Background: I’ve been secretly hoping that Neal Rohrbach (@nrohrbach) would do a snarky post for quite a while. Neal is the co-founder of ideaAnglers.com, a collaboration start-up that was recently featured on Business Week as a online business tool with the likes of Twitter, Skype, and Google Apps. Neal is a multi-talented professional whose portfolio is outshined only by his ability to generate new and fresh ideas. So needless to say, I’m excited…
Recently my company completed a website makeover for a local business that wanted a fresh new look and more traffic driven to their site (the names have been omitted to protect the guilty). They were extremely pleased with the look and feel, compliments all around, then shortly after things started getting a little tense. In the first sentence of our conversation I knew I was in for a ride: “I clicked on ‘view page source’ for my website.”
That was the first hint that I was working with someone who knew “just enough to be dangerous” and they were playing with fire. My client wanted to know where the keyword meta tags were and how could their site possibly be optimized if there weren’t keywords in the headers. They wanted to see the research, spreadsheets and other fruits of our labor which they were billed for. I suppose this fired me up a bit because even though they didn’t come out and say it, I knew they were questioning the integrity of my business, work ethic, etc. I hopped on my SEO soapbox and explained what I had done for them and what was behind good, true and modern day search engine optimization.
There are countless SEO articles out there, in fact I could recommend a few if you’d like, so I won’t go on and on with the boring details. I’ll give you the “cliffnotes” with a little snark flare, the wordpost way.
First of all, let’s talk about that “keyword meta tag” they were looking for. The blunt truth: no major search engine has used that tag for at least half a decade. What’s that? You googled SEO and found a tutorial on how to add the keyword meta tags? Was the first step to the tutorial to open your website up in Microsoft Notepad? If that’s search engine optimization, then the next recipe you google better start out with “go chop wood for your stove.”
Search engine optimization is molded around setting up a site so that it’s easily read by crawlers and search spiders using clear and easy to read XHTML. This backbone to a website mocks any hand crafted code someone posted in an IRC chat channel. Those META tags the self proclaimed experts refer to provide no additional information for a spider that it couldn’t have already found in your content. Ah, there’s the rub: Content is King. Search spiders don’t grab your keywords and move on, they explore and index your site based on what’s actually there. You and I both know you can’t trust a political candidate based on what they TELL YOU they’re all about. You have to do the research, review how they’re voting on bills, what they’re writing, what they’re actually doing. Same goes for search engine spiders: they don’t trust what you tell them at the podium, they dig deeper.
Give search engine spiders the guts they’re looking for and help lead them to it. Use valid and clean XHTML, link everything together coherently and the spiders won’t have a problem moving from page to page. There are some important “tags” to pay attention to: heading tags, alt tags and your anchor text. Use clean URLs when possible, use the page titles to explain the pages themselves and most importantly offer quality content. That “quality content” is going to yield return visitors and inbound links. Inbound links, other reputable sites linking back to yours, are arguably the “deal breaker” when it comes to a search engine boosting your site’s page rank.
I suppose you could put those prehistoric keyword tags in your headers to avoid the “tagony” of explaining to your client (most likely for the 2nd or 3rd time) what SEO you implemented and why. I’m stubborn and rebellious, so I still haven’t added any keyword meta tags to my client’s aforementioned site. How’s that SEO working out for them? Well, recent analytics show their site traffic from Google alone increased only 2,097%.
Neal Rohrbach is Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Idea Anglers. He also serves as Art Director for Outdoor Channel Outfitters. His portfolio boasts successful projects on both small and global markets, from “Mom & Pop” businesses to professional sports teams and Fortune 500 companies. He is a marketing zealot, graphic designer and entrepreneur. He thinks outside the box, not off the shelf.
Related Posts
No related posts were found, so here's a consolation prize: Microsoft, Yahoo, and Not Getting What You Want (in the short-term).
keywords: idea Anglers, SEO, Straight-up Snark, strategy
