Tags 2015

Meta Tags

Meta tags were used to help search engines organize the Web. Documents listed keywords and descriptions that were used to match user queries. Initially these tags were somewhat effective, but over time, marketers exploited them and they lost their relevancy.

People began to stuff incredibly large amounts of data (which was frequently off topic) into these tags to achieve high search engine rankings. Porn and other high-margin websites published meta tags like “free, free, free, free, Disney, free.” Getting a better ranking simply meant you repeated your keywords a few more times in the meta tags.

It did not help anything that during the first Web bubble stocks were based on eyeballs, not profits. That meant that people were busy trying to buy any type of exposure they could, which ended up making it exceptionally profitable to spam search engines to show off topic random banners on websites.

The Internet bubble burst. What caused such a fast economic recovery was the shift from selling untargeted ad impressions to selling targeted leads. This meant that webmasters lost much of their incentive for trying to get any kind of traffic they could. Suddenly it made far greater sense to try to get niche-targeted traffic.

In 1998, Overture pioneered the pay-per-click business model that most all major search engines rely on. Google AdWords enhanced the model by adding a few more variables to the equation—the most important one is factoring ad click-through rate (CTR) into the ad ranking algorithm.

Google extended the targeted advertisement marketing by delivering relevant contextual advertisements on publisher websites via the Google AdSense program.

More and more ad spending is coming online because it is easy to track the return on investment. As search algorithms continue to improve, the value of having well-cited, original, useful content increases daily.

Instead of relying exclusively on page titles and meta tags, search engine now index the entire page contents. Since search engines have been able to view entire pages, the hidden inputs (such as meta tags) have lost much of their importance in relevancy algorithms.

The best way for search engines to provide relevant results is to emulate a user and rank the page based on the same things the user see and do (Do users like this website? Do they quickly hit the back button?), and what other people are saying

about the document (For example, does anybody link to this page or site? Who is linking at it? What is the link text? And so on.).

Search engines make billions of dollars each year selling ads. Most search engine traffic goes to the free, organically listed sites. The ratio of traffic distribution is going to be keyword dependent and search engine dependent, but I believe about 85% of Google’s traffic clicks on the organic listings. Most other search engines display ads a bit more aggressively than Google does. In many of those search engines, organic listings get around 70% of the traffic. Some sites rank well on merit, while others are there due exclusively to ranking manipulation.

In many situations, a proper SEO campaign can provide a much greater ROI than paid ads do. This means that while search engine optimizers—known in the industry as SEOs—and search engines have business models that may overlap, they may also compete with one another for ad dollars. Sometimes SEOs and search engines are friends with each other, and, unfortunately, sometimes they are enemies.

When search engines return relevant results, they get to deliver more ads. When their results are not relevant, they lose market share. Beyond relevancy, some search engines also try to bias the search results to informational sites such that commercial sites are forced into buying ads.

I have had a single page that I have not actively promoted randomly send me commission checks for over $1,000. There is a huge sum of money in manipulating search results. There are ways to improve search engine placement that go with the goals of the search engines, and there are also ways that go against them. Quality SEOs aim to be relevant, whether or not they follow search guidelines.

Many effective SEO techniques may be considered somewhat spammy.

Like anything in life, you should make an informed decision about which SEO techniques you want to use and which ones you do not (and the odds are, you care about learning the difference, or you wouldn’t be reading this).

You may choose to use highly aggressive, “crash and burn” techniques, or slower, more predictable, less risky techniques. Most industries will not require extremely aggressive promotional techniques. Later on I will try to point out which techniques are which.

While there will always be ways to manipulate the search engines, there is no telling if you will eventually get caught and lose your rankings if you optimize your site

using overtly deceptive techniques. In any business such as SEO, there will be different risk levels.

Search engines try hard not to flag false positives (label good sites as spam), so there is usually a bunch of slack to play with, but many people also make common mistakes, like incorrectly using a 302 redirect, or not using specific page titles on their pages, or allowing spiders to index multiple URLs with the same content. If you are ever in doubt if you are making technical errors, feel free to search a few SEO forums or ask me.

The search engines aim to emulate users. If you design good content for users and build a smart linking campaign, eventually it will pay off.

New aggressive techniques pop up all the time. As long as they are available, people will exploit them. People will force the issue until search engines close the loophole, and then people will find a new one. The competitive nature of web marketing forces search engines to continuously improve their algorithms and filters.

In my opinion, the ongoing effort of keeping up with the latest SEO tricks is usually not worth it for most webmasters. Some relational database programmers and people with creative or analytical minds may always be one step ahead, but the average business owner probably does not have the time to dedicate to keeping up with the latest tricks.

Tying ethics to SEO techniques is a marketing scam. Either a technique is effective, or it is not. There is nothing unethical about being aggressive. You probably do not want to take big risks with domains you cannot afford to have blacklisted, but there is nothing wrong with owning a few test sites.

Some sites that are not aggressively promoted still fall out of favor on occasion. As a webmaster following Google’s guidelines, you still can not expect Google to owe you free traffic. You have to earn it by making others cite your website.

The effects of SEO do take time to kick in. At any given time, considering how dynamically the web changes, there will be some holes in search algorithms that make certain SEO techniques exceptionally effective.

I have spoken with current search engine engineers working at major search engines in regards to this e-book. I also have spoken with database programmers who later became some of the world’s most technically advanced SEOs. Some of these programmers have told me what some would consider tricks that work really well, but they only work really well because few people know about them.

I do not try to promote the latest search spamming techniques in this e-book for the following reasons:

•       They are the most likely to quickly change. Some things that are cutting-edge and effective today can become ineffective and actually hurt you tomorrow.

•       Some of them can be damaging to your brand.

•       Aggressive techniques are the some of the most likely techniques to get your site banned.

•       Some things are told to me as a secret, and if they are made openly available to anyone (including search engine engineers—some who have read this e-book), then they lose their value, and I lose my friends and resources.

•       I do not have a lot of experience with exceptionally aggressive promotional techniques, as I have not needed them to rank well in most the markets I worked in.

•       People who use aggressive techniques are not evil or bad, but I cannot possibly put accurate, current, useful, and risky information out to everyone in an e-book format and expect it to not cause problems for some people.

•       To me, effective web promotion is balancing risk versus reward. SEOBook.com got on the first page of Google for SEO within nine months of making the site, with less than $5,000 spent on promotion. Most sites do not need to use overly aggressive and risky promotional techniques. SEO works so well because most sites on the web do not actively practice effective SEO.