The Rank Magic Blog

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

By the small stuff, I mean the picky details that paralyze people. Things like how many words or characters should be in a title tag. Or in what order those words should be placed. Or how many times a keyword phrase should be in the copy. Or how many keyword phrases any page can be optimized for. Or should commas be used in the Meta keyword tag. Or should file names have hyphens in them. Or should headlines use H1 tags (or H2 tags, or whatever).

Guess what? None of that stuff matters! Pretty crazy coming from an SEO, huh? But seriously, it really doesn't matter. When you get caught up in those minor details, you will lose your focus on what does matter."

"The important things I'm talking about are stuff like the age, popularity, and authority of your site, as well as its usability and overall appeal to its target audience."

Sweat the Small Stuff

I won’t argue that optimizing your Meta tags and H1 tags will always give you a significant boost in the rankings, or that if you put one extra word in your title tags you’re doomed to Google Hell; it won’t.

I won’t argue that Meta tags and H1 tags hold the same importance as keyword research, link building and site architecture, or that they should paralyze you in fear. There has no been research to prove that self-induced paralysis has any effect on your rankings.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not important or that you should forget them. The details are important. If they play any part in the search engine’s algorithm, they should be part of your search engine optimization campaign. Why? Because if you’re ignoring them and your competition isn’t, it puts you at a disadvantage. You can’t afford that.

The trouble with "not sweating the small stuff" is that you end up with an okay site. Not a great site, just one that's "good enough". If all you're willing to optimize for is "good enough" then your rankings will reflect that. Top 20 is good enough. Top 10 requires more work. Top 3? That requires sweating the small stuff.

Don't Anger the Google Gods!

That's the lesson Paul Sanar learned--too late--last year. Up until last fall, the 21-year-old New Yorker depended solely on the search engine to keep traffic flowing to Skyfacet.com, his online diamond business; Sanar says he sold $3 million dollars worth of jewelry a year. Then, he says, Google turned its back on Skyfacet.com, condemning the site to Internet obscurity.

Beginning in September 2006, Skyfacet no longer showed up on the first few pages of Google's results when users typed in search terms like "diamonds" and "engagement ring." The site's traffic vanished, and Sanar says his sales dropped $500,000 in three months.
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In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages, making them look like duplicate – that is, spam – content. But even after he reversed the consultant's changes, he couldn't get Skyfacet's pages out of Google Hell, where they remain today. [They're referring to Google's Supplemental Index -- Bill]
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"So many of the rules are vague," Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic.

Jhalani says he removed the links that may have offended Google, but the site remained in Google's gulag. Jhalani wrote Google asking the search engine to reappraise MySolitaire; nothing happened. Since Google ranks sites partially by the quality of sites that link to them, he painstakingly contacted every site that seemed to be of low quality and linked to MySolitaire, asking them to remove their links, sometimes even sending cease-and-desist letters. Finally the site returned to Google's main index last June, though Jhalani has no way of knowing just what finally caused Google's algorithm to forgive him.

We lost a client recently because our client told us they had not closed a single deal as a result of the work we did for them. They were a large networking company and if they had even closed a single client, it would have more than made up for the modest cost of their campaign. We monitored their account and we knew they were getting leads. We asked about their follow up. Their response was shocking. If leads came in via the telephone and a rep happened to be around (which was seldom) the lead would be answered. If not, it was written down and put into a drawer. Leads that came in from forms or emails were sent to a data file but they had not assigned lead follow up duties to any specific employee. As a result most leads were followed up days later or not at all!

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If you get a lead the strategy should be to stop the prospect from searching. If you don’t follow up quickly, the prospect will find somebody else and your hard work and advertising budget will have been wasted.