Considering Massive Rewrites? Don’t Bother!

Late last month I received a bid request from a company who wanted to increase the amount of content on their website. In their email to me they mentioned that their site was founded in 2000, had about 300 pages indexed by Google, and they believed that there were about 5000 inbound links.

I did  a little research myself and discovered that while the home page had a PageRank of 4, most of the main inner pages were PR3 or PR2, with deeper pages showing up as PR1, PR0, if that. Though PageRank isn’t critically important, I was a bit surprised to find that this site wasn’t ranked as well as it could have been. Checking some of their competitor’s sites I found much better results which had me wondering — what were they doing wrong?

Digging deeper I discovered some problems with the site, mistakes made by a webmaster which needed to be corrected:

• For quite a few internal pages, there wasn’t much linking between other pages on the site. I didn’t find that many outbound links either, but there should have been more links between existing pages on the same URL.

• Some of the internal pages were difficult to find. Likely, when the site was first started, these pages were linked to some other page on the site, but were no longer. Effectively orphaned, these lone internal pages were getting absolutely no benefit from other pages, hence the grayed out Google toolbar ranking.

When I mentioned these matters to the owner, he was surprised. Clearly, when the site was launched in Spring 2000, all of the pages were properly linked. A web designer and writer were hired to put the site together and everything worked fine. However, I did learn that the company — in a bid to save some money — made some changes to the site themselves early in 2003 and again in 2005 whereby content was updated, new pages added, and the design tweaked.

I also learned that the owner was the one who did all of the changes. Ugh.

Anyway, the client had contacted me initially with the purpose to have me rewrite a bunch of pages to bring them up to date. His thinking was that the fresh content would be recognized by the search engines and encourage the “bots” to visit his pages. Though this is true, I mentioned that he could save a whole lot of time (and money) if he added the links in himself and update the content as needed. Each page FTP’d to the internet would invite a crawl from Googlebot provided his site map was up to date.

Naturally, I found out that he didn’t even have a site map in place so I instructed him on how to get one.  I also shared Google’s Webmaster Guidelines link and encourage the client to visit Google Webmaster Tools to add and verify his site and do the same with Yahoo! Site Explorer.

As for me, I’ll be doing some other work for this client, but nothing involving fixing internal problems made by others.  Most times I’d rather have people clean up their own mess and take on fresh work without hassling with old stuff.  Besides, learning from one’s mistakes has its advantages, particularly when you manage your own business.

SEO Myths, Tricks, and Trials

Power To SEO!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most uttered terms by webmasters, bloggers, and web enthusiasts. We all know what it is, but we have diverging, even contradictory opinions on how to best achieve this.

At one time, SEO “experts” encouraged page optimization for all of the major search engines. Today, Google is the most important — perhaps the only — search engine worth optimizing for. Granted, Yahoo, MSN and Ask each have their place, but Google is dominant and is in many markets exerting more influence then all of its competitors combined, thus rendering everyone else to a distant second tier status.

A big portion of what I do every day is built on SEO: I build links, work on back links, add fresh content, tweak existing content, digg, stumble, and work my way on and on and on. At times it can be tiring, seeming somewhat pointless, but when I check the SERPs (search engine results pages) and learn that a customer has discovered me due to my hard work it all becomes worthwhile.

Allow me to cover some of the myths, tricks and trials of SEO. Some of what I am sharing is simply my opinion, while other methods have a proven track history — steps I do over and over and over again.

SEO Myths

You must saturate your article with keywords. Granted keywords are important, but anything over 2 or 3 percent is plain wrong. This means that if you write a 500 word article you will use “diamond necklace” between 10 and 15 times. Um, that is plain silly…boring to read too. Better: use a particular keyword or phrase three, perhaps five times in the article. That is all you need to do.

Limit your articles to 250 words, submit them to the article directories. No and no. The premise with the first part is that a page with less words on it will load quicker. In some cases, maybe so. But, there isn’t much that can be said in 250 words that makes sense. As far as the article directories go, be very selective: they aren’t all equal — I have two directories that I really like, but I use them with care.

Tags do not matter. Some do, some don’t (as much). META tags aren’t all that important, but Title, Paragraph, and ALT tags are very important. Use them with care and you’ll succeed. (note: see comment below by SEO Ranter who disputes my finding with a comment by me linking to a site which explains their effectiveness today).

SEO Tricks

Writing good content is essential. Well, so is writing jibberish. Seriously, the search engines are not grammar police — I’ve seen many pages do very well that are poorly written. Sure, if you want to engage your readers, you should work on well you write, but that won’t necessarily stop your page from performing well. Focus on writing a lot of unique content too. Quantity isn’t tops, but it can be important.

Add a Site Map. Always a good idea — make your site easier for the search engines to spider. Besides if links break or other problems arise, you can check your site map and quickly correct the problem.

Build Links. Having an excellent internal link structure is important. Wherever possible, point to some of the articles and categories within your site, not just outside links. Point to related sites you control and share some link love with sites outside of your control as well. Exchanging blogroll links is good. Better: set up a separate link page and link from that page. You’ll avoid the clutter and not duplicate links across your blog.

SEO Trials

Oftentimes, feedback is difficult to gauge. Sure, SERPs can be followed, but are people clicking on your pages, reading what you published, and taking additional action such as buying your product? Some people are sniffers, others are lurkers, while still others are shoppers — you want to snag the latter.

SEO can be tiring. Yes, but it is very necessary. SEO should be habit-forming and the part of everything that you write. Good habits equal good results; the opposite is also true. Which method do you want to follow?

Sure, there are other tips and tricks I could mention, but then I’d be giving fodder to my competition.

Meanwhile, familiarize yourself with the many tips and tricks out there and give the good and safe ones a try. Yes, there are some shady ways to do SEO, but I am not covering those. Let your white hat go a bit gray, but wearing a black hat can come back to bite you.