John Greer Coast-to-Coast SEO

by John Greer on 05/15/2009 at 2:21 pm in SEO, SEO Best Practices

SEO is great for conspiracy theorists. For starters, it’s monopolistic, with Google gathering more than 70% of US search traffic. It’s also black box, where the only way to learn about how it works is through experience. For most people, it’s a complete mystery and works like magic. Google’s Chief Spam Cop, Matt Cutts, releases just enough information to make the conspiracy all the more believable.

Because of its mysterious nature, people draw a lot of false conclusions about how a web page can rank. For one, there is no magic bullet to ranking. In fact, Google has over a hundred data points it factors into rankings. They usually deliver good results, too, which keep getting better. What that means is that you should focus as much on creating what a visitor would like to see highly ranked, as well as working on SEO tactics.

Some other common misconceptions are:

• You can’t have a flash(y) site and rank well. Not so, in fact, you can have a great looking site with graphics and even Flash movies widely used with careful planning. Using CSS techniques and font alternatives you can remove many unnecessary images. Those images that are kept can be thoroughly optimized. Flash movies can also be better optimized and integrated. With that in mind though, stick with text first and add in these elements when they add to the user experience.
• Traffic is the measure of an SEO campaign. While it’s true that a good SEO campaign will drive more traffic, the traffic needs to be qualified. Search phrases with low conversion rates, low bounce rates, and low visitor loyalty rates should be lower priorities than well performing phrases. Additionally, landing pages need to be well designed for conversions as well as capturing search traffic.
• A lot of sites assumed an XML sitemap wasn’t important, so long as you have an HTML sitemap on your site. In fact, Google discovers new pages on a site much faster when an XML sitemap is present and updated frequently. That means your new products start getting traffic quicker.
• Ranking well is your goal. Yes, ranking highly in Yahoo is nice, but is anyone clicking on your listing? Search visitors won’t simply click on the first listing, they will quickly scan some listing before clicking. Your title, description, and URL need to convince a user to click.
• SEO just affects your site pages. While the HTML pages of a site are a huge part of SEO, pages are not the only content appearing in search engine results. Videos, images, PDFs, RSS feeds, Flash movies, and more appear sprinkled throughout search engine results. Including elements like these in your site, and ensuring they are optimized, means more opportunities for your site to appear.