| SEO save money! SEO pitfalls to avoid |
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| Written by Michele Fadda | |
SEO traps to avoidGood morning, My name is Michele Fadda. I am a professional nformation technology Web and firmware development consultant. I decided to share some 'information on SEO for free, without asking for anything in return: gratis! SEO is a major buzzword , Search Engine Optimisazion. SEO is an essential component of any activity on the Internet web, as the primary requirement of any web site, e-commerce, professional or not. In plain terms it means reaching intended audiences and being found. Let us be clear, over 90% of all traffic to any site originates from search engines. Google alone captures almost the entire market traffic. Optimizing your site and any relevant actions in order to "be found," trying to maximize web site positioning by appearing among the first results on Google, is the purpose of the activities which we call SEO. One of the main openly declared features of Google is attempting to offer relevant material in response to user searches. If Google does not always manage to achieve this result, we might say they do a valiant attempt in doing so and more often than not, succeed. If you search for Michele Fadda, on Google am found (at the time of publication of this article) on the third page of Google. In between you will find other sites, some belonging to odd folks bearing my same name, and other things that nobody arguably could consider relevant to any Michele Fadda whatsoever: personal forum posts, some of which very old, perhaps more than a decade. Google does not even always manage to consider "relevant" personal sites owned and managed by this Michele Fadda, or other blogs of yours truly, which are surely more important and relevant than old posts now forgotten, and that Google has just refreshed (considering them mistakenly "Recent and significant") just because they were moved (artfully?) from their own original site by some cunning administrator trying to profit (in terms of web rank) from old posts belonging to someone else. Wow! Sometimes you cannot help being amazed at how much garbage Google manages to find and consider "important"!
Are there better search engines than Google?There are engines more comprehensive and updated Google, e.g.: AllTheWeb . allTheWeb, is a less cut down version of Yahoo Search, where a record is kept of virtually every single page that the crawler Yahoo (Yahoo Slurp) manages to reach. Depending on circumstances, each search engine will rank the same page differently, as each uses different criteria and different ranking algorithms. So the same strategy which works well on Google will not necessarily work on Yahoo Search. Being placed on top of Google for a given search key does not imply being found at the same position in other engines. However Google is the single most important web search engine, although it seems to be somewhat influenced by Yahoo, which eventually incorporated almost all other historical search engines dated back to the nineties, one such examples being the old Altavista. Yahoo is mostly about commercial submission (payola)Unfortunately, Yahoo Search is becoming an engine based almost exclusively on commercial criteria of submission (and probably positioning as well) : who pays more ends up at the top, who does not pay is almost always considered "junk" and irrelevant. Payola always drives search engine quality down. It is a very good idea to devise a Search Optimisation strategy which only purpose is maximising placement on Google, as this is the strategy which will maximise returns. Yahoo offer is definitely out of the market, and not only in terms of SEO, but anything or any service which they offer is far too expensive compared to competition in terms of value for money. Consider that you might have a website such as this one for much, much less than you would spend on Yahoo. Free for Yahoo, means that they reap earnings from your work by means of advertisement, at least Google let's you place a Blogger site and lets YOU place your own advertisement using ADSENSE, generously sharing some of Google's profit with you. Yahoo costs far too much!If you examine Yahoo marketing offer, you will notice that you have to pay upfront, for a service which they may or may not) start, and start if and when they please! And be warned that Yahoo search costs TEN TIMES, in terms of comparable ROI and such, compared to Google. Yahoo is only good if you have some GRATIS coupon offered by someone else, in my view. In terms of cost per click, the more you spend, the less you get: if you are paying a premium for clicks, as you don't pay by CONVERSION RATE, you are paying too much. This is typical of any SEO campaign. LULU rapes the unwaryE.g.: you can buy clicks for your own published book by LULU, at a rate of about 100$ per 100 clicks. Wait a minute, ONE DOLLAR PER CLICK? It is awful, let's call this practice with it's name, a spade being a spade: lulu pay per click campaigns are a rape. You small publisher are never going to make money this way, you simply can't win at this game. If you wan't to advertise your own activity on LULU build your own site, drive traffic to your own site, do not pay in order to drive traffic to LULU. Never ever pay LULU in order to promote your own product on LULU: you end up promoting them and paying through the nose for the privilege! You could and should have instead paid 0.10 or 0.05 $ per click (not "per impression" from Google. Yahoo search clicks are less expensive than LULU's and roughly in the same league, but you have to pay up front, for a minimum package which is an order of magnitude more expensive than Google's. And I repeat, Yahoo does not rank in the same league as Google in terms of users, neither does so in terms of service. A Google adwords campaign starts about 10 minutes after you have set your parameters, in Yahoo you have to wait for approval, during office hours, they won't start your campaign if it is not "lucrative enough", and even so, even when your campagn starts, you may end up receiving no clicks (you paid for them up front, didn't you?). In the world of SEO, very often, the more you spend the less you get, and sometimes results can be actuallyt very damaging, i.e. make your web site loose value. Any black hat attempt to maximise your position by resorting to dirty tricks may trigger Google response and have your site banned from Google, often "subtly", meaning that you risk ending up solid at page 722 on ANY search. Things that may trigger this are: hidden or unreadable text, deceptive descriptions, copying the same content from another site, any hacker trick. Another way to throw away money from the window in exchange for nothing is with Internet Directories and submission services. There are relatively few reputable and technically non deceptive ones. I mean about thirty major ones. Free may cost you dearlyMost if not all Internet directories are deceptive, or use tactics which will maximise their ranking at your expense. Even "free" may cost you far too much! Here is a brief and I am afraid incomplete list of Shams and dirty tactics routinely used by Internet directories and web providers in order to gain from your gullibility. 10 things to consider, carefully, about SEO
What, more SEO traps!Another way to drive you out of your money by providing nothing in return or even damaging you is asking you up front for very expensive SEO services and consultancies. Let's face it: Google ranking is Google's secret sauce, nobody outside Google knows for sure how exactly how it works, and nobody, absolutely nobody, can guarantee you positioning on top of Google. This is so by design, Google does not want to be exploited, does not want "google bombing" to work anymore. Bear in mind that Google does not even rank themselves on top: they are have typically a rank of 8 out of 10, NASA and MIT are one of the few organisations deserving a rank of 10. SEO Friendly?Those SEO consultants try to spare you from at least 500$ just for submitting your url to directories (which, as we saw, can DAMAGE the ranking of your website). Some of them even promise to even write an article or two on you, typically about 1000 words long, if you are lucky. In Italy we call this sort of activity letting you pay for fried air, in English you would probably talk about giving the old runaround. Some have lists of so called SEO friendly directories. As we saw, directories offer very limited value in terms of Google ranking, and may even damage you. Being mentioned and linked by other sites is indeed useful, but the page rank of a page full of links, which is the one on which they link you, which is never going to be their main and usually high ranked page, is usually zero. If you are given the opportunity to be listed for free in a directory: you are giving away for free your own description (that is structured, meaningful text) for a link coming from a site that contains only worthless links. Don't you realise you are being cheated by certain directories? You are doing work for free for them and you are getting NOTHING in return. You will end up being indexed, but this you could have achieved for free by submitting your site to Google and, even better, by providing them with an XML site map. A link from a directory can be useful only if it is from a business listing clearly belonging to the same industry sector, such as a professional register or similar, especially if it is not a link for a fee, and only after you have seen what is technically like in HTML. If you see things that are not of pure href without have your doubts. Link for a fee may be damaging: Google have a page for "reporting paid links and spam" of their index. Be warned. |
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