A Frank Look at Search Engine Optimization
July 30th, 2008 by ValWhen I first got into web development, search engine optimization (SEO) seemed to be some sort of dark art. We worked for select clients with mysterious optimization specialists they had somehow hooked up with who performed what they’d have you believe was magic for websites. On the chance occasion that it was apparent how they were achieving their goals, it was often by methods one might consider sneaky. Some of the time it was definitely sneaky and not just at the expense of search engines and end users, but the website owners themselves. I had a really lousy experience with a group who was offering this type of “help” — I was only speaking with them because my client had asked me to and the sales guy was literally yelling at me because I wasn’t buying into his scheme. Whether it was for the intrigue of it all, the obvious business implications or that I became sure I didn’t want to work with these jokers this anymore, I decided to become an expert myself.
Over time I found that not by loading a site up with keywords or hiding key phrases in the code or any other questionable methods, but rather by uniquely and descriptively populating meta content, tag attributes and other basic elements of HTML I could bring traffic to sites that deserve it. Doing it this way was helpful for everyone. Users would see meaningful content in search engine results and end up at the website they were looking for. When they hovered over links and images in the site, they would see captions describing them. They might even be able to remember the URL of something other than your home page. Search engines would have meaningful content to describe the website in their results and confirmation that a page is about what it appears to be about. Clients would have a better site with more and better-targeted visitors to it. We would be pleasing our customers, getting our work seen by more people, entering into a new market segment and closing the loop from unnecessary subcontractors.
I’ve since worked on several serious SEO campaigns with great results. One of the sites I haven’t worked on in years, but they still consistently get #1 placement on all their target phrases. The new VermontCountryProperties.com that we launched last November has several hundred thousand pages indexed by Google. They are often the top result for “Vermont real estate” and they appear in the top results for virtually every search term related to their state-wide real estate and rental brokerage. They even get top placement for markets that they only began to serve when they launched this new site, some of which are fiercely competitive. We recently launched a satellite website system that allows their staff to quickly and easily launch new sites for any given market segment or sub-segment. This has an almost immediate and lasting effect on the parent site’s search engine placement, but also serves to develop these web properties on their own terms.
We don’t make any promises of top placement, especially not for unrealistic goals — we won’t tell a local widget purveyor we’ll get them the #1 spot for “widgets”; that’s not their market. What we do expect as a result and that we would have our clients expect of an SEO campaign with us is that given a sufficient budget and some time to let the cumulative effect of optimization take effect, we can put a site in its rightful place in the market — the largest widget dealership in town should be able to come up in top results for “Manchester Vermont widget”. If your business isn’t getting results that reflect its place in the market, you’ll eventually lose your place. If you want your website to start getting the traffic it deserves, please get in touch.
Tags: SEO
