Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [45]
Another issue is the industry in which the SEO specialist provides services. Certain industries (affectionately referred to as PPC—pills, porn, and casinos) require cutthroat SEO tactics that few marketers could ever imagine. The competitive atmosphere in those industries results in an SEO “arms race” that involves targeting competitor websites with underhanded techniques, technical wizardry, and over-the-line short-term tactics. These areas are so competitive and abused that Google has even stated that they rarely enforce their own quality guidelines. (PPC is also used as an acronym for pay-per-click marketing, so the double meaning caught on within the industry.)
The SEO practitioners in these industries will occasionally write an article about the latest sneaky tactics designed to unseat a competitor or build their rankings. In those businesses, improvements in rankings can be the results of minute tweaks in linking strategies, development of thousands of “fake” sites that link to the main site, and the use of “disposable” domains. These tactics in the majority of other businesses can easily go unused, because the competition is nowhere near as intense or scrutinized, and most businesses are focused on a long-term approach to their online presence and domain name. As such, many of these articles that focus on the tactics employed at that level can be just as misleading for a website manager or a small-business owner, because they can detract from the basics and focus someone on a minute detail or advice that may yield little results.
The catch to working with an SEO specialist is to understand their background and areas of specialty. This will greatly affect how they approach your project and the results they expect to deliver.
Factor 2: Content Written before 1999
Two things were evident to search engine optimizers in the early days. You needed content to rank in the search engines, and if you got rankings, you got customers. Because of those two things, SEO specialists wrote an inordinate amount of content in a very short amount of time.
Tactics
Following most of the published advice written prior to the year 2000 could land you in some trouble with the search engines, because many of the tactics and software utilized at the time relied on “bait-and-switch” techniques. That means showing the search engine pages that were developed primarily to gain rankings and then showing the visitor another page. The pages built specifically for search engines were typically nonsensical if you ever tried to read one. These pages were built to accommodate the algorithm, not to persuade the visitor.
Still available online are thousands of articles for creating these infamous “doorway pages.” There are more than enough articles debating the use of commas to separate keywords in the meta keyword tag. There are articles for detecting the search engine spiders using IP detection and serving alternate pages specifically to them. There are articles advising webmasters to join discussion forums and put their website URL in their signature line, just to help inflate link text to their website.
The problem is context. Although the articles may have had some truth to them at some time, the subject matter seems contradictory when compared to other articles. Unless the reader understands the industry as a whole, past and current tactics, and the goals, developments, and purposes for these isolated tactics, the specifics seem random.
Events
The first major event in SEO was the