WEB WISE by Tony Thornby (Living Streams)

In the absence this month of any emails from Chamber members with queries, I’ve decided to write about the area of internet marketing that seems to contain many companies taking money from customers for no tangible results – search engine optimisation (SEO). In ‘English’, work to get you ranked higher in the search engines.

In terms of work that gets completed but has little or no effect, these companies will:

1. ‘Submit’ your website to the search engines for you. The only thing this achieves is to get your site ‘indexed’, i.e. your pages included in the search engines’ database. While it is true that you cannot be ranked if your web pages aren’t indexed by the search engines, it isn’t a factor in the ranking algorithms and your site should be found and indexed within a couple of weeks without doing anything. ‘Resubmitting’ after your site is indexed is absolutely pointless because once found your site will be revisited at intervals automatically.
2. Get you highly ranked for phrases which are very rarely searched and therefore deliver very few website visitors. Their demonstration of value is to get you to search using the phrase and see that you have a highly ranked page. Very few websites will target being ranked for such terms so the competition is usually weak – hence they have very little work to complete to achieve the useless high ranking.
   
   One trick is to add your location to a well searched term and get you ranked for the combined phrase. People in the UK very rarely include location in search terms when looking for commercial services / companies (there are some exceptions).
   
   If you would like to check search frequency for any given phrase and related ones, the free Google tool to be found at https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal is easy to use and reliable as any. It gives UK search data (using Google) for the last full calendar month as well as world figures: It also gives figures for broad, phrase and exact match – which I will explain in a later article.
3. Charge you for filling your page’s title tag, description meta tag and keyword meta tag with masses of phrases when: - As a good rule of thumb, a single page only stands a chance of highly ranking for one phrase (or a set of VERY closely related phrases) - There is no point in getting a page ranked for subjects which the page isn’t about, even if you could. Your human webpage visitors would leave the site immediately because it doesn’t match their search:
   
   - Google ignores the content of the keyword meta tag for ranking purposes and the other search engines take very little notice of it
   
   - Search engines only read about the first 70 characters (inc spaces) of the title tag and about 150 characters (including spaces) of the description meta tag
   
   - Even if this did get you ranked, no human is going to click on the entry for your page that they see in the search results, because it (the content of your title tag and description meta tag) makes no sense and the entries for other websites do
4. List within page work that they will carry out for their money when for the targeted search phrases this is never going to get you highly ranked because the current top 10 pages are superior to yours:
   
   - for a combination of site age, site size, frequency of content addition, links from government / educational websites, entry in the DMOZ directory and entry in the Yahoo directory
   
   - in terms of number and quality of links from other sites (external) coming to your page and to your site.
   
   The key here is that they are charging for doing a defined set of work not for getting you ranked or, even better, achieving extra website visitors.
5. Submit an entry for you to DMOZ, open source, directory. This is a human edited directory and the percentage of applications that are accepted is now quite low. You should only pay for acceptance - not submission.

SEO is an enormous subject and cannot possibly be covered fully in one article, but hopefully that’s given you a feeling for the sort of offers you should reject because you’d be wasting your money.

For more useful articles on business use of the web, please make use of Living streams free, Google News approved, services at http://www.living-streams.co.uk/Internet-Services-Business-News.aspx or follow me at www.twitter.com/coffeemate49

 

Please do post web queries you would like answering in this column to tony.thornby@living–streams.co.uk