Google PageRank? Seriously, just get out your checkbook right now and write me a blank check. Don’t worry, I will go ahead and fill in the dollar amount. You just be sure to sign it.
I was thrown back into yesteryear by a blog article I read at Search Engine Journal that discussed Google PageRank. No, it was not something from deep in the bowels of their 2003 archives, but rather a real life demonstration of sad linkbait published only yesterday. I don’t need a pissing match with these guys, but it was sad to see a long-dead topic like PageRank being exhumed for public consumption.
It reminded me about who I write for, and why. I write for you, and I try to make useful facts and good ideas spring to life with a touch of entertainment value. Once in a while I will throw in my Murnahan Cheez Whiz style to keep you on your toes and make you say “what?!”
My objectives include reducing the abundance of blatant SEO lies and myths that search engine optimizers promote. Sure, I may not be able to fix the whole world, but I can do my part to blow the “bullshit whistle” on bad SEO information.
Since I want you to subscribe to my blog and come back, I try to overlook topics that will be genuinely useless and guide you wrong. You know, topics to scare you into putting crap in your brain like Google PageRank changes.
The article I am talking about brought acid to the top of my throat and reminded me just how easy it could be to scam people out of a blank check. It touched on just how “unknown” this SEO business I am in really is, and it made me feel like one hell of a nice guy for telling things straight.
OMG, are people seriously still writing about PageRank? Maybe we can throw some meta tags into the conversation. While we are at it, I want to break out my old Farrah Fawcett poster and leave my mom a “surprise” under the bed, too.
Agreed, very old news. It is funny to me that somebody recently mentioned the PageRank of my blog and my first thought was as nostalgic as my Atari 2600.
I have not even looked at the “Green Fairy” of PageRank in half a decade. If you are doing the things you should be doing, people will love your stuff enough to link to it. If it is relevant content for a given search, on a reasonably decent website, and other people crave it, the site will rank well. Isn’t that a whole lot easier than waiting for Google to give you a number?
The remembrance of Google PageRank brought to mind the different qualities of search engine optimizers that I enjoy just enough to squash them to pieces and bury them in a shallow grave.
It is easy to understand how people could get confused about SEO. It is an industry that begs for naivety, ignorance, greed, and dishonesty. Sadly, these things are in great abundance among website owners and want-to-be SEO providers, alike.
Lay Down Your Google PageRank Gun and Listen!
Don’t shoot the messenger, but if you are looking at measurements like Google PageRank as an indicator of progress, your efforts are a hot mess. Save yourself some grief. A far better answer is to create something useful, creative, interesting, and relevant to people. These are the things which compel people like crack cocaine. These are the things which cause people to reference you and link to your website content. These are the things which make a difference, and not some misunderstood 1-10 measure that Google itself tells you to ignore.
I do not even understand why there is still a Google PageRank measurement, because Google has made it damn clear for many years that the most important thing is to give people what they want. If you concern yourself a fraction as much about what you are delivering to people as you concern yourself with Google, you will very likely rank a whole lot better. Plus, your PageRank will go up, too!
Note: I am not one of those people who only preach the gospel of “Content is King” and that writing a bunch of stuff on a blog will make something rank well. There are a lot of things which go into good SEO. Google PageRank is not in my list of SEO lessons, and I don’t think it was anywhere in my SEO blog archive, either … until now.
OK, doubters, now that you have heard me out, go ahead and fire your PageRank guns and tell me how wrong I am in the comments section below.
Have you ever been hit by a stroke of Genius, telling you that automated directory submissions will help your ranking in search engine results? Maybe you thought that some nicely crafted meta tags would help your search engine ranking. I may be a bit too hard on people at times, but common sense just completely eludes many people when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). Many website owners want to rank in the top of search results so badly that they will try almost anything. Well, as long as it is cheap, easy, and sounds techie-fancy.
When I started to write this, I was going to rant about automated directory submissions. Then I realized that I have touched on the topic of directory submissions before. I still have something to get off my chest, and I still have something to say about the toxic lies and misinformation that have been created surrounding the SEO industry. It is often fueled by greed and hope of getting something for nothing.
It is easy for liars to make something believable to people who know little about the topic. This has created an ugly monster of the SEO industry.
The SEO Monster Eats, Every Day!
In just the last spin of the clock, I have had several people ask me for information about automated directory submission services to improve their search engine ranking. It reminds me that most people really do not understand SEO. Judging from the glazed look on their faces, I can tell that many people really don’t want to understand. They just want it to magically work. I understand that, and I can imagine how frustrating and stressful it must be for non-SEO people to filter reliable information about search engine optimization through all of the common SEO lies (although this may help: 7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying).
Outdated, Outrageous, and Downright Dishonest SEO Garbage
There is so much bad information and outdated material spread across the Internet that I think it would frustrate the heck out of me if I was trying to feel my way through it for the first time. What bothers me is how many people are out there trying to earn a buck by selling things that do not help, and even more commonly, severely damage paying customers’ hopes of being found in a search engine.
The world of SEO truly is like a foreign language to most people. They read something about SEO and meta tags, and they think they are on to something revolutionary. It just stuns me that with all of the great information out here on the Internet, how many people are fooled by the first scam they come across.
For some people, I think there is a sense that if it is written, it must hold some truth. Once they find out the hard way that it was a scam and it didn’t work, they either give up and hate everything about SEO, or they take the time to learn the difference and read something sensible and logic-based like “Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference“.
Even in large corporate settings, I have often found people in the role of search engine optimizer collecting a nice salary who got their job just by spouting out a few industry buzz words. The people hiring them are either enamored by their “vast knowledge”, or just give up and offer them a job on blind faith.
A really hard pill to swallow is that most of today’s SEO “experts” have never ranked for anything significantly competitive. That is not a gouge against my industry, and these people are not my competitors. It is a statistical truth. To make this point clear, just have a look at the backlinks to most SEO websites and then see where they rank for the first four words of their home page title. Try this with the website of the SEO who reaches you by email, on the phone, or in a paid advertisement, instead of you finding them through a search.
Productized SEO Services Created a Monster
I think that productizing SEO and selling easy to understand pre-packaged SEO services has created and fed this monster. As an industry, those of us who sell SEO services realized a long time ago that it is much easier to package things up and say “Here is your price, and here is what you get.”
This certainly makes it easier to sell SEO. After all, it is easier for clients to choose from a list and compare it to what others offer. Also, it is a lot more profitable for the SEO to create something once, and sell it many times. The truth is that it is seldom what is best for meeting the customer’s objectives, and it creates a mentality that ranking well in search engines is merely a predefined set of SEO tasks.
This is not to say that things like SEOmoz’s SEO tools, SpyFu, and the squillion other SEO tools are not just great. These are tools, but like a paintbrush, they are only as good as the person using them. A tragedy that happened is when a lot of SEO realized that they could sell far more, and easier, if they promised something such as top ten ranking for “x” number of keywords and then price it and put it in a shopping cart for people to buy. There are countless types of SEO services being promoted with a “buy it now” approach, without any consultation, without any strategy, and with a promise of easy results.
Do you really trust anything that is so easy? OK, rephrase … Do you really trust anything that is so easy in 2011?
Directory Submission Service Example
I started my rant with directory submissions, and I will still use it as an example. “What is a directory submission service?” I hope that is what you are thinking, but in case you did not already know, I will explain it. It is a once-heralded way to automatically submit a website to long lists of search engines and directories, with a hope that it would help search engine rankings, bring more visitors to a website, and boost sales.
I suppose it seems logical to a lot of people that if they use SEO directory submission services to add their website link to a squillion directories and search engines, it will produce magical results. Now let’s clear this up. Seriously, do you think that a magical automated fix like directory and search engine submissions will be your pink pony ride to success?
Oh, and nobody else ever thought of that, so it will be revolutionary! Right? Search engines will suck that up like grape soda and will count all of those backlinks (links to your website) as proof that your website is valuable.
Rub a lamp, sucker! Maybe a Genie will come to your assistance, too.
The Productized SEO Monster Awakens My Inner-Sailor
There are just a few things which make it hard for me to hold back my inner sailor and refrain from dropping severely foul language all over my blog. People falling for things like automated directory submissions and other simple tricks helping their SEO efforts is one of those things. I just don’t think I can even be nice about this. Shit! Call it a temporary case of Tourette’s Syndrome, but this inner-sailor in me is wanting out pretty badly.
People who actually fall for things like this drive me nuts. I just want to say “Hey, Genius, do you want to know the truth, or would you rather waste more money and time to screw up your website?”
If you want the real truth about SEO, slow down, pay attention, and stop breathing those SEO fumes in the air. Spend some time to learn things that will actually work, and will help you to grow your business. For example, those links in the text of this article are not just there for me, and they may help you, a lot. Better yet, here is a link for some relatively easy SEO tips that can save you a lot of time and frustration: SEO Lessons You Should Know.
These tips will not cost you a penny, and will only take a short time to read. Maybe I am just full of hot air, but if so, go ahead and search Google for SEO lessons and see where that link I just gave you shows up in non-advertised, relevance-based organic results. Hint: It is not number two on the list.
I do not write about this because I am seeking a bunch of customers. I only work with a couple clients at a time, and I turn away far more than I work with. Yes, writing about SEO helps people to find me, but it is not just here to help me. This is here to help you.
Just one more thing! Have you subscribed to aWebGuy.com yet?
I suspect that you want to know, “is Twitter good for SEO?” Either that, or your bum is feeling pretty sore, and you are willing to try anything. I am happy to help with the Twitter part, and I am sorry about your rump. Try pistachio, but don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.
I am surprised that more people have not discussed the topic of Twitter and SEO to provide their opinion-based answers. I think that a lot of people are afraid to touch on this, for fear of giving an unpopular answer, or being wrong. Well, leave it to me to tell you this: “Yes, Twitter helps SEO!”
Twitter can help with SEO efforts, directly, as well as indirectly when Twitter users share the information in places such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and elsewhere. If somebody tells you otherwise, you are listening to the wrong SEO advice.
I read an article on the widely respected SEOmoz.org blog today that addressed the SEO value of Twitter. It reminded me how much I sometimes forget the importance of bringing things down to a very simple level. I guess I just forget that not everybody has done this “Internet thing” to earn food for the past decade and a half. I try to keep things pretty simple, but I know I can wing one over readers’ heads some days. I try to provide useful marketing and SEO tips, but if I ever forget to make them simple, I apologize. This one should be nice and easy.
I thought that the value of Twitter for SEO was pretty obvious to most users, a long time ago. Sometimes, when I see what other people are saying, I recognize that details like this can slip by some people. Here is a quote from the recent article on SEOmoz titled “The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist“:
“So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.”
The article had some good points, but it really did take me back to grammar school. Quoting the article, “Now that we know” … what? Holy hemorrhoid! I guess I assumed that we knew this kind of thing years ago. Links from my old Yahoo chat groups in 1998 helped my SEO, but is that revolutionary, too? It was kind of funny to me how much it resembled something I said in early 2009 when I wrote the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“. Here is a statement I made in the book, and I stand by it today:
“Many search engine optimizers (SEO) will overlook the value of Twitter for improving search engine penetration. If they miss this part, they are making a big mistake. A reason many SEO will dismiss this value is that Twitter uses the “nofollow” attribute in outbound links. Make no mistake; Twitter can greatly enhance your visibility in search engine results.”
Heck, maybe the Internet is coming up to speed, or maybe I am just one of those people who are as strange as a pickled duck fart and foresee things in some uncanny way. I don’t know … maybe it is a combination.
Do More Tweets Help SEO?
This should be obvious, but the impact of more people tweeting your website content may be even higher than you imagined. Whenever somebody tweets your linked content, it creates links to your website. The quality and quantity of inks to a website are the most important factors that search engines use to gauge the importance of a website. Also, the links Twitter produces are not necessarily only on Twitter. There are a lot of services which aggregate Twitter’ed content, as well as many widgets and other syndication through RSS in which it may appear on other websites.
It will be far more important for other people to tweet your content than just tweeting your link a squillion times. Don’t bother with that, because it is not going to make you a ton of new friends. A few times is fine, but let’s not go out of the way to garner death threats, and insults about your mother.
Do More Twitter Followers Help SEO?
I am the last person who would wish to promote a “Twitter follower-frenzy”, so I almost hate to say this. Many indicators will suggest that more followers on Twitter can improve the SEO value of a tweet. Yes, a high follower count does correlate to higher SEO value, but I believe it correlates even better with the number of Twitter lists a person is on and other measurements.
I know that a lot of people want to become popular on Twitter, but before you implement some off the cuff plan, be sure to read the article titled “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful“. If you do the things that many moronic marketers suggest, people will wish a bad case of herpes on you and throw you on a flaming bed of nails before they will care to listen to you … or buy your stuff.
There is not much that I dislike more than a bunch of bad marketers out there with nothing useful to say. I think that millions of Twitter users would agree with me on this. Don’t take this as any suggestion that you go and try to gather as many Twitter followers as you can. Instead, I recommend, as I always have, that you be useful. As with anything SEO-related, being useful and providing compelling information is what matters the most. If you can do that, many of the other factors seem to magically fall into place. I am pretty sure it can also help hemorrhoids, even better than ice cream.
Twitter Changed, But it is Still Useful for SEO
Although I still really like Twitter, it changed a lot over time. Twitter had a huge growth spurt, and as the new users poured in, much of the real value of the service dwindled. It is still good for SEO, but what so many people do not grasp is that if you expect people to tweet and retweet what you have to share, it had better be pretty damn awesome to be heard over the excess noise.
How much did Twitter change? I could write another book about this, but I would rather stick needles in my eyes. I will just offer this: I wrote about Twitter retweets on February 29th, 2009. It was titled “Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet” and it received many hundreds of retweets. Tweetmeme says 420, but that data is old, and it was actually many more. In another case, I wrote a really short and basic article (approximately 250 words) about Twitter username selection on April 8th of 2009. It also received a ton of retweets and 158 reader comments. Back in the earlier days, I would measure between 500-1,500 clicks on darn near any link I tweeted, within minutes. Now, a hundredth of that would buzz my radar.
Maybe I just became less “brilliant” with the things people love to share, but I am pretty sure that is not the case. Many Twitter users just don’t see it when they are trying to follow a squillion other people, with hopes of being followed back.
Today, when I tweet something from my blog, I do not count on Twitter to pass it along. In fact, Twitter directly accounts for under three percent of my website traffic. Moreover, I have measured that the website traffic coming directly from Twitter has a low probability of participating and adding their comments to a topic. I think this is because of Twitter-enhanced attention disorders which were there before Twitter. Twitter just made it even more “old fashioned” to actually read things and pay attention. My study on this is forthcoming, but let’s just start the study with whether you will take the time to finish reading and add your comment.
Since the time of these popular Twitter-related articles, I have written hundreds of very compelling and useful blog articles which far exceeded the relatively minor value of those. I can effectively measure the value of Twitter from a conversational standpoint as much lower than it was. The SEO value of Twitter and the Twitter “retweet” is still there, but if you want to break through the noise, it better be something stunning.
“I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines.”
If you came here about the ice cream, I am sorry about your bum. Perhaps you could try eating it really fast to take your mind off the ‘roids. If you came here about Twitter and SEO, please add your comments on my blog. Just type it in and let’s have a good old fashioned ice cream social.
SEO and Social Media Chicken Poop
I have heard many arguments separating SEO and social media by trying to decypher which is more valuable. Many of the people arguing this point are on one side or the other, and miss the point that they are both tactics which work together toward an overall strategy. Many people also seem to miss the fact that they are largely the same thing.
Here are a few questions that marketers use for producing arguments:
Which is more important … SEO or social media?
Which discipline provides the higher return on investment?
OK, that last one was my own personal interpretation, but seriously … how can people get this so mixed up that they stand in their corner arguing their respective knowledge without coming together in the center and having a big group hug?
SEO opens a lot of doors for companies. Having their greatness spread across the Internet in a way that people will find it when they search for something is extremely productive. People still ask me the question “how will people find my website?” To me, the question seems pretty easy … they will search for it! Having great information on a well prepared website and making it available to search engines is a “no-brainer”. Well, it is a “some-brainer”, because a lot of people still don’t really grasp it. In any case, it is very valuable, and backed up with a lot of facts. It also provides a lot of value to back up your social media marketing endeavors.
Social media is a great way to discover the people who may be interested in searching for you. It is often a proactive approach where you can add yourself to the mix. It is also a great way to learn more about those people who are already searching for you, will be searching for you, or may never search for you but will take a recommendation from others they trust. It also provides a lot of value to your search engine optimization endeavors.
I find that a lot of people get these two fields very confused, both by trying to separate them and by trying to merge them. SEO and social media both have their own unique qualities, but the reality is that trying to separate them is about as easy as picking chicken poop out of your toothpaste.
Both of these areas of Internet marketing are the same in many ways. Search engines use popularity of a website measured by incoming links pointing to the website content as a major factor for ranking. Social media also uses the popularity of website content as a major factor for ranking. What a lot of people fail to realize is how much they both work the same, and they both work in synergy.
I would be pleased to carry on in my typically lengthy way of writing until my brain hurts from extolling the values of these various marketing tools, but I have already done that. After all, have you seen my blog title? It is titled “SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog“ for a reason.
Today, I want you to jump in and help me to explain how both are intertwined yet diverse.
If you can offer a better way to describe the relationship of SEO and social media than to say that it is like trying to pick chicken poop from your toothpaste, I will offer you a kiss full on the mouth. I have nice fresh breath, but I can assure you that I have found a whole lot of “chicken poop in my toothpaste”.
People search for the craziest things online. Looking at your website statistics to see the searches people use to find your website can be an eye-opener. I discover thousands of bizarre and unexpected searches which lead people to my websites, and some of them quite useful. This can be quite entertaining, and also very beneficial for understanding people and the ways they search.
I constantly hear from people begging to be at the top of search engine results for specific terms. I often find that the things they want to rank for are about as well researched and thought out as balancing a three ton hippopotamus on a popsicle stick above your grandmother’s fine China collection. There are two problems with this: 1.) Somebody is going to get hurt. 2.) It does not work well, mathematically.
Most website owners do not have a clue about how to select the search terms to target, or even what people are already using to find their website. Even fewer know how to target useful search terms, or anything at all about the enormous value of lateral keywords which can often account for far more website traffic than the terms they desire. This is to your advantage, because now you do have a clue. You can thank me with your comments.
Reviewing the actual terms people type into a search engine to find things is truly astonishing. It is also an important way to better understand people and what they want. If you do not use tools like Google Analytics or Clicky statistics, you should.
The topic of how people search the Internet came up in conversation with a client yesterday. He pointed out a competing website which was ranking higher in search engines than his website. Of course, it was for his “hippopotamus-balancing” keyword selection which he thought must be important, because everybody else was targeting it. He got a quick schooling when I pointed out how few people were actually searching for that keyword phrase, and that according to available measurements (Compete.com, Alexa.com, Quantcast.com, Open Site Explorer and others) his website receives over 1,000 times more visitors and incoming links, and is ranked well for thousands of search terms. He kind of shut up after I showed him that, and I had my mind’s-eye vision of doing a victory dance. Then I pointed out his high conversion rate and had to take a step backward to preserve my personal space before he could slap on a big man-hug or kiss me square on the lips for all the money he is making.
Strange Ways People Search the Internet
It is easy to assume what people are searching for. It is also a huge point of failure for the majority of businesses trying to promote their product or service. I find too many people who make assumptions of the keyword phrases people will use to find them. It is important to be aware that each and every one of us use search engines differently. I find whole industries every day which blow me away with their total failure to understand and reach their market.
In an effort to make this point, I offer you these little bits of reality:
Here is a blog article I wrote a while back about cigars. I do not sell cigars, (although perhaps I should). I wrote one article about a cigar company falling short in their marketing, and then I later followed up with an article which showed the top 200 cigar-related search terms which brought people to my website from that single blog post. See “Cigar Prices Rising With Bad SEO and Social Media Marketing“.
More proof of this matter of an industry which did not grasp search engine optimization was found in the Smart Slate interactive whiteboard slate. See “Smart Slate, Smart Airliner, and Other Interactive Slates“. Because of the absurdity of this industry, I have earnestly looked into the option of entering the market just to mop the floor with the blood of fallen competitors.
Then, there is the automotive industry. I want to scream at this whole industry for the way they suck up billions in government bailouts, yet they keep trying to do business the way their grandfather sold cars. I wrote about their infamous ways of marketing and just how badly they are missing the mark. See “Topeka Kansas Car Dealer Social Media Marketing Case Study”
These examples are just a few of many thousands of markets being terribly overlooked by good marketing efforts including SEO that works. If you do not know what people are looking for, you will have a really hard time delivering what they want. It should seem obvious that when some knucklehead SEO (search engine optimizer) like me can come into an industry and take over thousands of first-page spots for search phrases and pull in the eyes of their potential customers, somebody is really missing the boat.
If you don’t pay attention to what people are searching for, in reality rather than just myth, you may as well just play with a hippopotamus on a stick. Just don’t blame me if you break grandma’s China.
