A week ago I wrote an article which suggested that many “search engine optimisation” (SEO) consultants out there were little more than charlatans, and I’d like to thank the many of you who emailed me with sympathetic messages based on your own experiences. There are some great ones out there, although they rightly expect decent fees, and I do understand that it’s often a sign of the immaturity of the customers that forces even good SEO consultants to resort to claiming they’ll “get you to number one on Google”, because that’s what the customers want.
For what it’s worth, the “SEO industry” is wrestling with its conscience: I’m sure many of us will, at one point in our careers, have been the “good guys” in a market where the snake oil salesmen have moved in, and it’s an infuriating situation. There was a time in the nineties, when I was a trade magazine editor, which saw the market swamped by the “colour separations” cowboys, many of whom were peddling entries in magazines which weren’t even going to be published. I thought the only way to let everyone know that my own magazine, Industrial Technology, wasn’t in that market, was to shout from the rooftops that “colour separations” was a meaningless term being used to avoid the term “paid-for editorial”, and fortunately our advertisers got the message. I believe the magazine remains an example of honest practice to this day.
If you want to see a highly-regarded SEO consultant discuss the problems in his own industry, read Guaranteed Search Engine Ranking - Guaranteed Search Engine Optimization by Michael Martinez on the SEO Theory and Analysis blog. Often a contrarian in his industry, this time the author thoroughly agrees with the conventional SEO wisdom that if anyone offers you “guaranteed search engine ranking” or “guaranteed search engine optimization”, run far, far away. Very fast.
For my part, I think the best approach is to learn what this is all about yourself and to manage your website’s SEO optimisation yourself. Getting the basics right really isn’t that difficult, as the best SEO consultants would agree.

Another one of those articles which might seem like it’s for the anoraks, but skim through because it highlights an important point. When you write a web page, I hope you’re always thinking about trying to “optimise” your site in the search engines for a relevant search term or two, by means of the words you write in the body copy, the title of the page, etc. But what if you have a search term which could be written back to front (e.g “widgets for working” or “working widgets”) and your research shows both are used frequently?

In Palindromic SEO makes SEO palindromic on theSEO Theory and Analysis blog, Michael Martinez shows you how to get both forms working for you. Core stuff if you’re a specialist copywriter, and although it might seem pretty esoteric if you’re a hard-pressed marketing director, make sure whoever writes your pages knows about this sort of thing.

Link building is the single most important activity you should be undertaking to promote your web site. Sure, you can sort out the “on page” search engine optimisation, and you should be ensuring your site has a good structure, and you should be looking at external advertising. But link building should be your first priority.

The trouble is, link building is difficult. What’s more, there’s no obvious technique to learn. The most thought-provoking posts on the subject are like this one from the SEO Theory and Analysis blog: Why your link-building techniques suck seems to suggest that every method of link-building can be rubbish, but it still may be your best approach. Which all goes to show how complicated link building can be. The best approach is to do what you think will work best for you.

Anyway, have a read.

The SEO Theory and Analysis blog today looks at Trends in SEO link building since 2004 and points you in the direction of Google Trends, an increasingly important tool in keyword research. Apart from directing you towards a better choice of keyword priorities for your site, it can also be used to back up your choice of terminology internally. For example, in my editorial capacity I was long ago required to standardise on “sensor” or “transducer” (yes, I appreciate there’s a difference, but this was in general terms). It’s the sort of discussion which comes up repeatedly in many organisations, particularly when Sales reckons it knows better than Marketing. Now you can put the two terms into Google Trends and if you do, you’ll discover that almost no search engine user in the UK opts for the word “transducer” - which is killer data. We’ll ignore the discussion for now as to why the number of searches for “sensor” is falling!

Do you have a “sitemap” (an index to all the pages on your site) which is visible to the public? I’m not talking here about what’s known as an “XML sitemap”, which is a specialist file aimed at search engine robots. I’m talking about a set of conventional web pages which list all of the real pages on your site.

On the SEO Theory and Analysis blog, Michael Martinez has produced an excellent guide to why and how you should do this. HTML Sitemap Design and Theory - Fundamental Basic Principles of HTML Sitemap Design actually claims that the HTML sitemap is “the most important part of any large web site.” Not only does the article explain why the author thinks this is so, but it goes on to show you how to construct it, and how you can use it to play with “anchor text”. Well worth a read.

I like this article from the SEO Theory and Analysis blog: In SEO, you can always say it again. In it, author Michael Martinez contends that you can do as much keyword research as you like, but you’ll still see queries you’d never remotely considered if you look at your logs. It’s a mindset we should all get into. (more…)