stephan.com
scattered thoughts

Another friend asked me what I know I about search engine optimization, particularly hiring a company to do that sort of work for her.

Do you know anything about this? I need my website to come up at the top of the heap. Can you direct me to someone competent who understands SEO/Spiders/Metatags/etc. Let me know if you can help.

My response:

Personally, I think it’s kind of evil. It’s not a scam, per se. The idea of it is essentially to figure out how the search engines work, most notably Google, and then game the system to show up higher in the rankings. First of all, it really impolite, it’s a very rude thing to do to the public commons. Second, you’re now competing with every OTHER joker who knows how to do it. Think of it as like waiting in line. You’re in line with 500 other people. A few assholes (the optimizing people) are linejumping. But, guess what, there’s 500 of them jumping on top of one another, all crawling over each other to get to the head. Finally, Google doesn’t like it, because it totally disrupts the whole point of the search engine in the first place, which means that they go to a lot of trouble to figure out what the optimizing people are trying to do, and stop them. If they decide you’re trying to scam, they’ll just totally take you out entirely. To use my line jumping metaphor, it’s like the place that people are waiting for hires a guard with a machine gun and just shoots all the line jumpers.

I’m just not in favor of it in general.

There are honest ways to get to the head of the line, or at least take your rightful place. Meta tags, as you mention, are a perfectly legit way to do this, and google DOES respect meta tags - in fact, they’ve been really friendly about it in the last few months. Meta tags are an attempt to help the search engine Do The Right Thing. Most of the “optimization” tricks people are trying to sell you are cheats. Meta tags are really easy to do, too - go look at the Travmatix site I’ve been working on, we’ve got a bunch of meta tags on the top of the page.

The point is there are a lot of honest ways to help the search engines do their job, and they won’t fall apart in six months when Google decides to cut out the deadwood. Another example is Google site maps, where you go tell the search engine what is on your site. They seem to give you preferential treatment for doing that.

Honest will get you much further than scamming - and you know I have nothing against scamming if it works Two more honest things to do:

Instead of spending your money on some asshole who thinks he can outsmart google, spend your money advertising with Google Adwords. You pay for the keywords you’re interested in. http://adwords.google.com/ . You can start for $10 or $20. If someone is looking for “celiac cupcakes” and you’ve bought those adwords, they’ll see your ad (there were NO ads for celiac cupcakes, go make a cupcake and advertise it!). Go check out the sidebar ads in a google search, or even in your gmail.

The best thing, though, is to actually produce a good product, and get people to talk about it. Google’s central algorithm, “Pagerank” works by counting inbound and outbound links to a website, here’s a few pages that explain it:

http://www.google.com/technology/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

It gives more weight to pages take have the most incoming links, and weights pages that THAT pages link out to higher than other pages.

So, how do you get pagerank to recognize you? Well, the best and most honest way would be to send samples of your product to people who will review them and discuss them on their blogs. The more influential (higher pagerank) their sites are, and the more they write about you, the better your rank will be - it helps to give back, as well, by linking out to other relevant sites. Find bloggers that talk about food, particularly gluten-free celiac food, and get them to write about you, and not only will their articles get you press, but their LINKS will get you RANKING!

So, now that you know sort of how pagerank works, here’s one form of search engine optimization that has been very popular lately. What you do is you make a hundred blogs. Fill them up with fake posts, with links all pointing to one another, all with links pointing to the site you want to promote. There are hundreds of thousands of fake blogs out there for just this reason.

In other words, search engine optimization is (in the scam way most of these people are selling it) a form of spam. Do you want to be a spammer? In fact, some of it is literally spam. The two blogs on stephan.com get TONS of “comment spam” and “link spam”, hoping that I’ll allow their comments, with links to porn, gambling, whatever, to go on my site, pointing back to them and increasing their page rank. You wouldn’t believe how much of it there is. I let it slide on stephan.com/artn for a few months and finally upgraded, installed three spam filters, and deleted SEVENTEEN THOUSAND comment spams!

THAT is search engine optimization.

So, if you want to drop your cash on a scam that is, at best, rude, but more likely futile, go ahead. But if you’ve got a real good product, the best thing to do is start blog for celiacs, write original and interesting content about your topic, and get other bloggers, review sites, etc. to talk about your product and link to your blog.

Except for handling online orders, you can do most of what you need at blogger.com or wordpress.com. It’s not get-rich-quick. It means you have to do work.

Here’s a nice line of links I followed last night that might give you an idea of how things work:
http://www.digg.com/general_sciences/Amazing_machine_seperates_whole_lobster_from_shell_while_alive_photos

http://www.secretlifeoflobsters.com/blog/2006/06/how-to-kill-lobster-redux.asp

http://www.shucksmaine.com/

It’s all about fitting into a web, like myspace, where you talk about other people, and they talk about you - rather than “optimizing” to fool a computer.