SEO traps to avoid

Good 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 unwary

E.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 dearly

Most 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

1) 303 redirects: they essentially hijack your rank, providing zero contribution to your rank.
2) tag nofollow: they take your contribution (categirised text, which has a value for internet search engines)
and give you nothing in return.
E.g.: Ecademy, they advertise the fact that user provided ads are indexed by internet search engines, and they indeed are, only that they somehow forget to inform you that the relevant increase in page rank coming from your own data and submissions drives up their own web site, not yours!
tag nofollow is actually prescribed by Google, but what these pay for links sites such as Ecademy don't like you to know is spelling out that the consequence of their indexing of your advert this way is often them obscuring your own site using your own material.
Tag nofollow is normally inserted on external contributors posts on wordpress blogs, it has a legitimate use, this is done openly and reasons behind this are well documented.
3) scripts and being hidden too deeply inside their web site: if your page link is not whithin a normal href tag in HTML, it won't be indexed nor ranked by Google. If the page containing your link it is too deep, say it needs four or five clicks to be reached, starting from the webroot, it won't be crawled either.
You have to pay $$$ for the favour of being listed on sites which I very much doubt Google will ever crawl for your content, hidden at fourth or fifth level from their webroot, where your content (that is the description of your site) will be considered an update of their website. You are paying in order to let them gaining an advantage, getting an expensive big flat nothing in return.
Yes, they edit content, and may refuse your link, this is their escape route from selling links, which is a thing Google doesn't like, but.... still, what are you giving these guys 40 bucks for?
To add insult to injury, their cathegorisation is an inane meaningless bizantine thing, because they thought thay they were indexing "actions" rather than concepts.
So you do web design, but they won't categorize you as such, they'll rather say that you are relevant to "Create web scripts" (which is definitely not what you do in order to earn your bread).
NB: don't just watch the status line: using scripts developers may show you whatever they desire on the status line. Examine the only reliable information: the HTML source code of the page, which you can open using View Source from Internet explorer. If what links to your page is not a plain and simple HTML href, without tag nofollow, your link is worth nothing.
4) frames: anything appearing on a page as HTML frames will not be indexed by Google.
5) robots.txt exclusion: the site gives you an HTML source which appears to be perfectly good. Pity that it will never be indexed or ranked as the web crawlers are not authorised to access your link page!
6) mixed approach: e.g.: redirect of a page which is shown inside a web frame. It is just another way to achieve the same result of jijacking your web rank by providing you nothing in return. A worth example of this strategy is Telecom TIN Virgilio redirects on domains, which you have to pay.
NB: this redirection is offered by many providers and internet DNS registrars! Why do you PAY for such a thing? It is totally useless and those who sell you such a thing do know it very well. They are basically exploiting your initial technical ignorance in order to keep you and your site captive, and manage to keep you out of your intended business. Let me repeat once again: any redirect may damage you by tricking the web search spider program into thinking that YOUR site actually belongs to the content which originates the redirect.
If you have domains on TIN, which uses redirections, or you have similar redirects at other providers, you have to realize that they are in a virtually useless or worse than useless waste of money.
7) flash sites: flash is not indexed by ANY web crawler. Google ignores flash entirely.
Whatever you spent for your flashy flash site may impress your visitors, but is not going to be found.
Flash is great to show off your technically unsavvy web agency clients, preferably inside your own intranet, but has no practical purpose when it comes to be found by clients which don't know you already.
Vbscript, Javascript, applets of any kind: same as above.
8) PHP is trickier than pure HTML but can be made SEO friendly, e.g.: Joomla, with or without SEO friendly URLs.
9) a meaningless link from many worthless sites may be construed by Google as "farming" and being penalised accordingly as an attempt to drive your ranking using forbidden approaches.
10) links, in order to provide any return to your rank should come from high rank pages, relevant to the subjects of your site. A page in order to have value for Google must be genuine rich text, with links to other relevant pages. If page is just a link collection, it is not going to be worth anything from the perspective of the web search engine. This may actually drive your rank down.

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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