SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a topic I hear come up a lot in meetings with businesses of all types. The ultimate win, according to them all … and according to every web designer who tries to sell their services … is a #1 ranking on the first page of any search engine.
The results of that would be obvious: Anybody looking for a product or service related to your business typically wants the easy way to find you, and coming up right away in a search result delivers.
My first question to web design and SEO “experts” is this: What keywords or phrases are you using as your test for your client to judge how successful your SEO campaign is?
Sadly their answers disappoint me, and unfortunately leave their clients with a false sense of success. Searching for your business name and town does not mean success. That’s cheating. How many Technica Systems are there in Port Moody? Of course its going to come up #1. Duh.
The tests you need to run to properly evaluate your SEO performance are based on what the non-knowing general public might type into Google or Bing or Yahoo. What do you type when you’re looking for a pizza place nearby? Furthermore, do you even use Google’s usual search page or do you more smartly use Google Maps, which pulls up data from the Google Places business directory?
As an ex-programmer, I type my searches in the underlying lexicon that I know gets best results in Google. But I’ve seen non-nerdy people type entire sentences into that search box like there’s somebody sitting at the other end deciphering this.
Its wonderful that Google’s programmers know how to write software that deciphers this to return useful answers.
With all that in mind, what really drives successful SEO? Well that dissapointing answer I hear from web designers who don’t keep up with the times over and over again is “meta tags!!” (A meta tag is some hidden text on your website pages that says stuff like <meta name=”keywords” content=”some keyword,another keyword” />
With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none and in September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that they are no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever.
So throw those meta tags out the window. They don’t matter.
What does?
The real juice behind what matters is guarded secretly like the recipes to KFC and Coca-Cola, but all search engines offer great hints and guides that you should read.
Google: Webmaster guidelines
Yahoo: Search Content Quality Guidelines
I’ll save you the boring reading, in no particular order this is what counts: Content, page delivery speed, updates, relevance, inbound links.
Aha, see that last one I mentioned? Inbound links?
The more external websites that link back to your website increases your score. In other words, popular website rank higher than unpopular ones. Typically this is because everybody links to something interesting on a popular site and nobody links to useless sites.
This is where social media comes into play.
Facebook has now eclipsed Google as a traffic generating source — at least from their main google.com search page. It used to be that every website counted on fresh hits because people found them through a Google search. They still do, but now more traffic comes to their sites because somebody posted a link in Facebook.
Get that? More traffic comes from links in Facebook.
Of course, this is why social media is on everybody’s lips these days. Everybody likes to share, everybody retweets links, everybody blogs, the endless circle of sharing content and information is super easy these days.
To sum up this whole SEO meta-tag topic, do you think PEOPLE who are posting these links in the various social media outlets are reading your meta tags?
No, they’re reading your freshly updated, relevant content and silently judging your site by how quickly it loads (take too long and they won’t bother letting it load, and certainly won’t bother sharing links to your site).
That’s the Social Media / SEO connection today.