Myths, Predictions & What's New
SEO Myths & Predictions
We watch practices in optimisation and we are amused at the spammers offering to place our site at the top of the listings and who want to provide reciprocal links to pages that are irrelevant or cannot be accessed. "There’s one born every minute…"
Myths Busted
Guaranteed top rankings!!
Right, so the SEO company with this offer also owns Google or they’ve hacked their encrypted search engine algorithm. Pigs might fly; read the fine print before paying or wasting your time talking to them.
Give it to me now!
If your site is not in the top 10-30 results on a search engine, that’s it, you’re dead. Maybe true, but let’s take that one further; assume your web site is returned by a search engine in the top 30 results, if the “description” looks like rubbish, the person looking will move on to a more attractive listing.
Wow, its got expensive things that move constantly and really great images
Must be a great site design….then again, if the initial design is not right, it can be all show and no go. Slow to load, no one waits for it all to load – you have 12 seconds if you’re lucky - and the very things that make it look great are design elements the search engines cannot index. Another fabulously exciting way to waste your money.
Pay per click (PPC)
PPC might be effective if you get revenue from the click, but otherwise you may as well give your money to charity – you’ll feel better that way. The advocates and providers of PPC may be good at directing traffic to your site for a limited time, but they do not care if that leads to revenues for you, they already have your money in the bank. PPC strategies may have a legitimate place in your web marketing strategy; but think carefully before embarking on a PPC strategy.
Paid directory listings
Uh oh! If you have to pay for a listing, then you are reliant on lots of people paying up before that site will become popular, unless you are talking about niche market sites. We can recommend genuine, already popular sites with free & low cost directory listings for businesses and community organisations.
Get a really good “marketer” to write your content
It does not necessarily follow that writers whose experience is producing brochures know anything about writing for search engine optimisation. For example, when requesting existing collateral which would form the basis of wording on a web site, we have been provided with brochures written by marketers containing no keywords or phrases, other than a product name, in four A4 pages of text; a complete waste of space on the web.
SEO is one of the Dark Arts
SEO does not have to remain a mystery; we seek to have an open business relationship with you to assist your business to grow by demystifying search engine optimisation.
We will provide practical advice and the means to ensure you have the best chance to promote your business on the web through sound copywriting and practices using straightforward SEO techniques. Creative Design is not about to display how mysterious it all is or how technically clever we are, at your expense.
Lots of links get you high rankings!
For starters links to other sites from your site are irrelevant. Good quality links to your site from others are important but are definitely not the “only” consideration in rankings as advocated by by some people who should know better. See ‘Our Predictions - Dangerous Link Strategies’ below.
Our developer told us he/she knows how to optimise our web site
If that was the case, how come so many sites have such ineffecitve optimisation? Search engine optimisation and programming are different skill sets and require a very different approach. These are rarely found in the same head - with some notable exceptions we’re sure - we just haven’t met any yet.
Don’t worry about the search engines, they find everything eventually
If you believe that rankings will “just happen” or that there is nothing that can really be done to influence them, consider this: somehow, some sites are better ranked than others, why is that? You can even have a “website” that will never be found by search engines, how does that happen?
Our Predictions
The leading search engines have already barred certain practices. As they continue in fierce competition they will weed out dodgy and misleading practices by websites that attempt to cheat their way into high ranking results. If the search engines fail to deliver results which are relevant to their users, they will loose credibility, shareholder value and revenue.
The money involved for the search engine companies is too much to allow bad practices in the long term. Constant revision and secrecy of the search algorithms is clear evidence of this.
The search engine providers are not stupid and those that treat them that way will eventually come unstuck. We do not have a crystal ball, the predictions below are based in part on software developments already in play in the Library Management market which are rapidly merging with public search engine technologies. The rest we figure is common sense.
Links and High Rankings
Sites, other than legitimate and credible directory sites, which establish large numbers of links to them in very short timeframes will not achieve high rankings. This is already in evidence through Google’s policy of making such sites serve some “apprenticeship” to establish credibility over time, rather than simply ranking them highly as soon as they come online, based on the number of links to them.
Dangerous Link Strategies
Search engines will become more sophisticated in analysing reciprocal links for relevance to a particular site. Those sites with an overabundance of links which are not relevant to their contents may be penalised; that is, all
those sites that think it is clever to attempt to achieve high rankings by acquiring hundreds of “reciprocal” links to their site – often through spamming - no matter what the website might be on the other end of that link. A stupid and potentially dangerous strategy. Often links pages on these sites are masked from public view and cannot be accessed through normal site navigation. This is why credible sites seeking links to add value for their users will only accept reciprocal links that can be navigated to easily, say within 2 clicks from the home page.
We have seen webmaster warnings that say “If it takes me longer than 30 seconds to find where my link would be on your site, forget swapping links.” We say: all power to those webmasters for not being conned and guarding the value and integrity of their own sites! There should be more of it.
Meta data and Keywords
Sites will be judged more worthy of higher rankings by the search engines where keywords and phrases in their meta data accurately reflect site content. Likewise, use of inappropriate keywords and phrases in meta data, or overuse of keywords and phrases to spam the search engines and poorly structured site content may result in poor rankings.
You heard it from Creative Design!
