Before we get to it, first of all, we are not a SEO company. In fact we believe that SEO it’s totally misunderstood. SEO means better web design. It means to present your information properly for search engines and visitors at the same time.
The other day I ran across a local car dealer website. As a web designer I couldn’t help but notice their web page title(the heading Google displays for search results) : “Car Dealer Raleigh NC Car Raleigh Used Car Raleigh Truck Raleigh Car Repair Service Raleigh NC”.
Look at their description meta tag: “Car Raleigh NC Car Dealer of New Raleigh Cars and Used Car Raleigh, Commercial Trucks, Raleigh Trucks and SUVs. Raleigh Auto Dealer of Cars, Crossovers, SUV & More Cars. Raleigh Auto Repair Service to All Makes and Models. “ Is this how you present yourself to your customers? Do you really think that Google does not have algorithms to fight keyword stuffing? Repeating Raleigh so many times in the Title tag and Meta description tag seems to anyone as keyword stuffing. SEO is not just adding keywords to title tags and meta descriptions.
But being the most powerful and accessible HTML tags that a SEO has at hand, it is often the most abused. Google and Yahoo are fighting that. Here is what Google says: ““Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”
I searched Car Dealer Raleigh NC. The company website was nowhere in the first results. And all the other ranking factors are working for it: the domain is old, established, the website has tons of links even from established national car companies. It really should be in the first results and it is not.
What is the conclusion? Not all SEO companies will serve you a good product. Web Design is still in its infancy. It is not the same kind of business you are used to. Always compare your website with well known internet sites.
Read more about How Web Design achieves Great Search Engine Optimization.
You got it half right. Good SEO starts at making sure your site is designed in a fashion that your keywords and content can be easily found. However, this is known as “on page” search engine optimization, and you do everyone a disservice saying that that’s all there is to SEO. 95% of what makes your site actually rank in Google is the number, and quality of incoming links, and what anchor text is used in those links. Combine that with the ‘on page’ factors, and that’s good SEO.
Other than that, you guys are accurate and actually refreshing with your content and your desire to ‘shed light’.
Steve, everyone is abusing incoming links and search engines developed algorithms to fight that. For small to medium businesses the number of links does not matter, quality of links is important. For big websites is a different story.
Agreed. But, maybe a little over-simplified. Link quality is paramount, but the algos are not nearly as robust as Google would like us to believe. They also said years ago that the 302 redirect trick was ‘defeated’, but even now people are using it with blogger.com blogs with great success.
While one on theme pr6 link is worth 150 pr0 links, have you tried getting a pr6 link lately? If you vary the anchor text dramatically, you can do a lot in a very small amount of time using those pr0 sites. This strategy will outrank on page seo only 8 days a week, and will also defeat the “only a few good links” strategy as well. I have seen it too many times. One caveat is domain age. A 3 year old domain will skyrocket with a few links while a new domain takes a lot more and spread out for longer periods of time.
On the flip side, I appreciate what you are doing with your blog and at the very least you are educating business owners on a misunderstood subject.
Steev