I attended my first search engine strategies conference in 2003 and I really took to it. I enjoyed modifying sites and seeing the results in search engines. You really feel and see a positive impact being made in the company.
The most unfortunate thing that I see in SEO today is the wild goose chases that are discrediting the entire industry. What’s worse is that for the most part the SEO industry is doing this to its self.
Let me state it load and clear, your super secret ultimate google hack is not real and you have not found the path to SEO GOLD.
Here’s why
First off it is a hack.
Second it’s not supported by any search engine
Third. Search engines make changes constantly without any warning. So even if your trick/hack does work it likely won’t work for long.
Fourth: Even if you are an avid tester of your techniques it doesn’t matter because your technique could be destroyed with one algorithm change
Fifth: Even if your hack does work, by the time you actually get it in place it will no loger work and you are going to look like a fool contradicting your self to a client in a month when your super hack doesn’t actually work
Sixth: Your making your self look like you don’t know what you are doing.
Seventh: You are lying. you are selling something that does not exist. Another word for this is fraud. In three months your client will see through you and you will lose the work. Try this, set realistic expectations, embrace a testing method and include the client in the testing process.
You are hurting your self and tarnishing the industry
I am not saying that you should stop trying to innovate and find a way to get ahead but I am saying you should stop selling it. Many of these theories likely came to be through some sort of observation and good intentions but since we, the mareketers, are at the mercy of the search engines, we can not establish any of these threroies as laws.
REAL SEO experts, enthusiasts etc… know better. For long term strategy success follow the basics and don’t fall for wild goose chase hacks or you will spend all your time cleaning up the mistakes from your
Here are some great posts covering SEO Goose Chases. I’ll admit that I ave fallen for a few of these myself. Some I still do just out of habit.
The real question now is how do we reeducate the average business on white hat SEO that establishes a long term strategy and follows the basics supported by the major search engines.
Looking at the new whitehouse.gov I have to say I really like the site. While clicking through the site I noticed it was architected in a fairly sophisticated manner. Very clean URLs (http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewashington/), no enormous query strings, key-terms and description set up. Very clean code with minimal in line Javascript and css based navigation and more.
So here’s the question: Does whitehouse.gov really need to be optimized for search engine indexing?
More surprising things on the site.
The design / layout and navigation is contemporary, sophisticated and well thought out
Categorized Syndication of headlines
RSS feeds for Agenda, Press, News, Blog, Gallery and Video Media RSS!
This ties in to my recent post on the importance of relevance (relevant) to the individual. I can follow the RSS how I want to.
There’s a robots.txt file but it really isn’t blocking anything
No xml sitemaps? I was betting there would be one given the other seo efforts
Looking at the source code there is a good use of jquery (my favorite library) and Thickbox! Codey Lindley should be proud.
And what are they using to measure website traffic? Webtrends. I wish Icould get a look at those reports. Especially today.
I was forwarded a link to www.crazyegg.com today. I have always followed Marketing Sherpa heatmap research and use the built in click map tracking in Google Analytics, but I have never really tested heatmap tracking on my sites. It looks interesting but not worth paying for until I see the benefits. So is it worth it? Has anyone tried it? What insights has heatmap tracking shown you?
While looking around for a free heatmap tracking service I came across www.fusestats.com. This is more of a full feature reporting service but they do offer a free subscription level that may produce some actionable info. So I am testing fusestats on this site for the next week to see what happens. Look for a followup on heatmap tracking once I start getting some data recorded.
It looks like the newly formed cooperation between Google and Adobe is showing some results already. I mentioned the commitment Google, Adobe and Yahoo were makingto enhance the state of SEO & Flash a couple months ago. Well, last week Google announced a way to track flash interactivity in Google Analytics. There are some steps you need to take in the development of your flash to enable the Google Analytics tracking but it doesn’t look too complicated. See the video below for an example of the implementation.
Is this solid proof that an SEO friendly flash is on the way or possibly already here? If we are able to tell google of Flash “pages” visited and click actions performed, are we also telling Google what to index?
I am willing to bet there will be a Google supported Flash site architecture template released in the next year.
