Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [22]
Essentially, the search engines operated on a principle that was exactly opposite of how they operate today. Today, they will find your site on their own and download your content and evaluate it. Back in the stone age of SEO, you would tell the search engine what your website was about, tell it the keywords that you should be found for, and submit the pages of your website that you wanted in the index.
Many businesses were built on this early practice of SEO. Unfortunately, when the practice of submitting your website was no longer necessary, there were still many companies that were able to sell website submission services. Many of these were unsolicited emails that claimed you could be found in the search engines by paying them $39.95, and they would submit your website to the top 20 search engines. Once in a while I still run into this claim today, but it is completely outdated. For one, I would like to hear how many people can name 10 search engines, much less 20.
Bottom line, there is no longer any reason to submit your website to the search engines. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines even state, “The vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.”
Old-School: Keywords in Metatags
Another of those “rock-solid” pieces of advice that seems to have held on past its time is the SEO technique of adding keywords into the metatags. At one time, this was the bread and butter of the SEO specialist’s website work. Search engines utilized this tag in order to rank sites according to the relevant words that were written into this element.
Just as an aside, metatags, which will be explained more in Chapters 5 and 6, are elements within the code of each web page. Meta is a Greek word meaning “after” or “behind,” which is a great way of picturing this element. Metatags are not visible to the website visitor, because they are behind the scenes and written into the code. They are “behind” the web page. Metatags were originally intended to be the card catalog to the Internet, allowing documents to be neatly organized into logical groupings by author, keyword, subject matter, and so on. Unfortunately, nothing about allowing webmasters to promote their own websites on the Internet is organized, logical, or neat.
Of course, as with every other early SEO technique, this was abused to the point of disgrace. As soon as the word spread that the keyword metatag was the primary factor that search engines used to rank your site, site owners started to utilize it to their complete advantage. Perhaps the most egregious use of this was using words such as Disneyland, Mickey Mouse, and Britney Spears as the metatag keywords for adult sites simply as a means of gaining rankings for those terms, which resulted in some very surprised people.
The failure in this system is that for the most part, the search engines believed what was written in the metatags and did not verify it against the content of the website. This made for unethical uses of the technique, because many webmasters were paid by visitor numbers, so simply getting people to the website was the goal. You could get a lot of people to your website if you ranked for a lot of terms, even if they weren’t relevant.
Of course, time went on, and the search engines wised up. Fewer and fewer search engines relied on keyword metatags as the knowledge of their misuse became legendary. Today, the keyword metatag is not used as a rankings factor for any of the major search engines. My advice is that there are things more worth your time than stuffing a bunch of keywords into the code that no one will look at.
Old-School: Background-Colored Text
This technique was formed out of the search engine improvements of spidering and evaluating the content that was actually on the page, not in the code. By taking content, basically a paragraph or list of keywords, and then adding that content on the page in a very small font and coloring the text the same color as the background,