Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

In her recent newsletter, she went on a bit of a rant over the nonsense people are hearing about SEO. She called it Spreading Silly SEO Stupidity. Here are a few of the stupid (and untrue) things people are spreading about Search Engine Optimization:

• Google only indexes the first 100 words on a page.
• The only way to rank is by using Google AdWords.
• Putting keywords in meta tags helps your rankings.
• If you click on your own Google listing, you’ll get a higher ranking.
• You need to update your blogs at least daily.
• SEO isn’t worth the bother anymore. (from a guy selling ads on the AT&T ad network)
• Some company can get you 2,000 backlinks for $49 a month.
• Reciprocal links will hurt your rankings.
• And the best of the bunch was a seminar where the speaker told attendees they should submit their websites to search engines on a monthly basis. He then proceeded to provide them with the name of a tool that would do that for only $99 per month. (Tip: It’s not worth a dime.)

Jill went on to postulate why these stupidities seem to persist in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Here’s her list of reason, but you should read her article for the explanation of each. It’s worth the read, if only to picture Jill getting all red in the face with exasperation over the people who propagate these myths.

• It’s easy to implement. (So what if it doesn’t work — it’s easy.)
• Old articles get recirculated.
• Designers and developers know just enough SEO to be dangerous.
• Forum newbies parrot whatever they’re heard..
• Believing what you read or hear instead of figuring it out for yourself.
• Mixing up cause and effect.
• They’re set in their ways.

Dealing With Varying Rankings

In our recent post about rankings disappearing, we listed several reasons your rankings may vary substantially between checks. One factor was that searches by different people may show different results, and searches from different locations may do the same. The keyword ranking reporting Rank Magic does for our clients is done consistently so that trend comparisons should be pretty accurate even though the rankings we find may differ slightly from what you may find doing your own search.

A better measure may be the traffic on your site.

If a keyword phrase disappears from the rankings one month but your traffic remains steady for it, you can discount the ranking report as an aberration.

Another reason traffic reporting is helpful has to do with keyword selection. Some SEOs have been known to optimize and track rankings for keywords that are easy to rank highly for because no one searches for them. They may report great rankings that bear no relationship to whether your website is actually getting visitors as a result.

For that reason, we’re adding something new to our SEO Monitoring services. If you have Google Analytics on your website, we’ll report to you on that monthkly along with our ranking reports.

Ask us about adding this to your SEO Monitoring services.

Not monitoring your site’s performance? You really should — either manually yourself or with help from a professional Here’s what we include in our services:

• Monthly Broken Link Report so you’ll know if you’ve got dead links on your site that you need to clean up.
• Monthly Link Popularity Report showing how many inbound links are reported for you by Google, Yahoo and Bing. This also shows how many links are reported for about a half dozen of your most important competitors.
• Comprehensive online Keyword Status Reports updated for you monthly. If you’ve been a client of ours recently, you’ve probably seen them and know how thorough and how valuable they are. We typically run the first one for you as soon as you identify your keywords (as a baseline report) and then monthly thereafter.
• Review of your Traffic Reports monthly if you have Google Analytics installed on your website and give us access to review it.

If Rank Magic isn’t helping you monitor your search engine health, ask us how easy and inexpensive it is.

Some Keyword Rankings Gone?

Every once in awhile you may notice that some keywords suddenly seem to drop out of rankings and then pop right back a month later. We see that on occasion. What’s that all about?

Well, perhaps we  should explain a bit about ranking reporting.

1. If you check a keyword’s ranking from computers at two different physical locations, you’re likely to get slightly different results due to your results coming from different data centers. Google has dozens of data centers around the country, and they’re not all precisely synchronized. So this is one reason you might get different rankings.
2. Search engine tweak their ranking algorithms frequently. They often try a change, evaluate it for a few days, and then undo it if it didn’t work as hoped. This is a common cause of rankings that seem to disappear and then reappear.
3. Search engines are beginning to personalize results. If Google figures out that you’re a wine connoisseur or you own a restaurant, when you search for glasses they may send you more results about glassware than about eyeglasses.

All of these create variable results that are not always replicable from one query to the next, or even from one browser to the next.

Rankings that disappear are no cause for panic unless they’re still missing for two-three months. If that happens, ask us to investigate the problem for you.

Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all. Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

• Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
• Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
• Proper use of 301 redirects
• Paying close attention to their page speed
• Constantly building backlinks.
• One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.

CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant. Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought. And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

Renee Shupe, the Redhead Virtual Assistant, recently ranted about the dangers of using free web hosting sites for a business website. Of particular note are these:

• Your site is a sub-domain at the hosting site. So instead of MyGreatSite.com, you become MySite.FreeWebHosting.com. That’s a killer for SEO.
• Most of these require advertising on your pages. That’s likely to either be ads for stuff that’s totally irrelevant to you business or (worse yet!) ads for competitors.
• You have little control over the look & feel of your site — you’re  forced to use their templates (some are just horrible-looking).
• You lose rights to your site — if they shut down their service or go out of business, you don’t have a copy of your site that you can put up elsewhere.

Never skimp on your web hosting. Select a reputable hosting provider who will protect your interests in your web site and provide full value. Ask us to recommend some.

Let’s say someone writes a scathing indictment of you or your company. Very possibly, anyone searching for your name will find those negative comments. Bad news!

Online reputation management companies work to minimize the impact of those negative reviews (seldom can you get them completely removed) by creating optimized positive content that will show up higher than the negative content. Push it down far enough and few if any people will ever see it.

Of course those concerned with ethical SEO discourage anything you do just for the search engines and that’s not useful to searchers. So will this tactic cause you trouble with the search engines? At Google, apparently not. Recently on NPR’s All Tech Considered, it was remarked that:

Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with the whole game [search suppression]. As the world’s largest search engine, a spokesman there says creating new content to hide negative material is fair play.

Google’s own post on this reinforces that position:

For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

Note that they specify useful information. Don’t just publish optimized garbage and expect it to do well. But if you generate useful content, it shouldn’t get you in trouble with Big G.

If you think your SEO consultant can work independently and work magic on your rankings without your help, you’re mistaken.

I know. You’re too busy running your business to spend time and effort on SEO. That’s why you hired an SEO consultant in the first place.

And we’d love to create an SEO strategy for you, choose keywords, make structural changes to make your website search engine friendly, write compelling marketing copy for your website and your blog, post updates to your Facebook Fan Page, tweet about your business, and earn you massive link popularity without you having to lift a finger.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

• You don’t want to delegate keyword selection. Sure, we can help, but selecting the best keywords requires an intimate knowledge of your business — something no SEO consultant has.
• Your webmaster needs to be the one to make your site search engine friendly. We can advise and suggest, but you don’t want any SEO consultant getting in between you and your webmaster. First, coordination and synchronization issues are inevitable. Second, it was an SEO company  making changes to the client’s website that got Ricoh and BMW websites completely banned from Google for more than six months a few years ago. You need your webmaster’s eyes on any changes proposed by an SEO consultant to prevent just that sort of thing.
• SEO consultants are almost never professional copywriters. We work with those folks all the time, and their skills are invaluable. Even if you don’t engage a copywriter, you can’t delegate the writing of marketing copy about your business to someone who isn’t intimately familiar with it. (That’s right — even with a professional copywriter, you’re going to have to be closely involved.)
• Blog posts don’t have to be the size of a short story, but they do need to be posted at least a couple of times a month. SEO consultants don’t know what to write about your business; that’s your area of expertise.
• Twitter activity is the same. Tweets need to come from you or someone knowledgeable on your staff.
• We can do link building for you, but when a potential reciprocal link partner requests a link, you need to be the one to decide if that link is acceptable. And links from clients and vendors might make great links for you, but your SEO  consultant can’t know who those people are.

Expect to be involved with your SEO campaign. You need to stay in touch with your SEO consultant frequently.

If you can’t make the time to be closely involved with your SEO campaign, you’re probably dooming it to failure. Much as it pains me to say this, you might as well not hire that SEO consultant in the first place.

There are a few principles that generate positive feelings in the visitors to your web site — positive feelings that are essential to converting those visitors into paying customers. Renee Shupe, the Redhead Virtual Assistant wrote a really helpful article on the subject: 5 Keys to Creating Websites That Sell.

Here they are in brief:

1. Make your web site interactive – give visitors a way to communicate with you.
2. Provide value — personally, I think this should be #1.
3. Provide easy, intuitive navigation
4. Have an attractive, professional-looking design
5. Give them a soft sell.

Renee expands on these nicely, so rather than try to explain all of them here. let us just refer you to her original article. It’s worth the read.

We’re teaching a Lunch & Learn session for the Hanover Area Chamber of Commerce on March 15th (Beware the Ides of March!) in East Hanover, NJ. It’s at the Ramada Inn on  Route 10 westbound from 11:45 – 1:30, cost is $20.

The Secrets to Do-It-Yourself SEO explains (in plain English) how the search engines work and how you can leverage the power of your own web site and others that link to it so that you achieve high rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines.

Bill Treloar, owner and chief SEO consultant at Rank Magic, will teach you how to select the best keywords, how to use them on your web site, how to improve link popularity, and how to build social buzz around you, your brand, and your website..

Last month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  J.C. Penney. Puzzled by how well jcpenney.com did in organic search results for just about everything they sold, they asked an SEO expert to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text (the clickable ntext of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The Times presented their findings to Google. Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

J.C. Penney, when contacted by the Times, claimed they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

So where did J.C. Penney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

• The original NY Times article “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search”
• Search Engine Land’s full discussion of the whole affair