I get a lot of requests from friends to help them with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is not my main area of expertise, but I do have to know a fair amount about it for my job.
One of the main questions that I get from people about SEO is “how can I get my site ranked in the top 10 on Google?” If you know anything about SEO and/or Google, you know the futility of such a question for anyone without significant resources. Small companies that compete in non-niche markets are forced to compete with giant corporations that have the resources to dedicate an entire staff to SEO. The typical large corporation has anywhere from one to ten full-time employees focusing on SEO; working every day to figure out how to get their company ranked number one for a dozen search terms, so competing with them can be very difficult to say the least… but not impossible, which is the beauty of the Internet, but I digress.
To make it even more difficult for small businesses, there are a whole lot of charlatans in the SEO business. These guys promise the world and deliver very little. There are tons of businesses taking people’s money for essentially doing nothing productive. Among the handful of these companies I’ve seen, they all seems to have a few things in common, so before you hire someone to help with SEO, please look at my checklist:
- Google is still the big kid on the block. If any SEO firm tells you that Google no longer owns the largest share of the market and is therefore not important to target for high rankings, that is a sure sign that the company just wants your money. There are a lot of different ways to measure market share, but any way you slice it, Google still has a more-than-significant share of the market. In fact, over the last 10 months (March 2008 to Jan 2009), Google’s market share has grown from 77% to 81%, so they show no signs of losing market share any time soon. Astonishingly, I have seen several SEO firms try to persuade prospective clients that Google is falling out of favor and that focusing on Yahoo! and MSN is the preferred tactic. I suspect the reason that they do this is because it is notoriously difficult to game Google’s system, and these guys know it. As a matter of fact, Google is known to completely de-list (ban) sites that try to game their system, and they are used to dealing with it and good at catching people who try it. As far as I am concerned, Google is really the only game in town when it comes to search, so if an SEO firm you are paying won’t guarantee getting your sites ranked with Google, then what are you paying for? The other 19% of the market that Google doesn’t have? How much is that really worth?
- Submitting Your Site to Search Engines. Another thing that bogus SEO firms will tout is how many search engines they will submit your site to. Many of them will tell you that they will submit your site to “over 100″ search engines. As I pointed out above, Google is really the only game in town, so who cares if your site is submitted to 100 search engines that no one uses? In fact, of the 19% market share that Google doesn’t have, Yahoo!/MSN/AOL account for almost all of that, which means that the 96 other search engines that your site will be submitted to, all have less than 1% of the market combined. So, no matter what the SEO firm tells you, submitting your site to 100 search engines is pretty much worthless.
- Editing Your Meta Tags. Many suspect SEO firms will also tell you that they will “optimize your site” by editing the invisible meta tags on your website (or adding meta tags if you don’t have them). This is also virtually worthless because Google pretty much ignores meta tags and focuses on the actual content of your web pages. Long ago, in the early days of the Internet, pages had unseen tags in the HTML called “Meta Tags” that were used to hold geeky information that was used only by programmers and search engines. A few of the meta tags held information, like the search terms that you wanted people to be able to find your pages under, and a short description of the page that was indexed and stored by primitive search engines, which they would then use as the basis of their searches. This is why Google revolutionized search: They do not use these meta tags at all because they realized that this system was far too easy to rig, which people did all the time. That’s why, about a decade ago, when you searched for a popular term like “CSI Miami”, many search engines would return hundreds and hundreds of results for pornography. The pornographers quickly realized that all they needed to do in order to get their pages ranked highly was to fill their meta tags with popular search terms and bogus page descriptions. Google circumvented this problem by actually looking on the content of the page to create their index and determine search terms that apply. This is why editing the meta tags on your site doesn’t really do anything.
- It’s all About Quality Links To Your Site. In addition to improving search as I described above, Google also created a system of ranking that rewards sites for having more links that point to the site. Google’s theory is that a link to a site is essentially like a “vote” in favor of that site, so the more “votes” for that site, the better ranking it gets from Google. Google rationalizes that the site for any topic that has the most links pointing to it, must be the accepted definitive authority on that topic, so it is ranked at the top. Google further refined this tactic by giving weight to each of the inbound links, so that one link from Wikipedia is far more valuable for ranking than 100 links from small unknown sites. This refinement prevents people from gaming the system by simply cranking out 10,000 dummy websites that serve no purpose other than creating links to a single site in an effort to improve the ranking. This is why I say that it is about “quality” links to your site. Some SEO firms I’ve seen will create a small network of sites that they call a “business directory” or something similar. These sites are really nothing more than a database of all their clients (and perhaps others) that is used to create a small network of web pages that link to one another in an effort to trick Google’s system into thinking that your site is really popular because so many sites link to it. Sometimes these SEO firms will even create several copies of these little networks to try and boost the number of links pointing to their customer’s sites. This is especially a bad tactic because Google actually lowers your ranking (or possibly bans your site altogether) for such behavior. Google cross-references its database to find sites with near-duplicate data. If it finds near-duplicates, then it lowers the weight of those links, or maybe even disregards them or assigns negative value to them (no one really knows because it’s a trade secret closely guarded by Google, but observers have seen the end results and have reported how they think it works). Anyway, the bottom line is that your chances of tricking Google with some scheme to manufacture links to your site will very likely either not work, or even worse, backfire. You are much better off starting a blog and joining some forums on the topic that relates to your site, then post as often as you can with relevant and meaningful content that links back to your site. Like anything worthwhile, its takes time and effort to build up a portfolio of quality links to your site. There are no shortcuts.
In summary, be very careful before hiring a firm to help you with SEO. Many of them are only hoping to take advantage of uninformed people and are not actually providing much value. Many of them may indeed get your site ranked high on Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL, which may be of value to you. But their services should be discounted accordingly if they are not going to help you get ranked with the search engine that 80% of people are using. As is always a good practice, caveat emptor.
2 Comments
Hi Robert, these are definitely some good points on what any small business owner should be watching out for when selecting an SEO consultant or company to work with.
If you look around it’s shocking to see how much some so called “SEO Companies” charge their clients per month and all they do is mass submit to low quality link directories and submit a few articles here and there.
And to speak about the point you made on large companies with SEO departments. One word of advice I can give to people wanting to rank well in Google is don’t let big companies or websites scare you off.
If you actually know what you are doing when it comes to SEO (not just the basics) you will know more then 90% of small and large businesses out there. Don’t think that just because they are a large company they will easily outrank you.
But remember they will outrank you if they are a large company that understands SEO, have money to put towards their SEO campaign, and you’re both going head to head for the same keyword. That’s just part of the game.
Nice post Robert,
Sam
SEO companies are tough. Ive been that route. Ended up doing my own and pay per click.