October 26, 2009
SEO
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Food that repeats on you for hours. Re-runs of ‘Back to the future’. Incompetent politicians …
There are some things that never seem to go away.
Another thing that seems to have been lingering forever is the concept that Keywords Meta Tags are of any use at all in SEO. So, just for the record, and for all those companies that have it in their heads that an important thing to do with SEO is to cram their code full of Keywords Meta Tags, there’s just one message …
The search engines take no notice of them at all. None of those that are worth using anyway. No, not even Google. And if you don’t believe it, here it is from the horses mouth …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&feature=player_embedded
October 22, 2009
Google Adwords, SEO, Website Strategy
1 Comment
“It could be you” is a familar phrase to those who do the lottery. That phrase can equally be applied to any company because every company has the same opportunity to succeed, but come the end of each week, which companies are going to be big winners and which will face a jackpot of:
?????
We thought up this lottery analogy earlier this week when we visited a new client. An established company, they went through a rough patch about 18 months ago which resulted in them needing to shed staff and since then their levels of business had declined further. They are experts in what they do and had little concept of what could be gained through website enhancements and online advertising.
Their view was that the market was in a downturn (not a bad assumption) and that everyone was suffering the same. They must have got to the end of each week thinking that their lucky numbers would never come up. Subjects such as website strategy and online advertising were a mystery to them.
Luckily (for them) we got involved and within just one short month they had the highest level of enquiries they’d had for at least the past couple of years. The point of that sentence is not to blow our own trumpet but to note that the client company can now look forward to each Friday with the prospect of enquiry levels and orders being higher than each preceding week. All from focusing on website strategy and online marketing.
While we’re always happy to see clients gaining plenty of business through what we’ve done, it never ceases to be surprising that so many companies are gradually declining and have nothing to look forward to at the end of each week. Of course, it’s not necessarily just website strategy and promotion that can work for a company – it can be a multitude of other activities that make a difference. But the point is that it’s easy to get into the ‘recession’ mentality and not dig deeper into the options available to create that Friday Jackpot feeling.
Or, to put that another way, it’s like knowing the lottery numbers for the upcoming draw but failing to go and buy a ticket. Is British business suffering? Certainly! Is it avoidable? In most cases, there is tons of business to be readily gained and the buyers are just waiting for potential suppliers to pop into their field of vision and impress them with their websites.
October 7, 2009
SEO
3 Comments
We live in a strange world where search engines such as Google will take into consideration the quality and number of backlinks in order to give a website prominence in the natural results. While there is much talk about how important it is for companies to build backlinks to their websites, and it is, unfortunately, just one of those things that has to be done, let’s consider for a moment how crazy the situation is …
Let’s take two mythical companies – NoTime Ltd and Time2SEO Ltd. Both companies sell widgets. In the ‘real world’, where people have opinions about the quality of products and services provided, if the two companies went head-to-head, the company ‘NoTime Ltd’ would win every time. They win because their widgets are better, their customer focus is superior, and people just generally love them. However, they are still a small company that has no time to do anything except to focus on their core business.
On the other hand, Time2SEO Ltd provide a poor service, sub-standard products, and people don’t really like them much. However, they either have the expertise, or money to spend on others with expertise, and the end result of that is plenty of quality backlinks to their website.
So then Google comes along and although it will judge both websites in different ways, one of the factors it will consider will be the backlinks. It sees minimal links into NoTime Ltd and several, seemingly quality, links into Time2SEO Ltd. The end result: Time2SEO Ltd getting stronger natural search engine positioning when people are searching online for a company that can supply widgets.
So, Time2SEO Ltd, as a sub-standard company, gain stronger search engine visiblity, pull in more enquiries and business, and continue to disappoint customers. Meanwhile, NoTime Ltd have a poorer natural search engine visibility and don’t have the opportunity to provide a great service. Let’s see the outcomes here:
- NoTime Ltd doesn’t gain more business.
- Time2SEO Ltd do gain more business.
- The new clients of Time2SEO Ltd get a sub-standard level of product and service and so are disappointed.
- In effect, search engines, through the way that they judge the popularity of websites, have contributed to client companies (of Time2SEO Ltd) becoming less efficient through finding Time2SEO Ltd in the search results (client companies buy widgets, the experience is negative, which makes the client companies less efficient than if they’d found a better supplier such as NoTime Ltd).
So what’s the answer here? Is it for NoTime Ltd to themselves focus on getting quality backlinks to their website so that they can try and rise about Time2SEO Ltd? No, because most companies in the real world don’t have the time or money to invest in sorting out backlinks, never mind all the other SEO stuff they need to do. They also don’t believe that they should have to.
The answer, quite simply, is for the search engines to look at things afresh. Allowing searchers to find companies in natural search results partially because of their backlinks strategy makes a mockery of search engines wanting to supply ‘quality’ results. The quality is on the surface because many of those companies high in the natural search results aren’t actually the best companies to deal with – they’re just the best at raising their visibility.
It would take a brave search engine indeed to go down the route of introducing a true definition of ‘quality’ into their ranking criteria. For there to be systems whereby the customers of companies grade the level of service or product they get, and that’s what counts as a factor in natural search engine positioning – now there’s something that would be beneficial to everyone (except the poor companies who need to up their game). Such a system would have to incorporate ways to detect fraudulent gradings of companies of course but there are ways to achieve this. Sadly, coming towards the end of 2009, there is still very little innovation coming out of the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (when it comes to natural search engine positioning criteria), but the opportunities are there for the player who really wants to make natural search engine results genuinely of the best quality possible.
