to me, isn’t SEO. Some who practice it may disagree. “Black Hat SEO” to them remains SEO. Just because they don’t want to follow the rules a search engine puts down doesn’t mean they aren’t doing SEO.
OK, then we have two types of SEO, “white hat” and “black hat.” And it’s black hat SEO alone that cause all the problems, right? Nope. That’s because you’ve also got some supposed “white hats” who don’t violate any rules but also don’t actually provide any SEO value. Let’s call them “no hats.”
The No Hat Pitch
I’m pretty sick of no hat SEOs. That’s because they send me crud like this:
The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means holidays, parties, family, friends, and a lost chance to save money on search engine marketing, Website Designing/Development.
We saved the best promotion for the end of the year! ONLY $50!! HuRRy UP!!
Search Engine Optimization. Love your website? Save initial SEO setup fee and see your website on first page of search engines.
No Black-hat methods.
Take a trial for just $50 and get linked with 100 quality websites having page rank up to 5.
Our team works directly with you to meet our target which is #1 position on search engines. We sincerely believe that the above services will merit with the requirements of your Organization
I’m pretty sure spending $50 will do absolutely nothing for me or anyone using this firm. Maybe they’ll somehow place 100 links on the web, and maybe, just maybe, they really will do it without “black hat” methods.
But those links probably won’t really give my site any benefit. What’s the anchor text going to be? If it’s the same for each page, going up all at the same time, might that trigger some unnatural link warning from Google? And even with low cost labor being used, $50 simply doesn’t cover the necessary time to understand what a site is about, to research other sites and then engage in communication to obtain quality links.
Another No Hat Pitch
Here’s another, sent to me and all the Marketing Land editors through our contact form:
I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough organic & social media traffic on your website.
I would like to update you that your website is still not ranked on the top pages of Google SERPs for your popular keywords (Products). Your loss is your competitor’s gain i.e. the traffic which could have generated quality sales for you goes to your competitors as they rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) organically. Reasons:
HTML and other on-page errors are present on your website.
Low number of internal and external quality links present on your website.
Duplicate or low quality contents present in your website without any regular update.
Need to update fresh contents on your website and blogs as per the latest Google guideline.
Broken Links and Poison words might be present in your website.
Social media profile needs to be updated regularly.
Long gone are the days when Google used to give priority to websites of keyword based domains or websites with huge number of links. Now Google counts each and every detail to verify if your website is relevant to the keywords you are promoting for. A single un-wanted link or a duplicate content can lead your website to be penalized by Google.
We are a leading website promotion company providing online promotion, SMO, Reputation Management, Content (both web and promotional content) fixing services to clients.
We have a team of 240+ SEO professional working 24*7. Our team of dedicated Google Analytic and Adwords certified professionals excel in promoting and increasing the visibility of a website in various search engines (including the latest Google Panda and Penguin updates), which will directly help in increasing traffics for your website.
Unlike other SEO companies we do not believe in talking rather we believe in delivering what we promise to our clients. We provide guaranteed services or money back-guarantee to all our clients who consider working with us.
If you are getting rigid by paying a huge amount in PPC then Organic listing by using white hat technique will be definitely a right choice for you. As the rate of conversion is more in organic listing as compared to PPC, eventually it will be an absolute gain for you.
This email just tells you the fraction of things we do, our optimization process involves many other technical factors which can be sent to you on your request. If you would like to know more about our services then please write us back else you can give us a call us in our number below.
The email is crap right from the first sentence, given that the person sending this has no idea what keywords are important to our site.
The itemization of problems isn’t correct, but then again, neither is some of the grammar in the itemization. But some people might believe this, in the way they might believe someone pitching an unnecessary product to remove mold in their home or to prevent a car from developing rust.
If this company really does have a team of certified Google Analytics and Google AdWords people, I’d hope Google would pull those certifications, which mean nothing in terms of guaranteeing SEO results. It’s like saying you have a team of certified carpenters and electricians who are going to try and fix your plumbing problems.
The Terrible Public Faces Of “SEO”
Pitches like these cause some people to hate SEO simply because they’re so so damn annoying. Others end up hating SEO because they’re taken in and waste their money on something they thought was SEO but wasn’t. Either way, it’s not a pretty public face that some associate with SEO.
This leads to what I’ve called crap hat SEO. Crap hat SEO produces the second terrible public face that people see.
Crap Hat SEO
A crap hat SEO doesn’t give a damn about anything. They may be generating hundreds or thousands of pages of nonsensical copy using software, then using more software to comment spam the hell out of sites and pretty much not caring about what type of mess they leave behind, as long as they rank.
And mess it is. Publishers who own those comment spammed sites have to deal with the garbage, and they blame the damn “SEOs” for causing it. You also have some searchers who encounter junk pages that don’t really deliver what they’re looking for eventually realize there’s this “SEO thing” that screwed everything up.
The SEO Reputation Problem
I wish I had an easy solution for these things, but I don’t. What I can say is that SEO is not alone among industries where some bad actors can give the entire profession a terrible reputation.
For example, anyone who’s ever taken out a home loan knows that in the following weeks, you’ll get inundated with “official letters” of all types, stamped “time sensitive” or “important notice” and sounding authoritative by listing your loan balance or lender.
These pitches for insurance policies or refinancing offers are crap, public facing crap that give the insurance and mortgage industries a bad name.
But both industries provide necessary services, and there are good people and companies in those industries. That’s why they continue on, and it’s why SEO continues on despite every few months someone writing an article declaring that it’s going to die.
Intent Content Vs Interest Content
I challenge you to break your content into 2 types: Intent & Interest. Your intent content is fundamental to your on-page SEO strategy. For retailers, these are your category and product detail pages. For lead gen, these pages are the services and/or specialist pages that convert visitors into customers, but also have a main keyword theme (like “SEO Expert”).
NOTE: Your web design company should not be charging you extra for fundamental best practices – there is no extra effort required to apply SEO best practices.
Analyze your competitors’ versions of your pages and make yours more convincing (sit in on a sales call with your best rep), but also make sure you’ve thought about the following website-level elements, which may make all the difference:
Page title and description are unique and use title tag principles, while insuring that they fit in the SERPS without truncation
Using only one h1 tag per page with a main topic/theme in mind
Your code does not need to use valid CSS3 or HTML5, but it does help insure cross-browser and cross-device compatibility and should at least be considered.
Webpages should look great on any browser, but a mobile (tap-friendly) version will be the absolute best experience to Smartphone users (nearly 20% of all searches are done on mobile devices now)
Using a Content Delivery Network (such as MaxCDN) will significantly optimize files and download times.
Performance matters. If it didn’t, why would Google create PageSpeed tools? WebpageTest.org uses this tool to give you an quick way to test your webpages.
Your pages should be structured like a college essay, with a strong title, short heading, main thesis/first paragraph, sub-topics (subheadings), examples, bullet/numbered lists, images and video (as applicable) along with links to additional resources, references, and similar content the reader might be interested in.
Check for broken links and images, along with alt and height/width attributes for accessibility & performance improvement.
Verify that your content is unique by copying a line of text from the page and pasting it into Google within quotes.
Include a site map for users (rich in keywords that define the content) and a site map for search engines (XML)
I could go on forever, but nowhere above do you see anything that requires a cost on your end, just your time or the time of an intern (or bored receptionist). Intent keywords aren’t difficult to rank for within most search engines if your site scores well with all the tools mentioned above.
I challenge you to break your content into 2 types: Intent & Interest. Your intent content is fundamental to your on-page SEO strategy. For retailers, these are your category and product detail pages. For lead gen, these pages are the services and/or specialist pages that convert visitors into customers, but also have a main keyword theme (like “SEO Expert”).
NOTE: Your web design company should not be charging you extra for fundamental best practices – there is no extra effort required to apply SEO best practices.
Analyze your competitors’ versions of your pages and make yours more convincing (sit in on a sales call with your best rep), but also make sure you’ve thought about the following website-level elements, which may make all the difference:
Page title and description are unique and use title tag principles, while insuring that they fit in the SERPS without truncation
Using only one h1 tag per page with a main topic/theme in mind
Your code does not need to use valid CSS3 or HTML5, but it does help insure cross-browser and cross-device compatibility and should at least be considered.
Webpages should look great on any browser, but a mobile (tap-friendly) version will be the absolute best experience to Smartphone users (nearly 20% of all searches are done on mobile devices now)
Using a Content Delivery Network (such as MaxCDN) will significantly optimize files and download times.
Performance matters. If it didn’t, why would Google create PageSpeed tools? WebpageTest.org uses this tool to give you an quick way to test your webpages.
Your pages should be structured like a college essay, with a strong title, short heading, main thesis/first paragraph, sub-topics (subheadings), examples, bullet/numbered lists, images and video (as applicable) along with links to additional resources, references, and similar content the reader might be interested in.
Check for broken links and images, along with alt and height/width attributes for accessibility & performance improvement.
Verify that your content is unique by copying a line of text from the page and pasting it into Google within quotes.
Include a site map for users (rich in keywords that define the content) and a site map for search engines (XML)
I could go on forever, but nowhere above do you see anything that requires a cost on your end, just your time or the time of an intern (or bored receptionist). Intent keywords aren’t difficult to rank for within most search engines if your site scores well with all the tools mentioned above.
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