Your SEO is shit

So you might start taking this site to pieces and finding things wrong with our site at Your SEO is Shit.

We’re playing as we go along with it, we’ve never used wordpress before and it has some limitations. Som of which we’ve fixed, some of which are being fixed, and some of which will never be fixed.

Mostly, this site is just a chassis. Imagine being asked the question

‘So have you ever seen a site which does …example… very well?’

and having to keep a catalogue of sites in your head, because not one site does everything perfectly – well.. we’re having a go, but none of us wanted to hand code a site from the ground up (we don’t have time) so slapping WordPress into some webspace became the obvious answer.

Some things we’re currently having some problems with include:

Over-riding auto generated meta descriptions
A nice 404 page
Recent searches

for example

Anyway, we’re getting through the list as best we can.

This post is a category pinch-point as well

Go to the Your SEO is shit hompage

Recently, I was listening to an interview of an SEO, where the question was:

“What’s the first thing, as an SEO, you do when your SEOing a site”

Amazingly the answer given, by this celebrity SEO was:

‘The first thing I do as an SEO is keyphrase research”

Ok, lets examine why this is shit.

Set the scene

So imagine you’ve got a website, it’s doing ok, your happy. You feel it could be doing better but aren’t really entirely sure how, why or what. Then you hear of this thing called ‘SOE’ or something. Who knows.

You call the recruitment agency and say ‘Get me one of these ESO people for my website’

After spending a few weeks (during which time the traffic on your site has stayed static) interviewing a right bunch of weirdos you pick the least weird of them all and offer them a job, may be give them a couple of months probation just for safety.

So they work their months notice and turn up on day 1, you find them a desk and a computer (which they say is rubbish) and leave them to do their thing.

What happens. Nothing that’s what. You ask your new SEO employee ‘ok, show me what you’ve done’, and they give you a great big spreadsheet of numbers and words and things. Doesn’t mean a thing to you but it looks clever, maybe it means something, here and there a word catches your eye, it looks like a product you sell, and then there’s numbers next to it… don’t know what the numbers are but it looks clever.

Your new expensive employee looks at you gleefully and says ‘It’s a Keyphrase Research report’.

You look at your traffic graph, it’s flat.

Your SEO is making no difference, if you discount the fact that the ‘Phrase Densikey’ thing might be clever. Nothing.

Here’s the non-bullshit answer.

The first thing an SEO should do when they start working on a site is make sure that Metrics are correctly implemented. Is all the traffic being counted? Is where the traffic coming from being correctly measured. If you don’t have this, any SEO work you do will always be open to ambiguity. As an SEO you can sometimes get instant traffic upkicks (and impress your new employer) immediately just by auditing metric implementation.

Beware the bull shitters – Keyphrase reports come later in the SEO cycle when you’re pushing for the last nth percentages, not at the start when you can get great traffic increases from the simple understandable actions.

After this is done, the SEO should go and have a cup of tea with the Boss and tell him how you mended his metrics and what they’regoing to do next and that SEO is not really wierd, and although the machine he gave the SEO isn’t as good as the one you’ve got at home you’re sure he’ll buy the SEO something blistering once you treble his conversions (so sometimes next week).

What to do second … coming soon

SEO-001

I’m not going to name names.  We all know who the celebrity SEOs are.

I’ve been working in the SEO industry for over a decade and never once have I posted in a forum, written a blog post about SEO or spoken in public about what I do.

The reason: the best SEOs in the industry operate in stealth mode.

I realise the irony that I’m now posting a blog entry about this, but I’m using the alias SEO-003 to prove that I’m not doing it for my own personal gain.

It has become a necessity for me to vent about the industry I work in to prevent me from suffering a stroke or other debilitating mental breakdown.

While the true SEOs toil away and perfect their craft, the celebrity SEOs perfect their public brand as a façade for their lack of knowledge.

If you are a true SEO, run silent, run deep (unless you need to blog under an alias to prevent yourself from suffering a brain haemorrhage).

More rants to follow.

SEO-003

Here’s an interesting thing I noticed in passing…

Background:

Yahoo! spent a lot of money on:

a). Rivals.com – a sporty site type thing, not really my cup of tea – but gotta love those spammy footers huh
b). IndexTools – a brilliant analytics product

And they MUST have some kind of corporate traffic reporting anyway, for ads n stuff…. So you gotta ask yourself:

Why has Rivals.com implemented Google Analytics?

<script type=”text/javascript”><!– var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”)); // –></script><script type=”text/javascript”><!– var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-3966162-2″);pageTracker._setDomainName(“rivals.com”);pageTracker._initData();pageTracker._trackPageview(); // –></script>

Apart from everything, this phrase springs to mind:

(5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.) 

SEO-001