The Problem with S.E.O. Shortcuts

Don’t get me wrong. I understand how important S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) is: In the age of Google, no company with a digital presence can be effective there without a fluent understanding of S.E.O., and an equal dose of diligence when it comes to using every tool at its disposal to make its content easily indexable and a breeze to find in searches. You don’t want to show up on page five of a search. You don’t even want to merely show up on page 1; you want to be in the top 3 of the search results.

How you do this, however, matters. Creating good content, properly tagging your pages, using bookmarking and sharing tools throughout your sites to help people find and link to specific pages are among the things you should be doing. Surrendering chunk of cash to one of thousands of shady S.E.O. outfits, however, is not a good idea.

I routinely receive correspondence like this from SEO companies trying to attract my business, and it makes me laugh. First, it’s SPAM, which is ironic in and of itself. (An S.E.O. company should know how to get to the top of searches about S.E.O. and shouldn’t have to SPAM anyone, right?) But what’s fascinating to me is that outfits like this show you exactly how they work. Check out the main body of a comment my trusty SPAM filter caught this morning on this very blog:

Penetrate awareness of your target audienceby using an integrated marketing strategy, which in many cases would include a well-planned website marketing strategy. If you can get yourself to become just a little “obsessed” with business marketing, then you’ll tend to read more marketing books, attend more business marketing seminars, and discover more marketing websites, newsletters, and blogs that will provide you with valuable small business marketing ideas and inspiration. If your website isn’t converting the way it ought to be, try to pinpoint its weaknesses and correct them. If the solution doesn’t jump right out at you, ask your associates, acquaintances, neighbors, or spouse what their initial gut reaction is to your latest print ad, website landing page, a business marketing postcard, or a radio ad. Get your products, services & business featured in blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers, and on TV. Make sure, of course, that you are allowed to include one or two links back to your website. This will accomplish two objectives: 1) You’ll probably draw in anywhere from a “trickle” to a “flood” of additional traffic to your website, and 2) Inbound links to your site from other relevant, high quality sites can help improve your search engine positioning (ranking) in Google, resulted in more targeted traffic and potential customers.

Nowadays internet marketers must use the right internet marketing tools to succeed. We use (company name removed) for all our marketing tools. Having good tools is essentail to success in the marketing world.

Thanks for the post great information.

Joe

No offense, “Joe,” but no thank you.

I won’t comment on the lack of punctuation or the typos. What I want to draw your attention to is the keyword soup Joe has cooked up for us. It’s amazing, really, how many keywords this guy has managed to squeeze into just a dozen sentences.

This basically amounts to what many S.E.O. “services” do. Unfortunately, cooking up keyword soup and ladling it all over the gears of a company’s digital properties is not intelligent, ethical or effective S.E.O. methodology.

Before you write me angry posts, note that I didn’t say all. I said many. I don’t necessarily mean your S.E.O. company.

Also note that this post is not an invitation to turn comments into sales pitches for your S.E.O. services. I will not remove sales pitches from this post’s comment section, but be warned that if any are posted, they will serve as examples of the very type of slimy and ineffective “tactics” (for lack of a better word) this post aims to illustrate.

Good content, frequently updated pages, making content sharable, building a community that will want to interact with your content and help others do the same, patience, diligence and attention to detail, these are the ways to think about S.E.O.. Hiring a company to spill instant keyword soup all over your websites isn’t. Be very careful who you hire for this type of endeavor. (Note: If the S.E.O. company you are talking to now assures you that they are not “one of these types of companies,” ask them to explain to you in detail how they are different. Don’t let them off the hook until you understand their explanation.)

Cheers.

(Now let’s just hope Google doesn’t tag me as a spammer for having listed all these random keywords in one post.)