Interview With Peter Kent, Author of Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Rachelle Money, 7 August 2008
Peter Kent is a renowned SEO expert responsible for a number of books and articles, as well as CEO of a successful consultancy firm. He talks of his frustrations at an industry he believes is now mostly scam, and of how small businesses can achieve great results without having to rely on expensive or time- consuming content.
Key points
- Local concept – people forget that their geographical location should be part of their keyword list. Stating where your business is based and which areas it covers will boost search engine rankings within a short space of time.
- Don't assume keywords. Do keyword research first to achieve a more focused SEO strategy and to remove abbreviations from your site.
- Target those communities who are talking about your product. Strike up a conversation with bloggers and forums and promote your site and services through them.
If you are unfamiliar with Peter Kent's name, just check your bookshelf. Remember when you bought Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
Kent's book is going from strength to strength, with the third edition published in June. In many ways he's a breath of fresh air because he doesn't just theorize about SEO - Kent practices it every day in his consultancy work.
Like a lot of people in SEO, it wasn't his first love. Throughout his mixed career Kent has collected a number of job titles; geologist, oil industry worker, nearly a dot.com millionaire, author, web developer, online marketer and now SEO consultant.
SEO scammers
It took Kent 18 months to convince his publisher to let him write SEO for Dummies back in the early noughties when it was a little known technique. Today it's popularity continues to grow, but SEO still has an image of 'anybody can do it'. This, Kent says, has led to the industry being hijacked by charlatans.
“Over the last few years as I speak to more clients and hear their stories, it has led me to believe that 80% of the business is scam.” Kent qualifies this remarkable statement by adding: “By that I mean that 80% of people in the business doing SEO consultancy are either running an outright scam, or they thought it was good to get into SEO because it's a hot area - but they don't really know what they're doing.”
This conclusion comes from Kent's own experiences of hearing business owners come to him with “horror stories” of how they have spent large chunks of their budget on optimizing their site, only to find that little if nothing has been done to achieve better rankings.
SEO for Dummies allowed people to learn techniques quickly but Kent admits that for a long-term strategy, businesses would need someone else. That 'someone else', in Kent's eyes, must not be a web designer. When Kent talks about web designers attempting to do SEO the frustration in his voice is clear. “I have never met a web design company or web design consultant who understands SEO,” he says bluntly.
For Kent the use of web design companies for SEO are the main source of those “horror stories.”
Kent says it is common for him to take on clients who have already received SEO from web designers. “I'll look at it (their website) and I see that it hasn't actually been optimized in any kind of way. Or, someone will say to me 'Is my site search engine-friendly?' I have a look at it and then go back to them and say, no. A few days later I'll hear back from the company telling me that the web design firm is now charging them $2,000 to make it search engine friendly.”
So what's Kent's advice? “Don't trust web designers as far as search engine optimization goes - even if they tell you they understand it, they don't. I used to say that a few understand it but I'm still waiting for them.“
Content is king.... sometimes
It's clear that Kent is someone who talks from experience - he knows what works, but not only that: he can tell you why it works. His time working on the coal face of SEO has led him to be creative with those clients who cannot rely on the traditional methods of boosting search engine rankings by generating content for their site.
Kent gives his top tips on how to conquer SEO without content:
“If you have a store that sells candles, you can play a few games to get links; like creating a software download library, for instance, and anybody who wants to be in the download library has to link to you. Let's be honest - if you have a candle site, are you going to be able to build something that is going to attract millions of links pointing at your site? Probably not.
“The reality is that you need to go out there and build links.”
Ways to do this include registering for web directories and issuing press releases and syndicated articles.
It's not all SEO says Kent, only one of the techniques he has used (with great success) in community marketing, as he explains.
“This guy I was talking to had a sports equipment store. He doesn't think he has a lot of competition because this is an up-and-coming sport in the US.
“He said there were people blogging about this sport, so I recommended he go to the bloggers and to those on forums, and strike up a rapport with chatty messages that don't look spammy. Introduce yourself and your site, tell them your story and say that your site will be of interest.
“Some of those bloggers will check the site out, write about it and link to it. Once that happens go back to them and tell them about your services, your products, or a promotion you are running.
“Ask if they would be interested in using or reviewing the product and send them a sample. Keep hitting them in that way.
“If it's a big blog you can ask them if they want to run a competition for their readers and no one else. There are so many ways you can work with these people.”
SEO for Dummies has long been regarded as a great starting point for people. We asked Kent to give the quickest and best SEO techniques that can be done instantly:
The local concept – if you have a local business, put up a contact page where the local area is listed. If you have a business in Denver, Colorado you should put your address on the site. But you don't just want traffic from people in Denver, you want it from around the state. I often tell clients to say at the bottom of a page 'serving other towns and cities', and name them.
Understand your keywords. Do keyword analysis, don't assume. I always tell people to spend a few bucks and get Wordtracker, spend a few hours, dig around, and do it properly.
It's interesting to hear that people are obsessed with abbreviations. They think it's important but when they do proper keyword research they often find that the same abbreviation means something different to a different group of people.
About Rachelle Money
Rachelle Money is a freelance journalist based in Scotland, UK. She graduated from the Scottish School of Journalism in 2005 where she was awarded an internship with two national publications - The Sunday Herald newspaper and The Big Issue magazine. Rachelle has been working with Wordtracker since August 2007 and is a regular contributor to the newsletter.
45 comments
Interesting that Kent considers building a relationship with bloggers (notably) as part of SEO. This drifts into a broader marketing approach. It's certainly true that it beats trying to generate links through random link farms, the misguided quantity approach. I'd also say that these same bloggers can also give you insights into your target audience, as they often pick up trends and new products before they go mainstream.
Loved the Book!! The best thing about Peter Kent's book, Is his attitude toward clients, the reader, and especially about SEO in general. Its the same attitude that Rachelle Money highlights in this article. Peter doesn't talk down to anyone in his book, and has a results oriented approach. As mentioned above he realizes that Search Engiens have in the past and still do today a ton of traffic that can be sent to your's or your client's domains.
But he also realizes that Search engines are not the only place for traffic. Point being that if they didn't have the huge amounts that they do have we wouldn't care about them.
Also bloggers write blog posts and links. Links mean votes for rankings in search engines. Peter Kent's idea are all "White Hat", another reason why I love his book. I am looking forward to meeting him someday.
Mr. Kent has not stated what I believed to be true for a long time that most of the SEO "experts" are nothing more than con artists. Thanks for offering his ideas.
I also learned a tough lesson about web designers when I found that each page in the site had the same meta description...Can't say enough about article writing; Google gives Ezine Articles a lot of value. Plus the social sites like stumbleupon and Digg bring traffic. Cheers!
Good overview of the SEO situation. It's Caveat Emptor -buyer beware. For those of us who had to learn the expensive way. When we chose the wrong web designer and the other people who stated they were experts. It unfortunately has been a frustrating learning experience. My mistake was not investing a small amount of money in the Dummies books. So I'm the dummy until I purchase the new SEO book. Thanks for the heads up. I have always found Wordtracker very helpful.
I absolutely loved Peters book and RAN with it. In less than a year I rank on page ONE for Google for a keyphrase of KEI .1 and not only did we see a drastic increase in traffic (without paying for Google ads at all), but our clients (therapists) saw a dramatic increase in the number of client calls.
Two huge pieces I've taken from Peter's book are:
Branding yourself - why, when you show up on that coveted page, should someone click on YOU and not your competitor? Your content and meta descriptions will really brand you to attract those web surfers.
Call to action! You can content yourself to death but if you don't get people to "do" what you want them to do, why bother? I've been so guilty of writing content, getting those pages ranked high and forgetting the call to action!
Elizabeth
Great article, I am heading right to amazon to buy the book. I have had good results using wordtracker and now I will put some of that knowledge to work. -Mike
I find I'm always surprised by what key words work for some of my sites, people seem to show up using key words that I never listed (or thought of)to put in my meta tags. Some of my sites do well in search engines for reasons I haven't figured out, some sites don't seem to rank no matter what I do or what I change.
One of my friends contacted an SEO company to see what he could do to improve his site, they wanted him to pay them a large amount of money to expand his site into a 200 page site. I could see their point of having more pages would increase your chance of getting into the search engines, but there is only so much you can say about one product. I don't see how having 200 pages with the same kind of content reworded in different ways would be of much help. He didn't go with them.
Part of the problem is that people want magic and there is no magic. SEO takes time.
Web designers are, first and foremost, designers. They're not really that interested in the 'business' of a client's site, they care about the look.
Combine this with a client who also cares more about the look than about usability - or taking the time to actually define their potential visitors - and you have a situation where it's likely that web sites won't do well on search engines and won't actually reach the people the client wants to reach.
Sometimes it feels like selling to the lowest common denominator.
No easy answers to this.
Sam
I am not sure I understand the comments about not trusting web designers for SEO. Mr. Kent is a member of an industry where he admits, credibility is undermined by the actions of scammers and poorly trained practitioners. Web designers exist in a similar environment and it seems unlikely that a successful professional website designer can achieve any level of credibility with customers unless he or she thoroughly understands SEO. According to the article, Mr. Kent says only 20% of SEO consultants have any credibility. Perhaps it is fair to assume a similar percentage of credible web designers also exist. If not, where does that leave Mr. Kent? According to his website he is a website designer also.
I own a small business I was getting 3 phone calls a day from those SEO companies promising the top listing on all major search engines. No of them worked. So I bought Peter Kents book read it about 5 times. My company is now always 1st or second position on Google with my keywords. Your book is easy to read for a novice like me. I found wordtracker through your book and have capitalized on keywords that my competition is not using. Mr Kent's and Wordtracker has helped me start my own SEO business. I'm helping other small businesses with there PPC campaigns and getting my Clients organic exposure. I'm making an extra $1500 per month part time because of Peter and Wordtracker. It takes time and is not always easy so if someone calls your business and sez that will get you top listing hang-up and go buy Peter's book and do it yourself. I make my own website thats free from zuxm and I'm passing up the big boys using what I learned from Mr Kent. Thanks a million
We're one of those companies that charges $2,500 (and more) to provide rudimentary search engine optimization services for commercial websites. This is a function of time investment. It takes time to develop an effective key word analysis and craft search-engine-sticky content and tags for a given web page.
It works. SEO is a highly predictable science that results in significantly improved search engine visibility and traffic for the target website.
We use WORD Tracker as a surrogate for global top-of-mind positioning research for a broad array of consumer and business products and services. WORD Tracker tells us what consumers are thinking about when they are thinking about various products and services. These findings provide direction for ads and promotions. Sometimes the entire direction of a company can change as the result key word findings that reveal the relative strengths of various marketing concepts.
I went to Jack Humphrey's 'Authority Summit' in Las Vegas and indeed the emphasis was on Blogging. So much so that I only really fire up Dreamweaver every now and again just to get a bit of code to paste into my blogs, the days of Dreamweaver templates and FTP have seriously gone for me now. I'm not even relying on my hosted stuff either, I'm using free web 2.0 properties and free blogs etc. So what has been the result for me with this? Well, I pay less in hosting and don't have to deal with pushing thousands of pages up by FTP, I can outsource a lot of my work more easily so I work less, I have multiple spots on the first few pages for my chosen keywords which means I am always top and I can push my competition back on to page 2 of Google. Generally life is better now I am blogging (which I can do from my phone!).
The long and short of it is that I am looking forward to reading Peter's book, because I have learnt that even if you think you know everything, you dont! Please comment on my blog if you'd like to add to my conversation (click my name on this post).
It's good to see how in this book there are universal techniques that can be applied no matter how fast the search engines algorithms change. In fact this book tells about the different ways to get inbound links that can drive traffic to your website.
When you're in a minority interest part of the arts with a lot of foreign phrases in common use, like I am, then SEO research is crucial! I do use Wordtracker, but sometimes the actual number of results are so low, you are not sure how significant they might be.
So, I use Wordtracker in association with the best research team at my disposal - 30+ friends and colleagues! I simply ask them what words they would use to search for my product, and you'd be amazed at the disparity of results. Let's face it, no prima donna worth her salt would have though of "opera songs for hire", but it does the business...
Peter's book is still at the heart of everything I do SEO-wise, not just for my own company but also for various websites across the world that I write 'gentle SEO copy' for. And yes, Peter's techniques really do work...
Great book for anyone who wants to understand SEO, from a small business doing it themselves to anyone charged with making a company website work. Peter does a good job of making it simple to understand and also provides good examples. (Though BMW Germany have been allowed out to play again).
We are a small SEO company but virtually every client has come with a tale of woe from their web design company. Most people are only enlightened about SEO once their expensive website has failed to get them traffic and/or business. So, we would vouch for Peter's comment about web designers - though I'm sure there are some out there who get it. Normally we are asked in by designers we work with at the initial client meeting, so the clients' understand how SEO can work for them.
If someone asks you for a large chunk of money upfront for SEO, don't pay it. Good SEO takes work, effort, intelligence and sometimes luck! Pay a company monthly and expect to see the results improve, if they don't, you've got the wrong company.
I'm the CEO of one of Australia's largest SEO/PPC companies, which has been operating for over 8 years. We are an ethical company who see so many cases of good people getting scammed. I think the 80% estimate is fairly accurate. Unfortunately, there is no strong regulation within this industry.
While books like this one will help people to understand SEO, there are still many people who simply do not have the time. If you do need to choose an SEO company, do your research well. It's very simple. SEO companies are paid to get results on search engines. If an SEO company cannot provide you with a good list of achievements, then go somewhere else. It's also good to check client testimonials that can confirm the quality of SEO being performed. In regards to price, I agree with Chriss TT - avoid large upfront payments. Monthly payments provide more incentive for SEO's to achieve. Also, check what reporting is being offered. The good SEO's I know, provide very transparent reporting to their clients. They have nothing to hide!
I felt Peter was a little sweeping about web designers although I know what he means - Web designers are not normally marketers and marketers are not normally webbies either.
We are a web design and marketing company who genuinely try to do both ! But we divide our client teams up with an account manager who is a marketer and a web developer (who isn't). We like to prioritise the content development and marketing approach (keyword research, optimisation etc)first, then bring in the developer under the leadership of the account manager to design and develop the site. We think it works this way and clients seems to like the results.
We often provide just the marketing element and work with the client's own designers too.
Yes, occasionally we do provide just the design /development but then we do try to provide some common sense marketing advice to clients to help to ensure their spend is not completely wasted and at least provides a sound basis for future marketing........
I run a copywriting business. I'm also a self-styled SEO copywriter! It was interesting to read that Peter Kent sees online PR and article marketing as two of the best ways to build high quality inbound links.
I've been espousing these techiques for a couple of years now, but it amazes me that clients just don't get it. Maybe they feel the whole process takes too long and will therefore prove to be too expensive or not cost-effective?
They'd rather commission a website designer to draft seven pages that approximate to the main areas of their business than sit down with a copywriter who could identify the corporate threads that lead to the 'best' keywords - and thence the best organic listings.
If anyone can suggest a way round this, I'd love to hear it!
Having read Peter's article and scrutinised all of the above comments, I realise that I absolutely must get Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. As a Sole Trader my time is split between trying to keep my website somewhere in the rankings and working for clients. I started from scratch with websites, SEO and all that but have gradually made headway. I have not found much support outside of family for anyone is my position who wants to make a splash on the internet with limited funds, so thanks Peter I'll get the book.
I will pick up SEO for Dummies. I purchased a different book that helped with Yahoo Stores Tips and SEO, but I found it very techie and hard to follow at first glance and didn't use it. I will also say that Content IS King. I found this out by mistake actually. My suppliers descriptions are very plain and not wordy at all. And when I searched my products on line I realized that dozens of store owners were using the exact same descriptions, not even correcting typo's. Something told me that I needed to change my descriptions to help the customer understand the products better. I had no idea that it would help with SE Rankings. Anyway, I've only been in business since September 07 and without even knowing about SEO for the most part I am Ranked high on page 2 of Yahoo search and on page 3 in Google Search. I know it's not page one but I am steadily climbing. Hopefully after I read SEO For Dummies I can break on to Page One.
I think it's a bit of a harsh rule to say that know web designers understand SEO, but there is a reality that most do not. I think it's great that PK has pointed out the additional marketing efforts that go hand-in-hand with SEO. Most people wanting SEO think just doing some on page work and picking a few keywords will create droves of traffic and revenue to their site. The reality of SEO being part of an overall marketing effort is priceless knowledge that is yet to be picked up on.
I recently evaluated a website that targets a very small market and has zero search engine visibility, even when the meta tagged keywords are searched. All flash and no content on the index page to tie-in with the keywords, the robots.txt has eight errors, every page has the same exact meta tags with no relevancy to page content and that's not all. It is a complete mess and a textbook case of how to make a website completely invisible to searches. Because it's a very small market with limited competition their competitor's poorly done sites get page one. The SEO was done by the web designers, who believe they know what they're doing, but in reality made just about every mistake possible. Perhaps I should send them a copy of Peter's book.
In my investigations of business licenses in the US, I have seen numerous references in many municipal codes stating that a business license was required from the cities Peter Kent referenced before you can do business in their city. Also in some codes it is mention that a license is required if you purport to do business in their city. Physical presence and location within the city was not a requisite for license requirement. It would seen to me that if you did in fact do as Peter suggested that you should not be surprised if you received a bill and fine from the city who codes you violated.
Yes it is true there are outright SEO con artists. There are also just plain bad SEOs who don't have a great deal of malice, they are just not very good.
Just as importantly, there are the companies who 'bolt on' SEO to their services. Some 'bolt on' well and some don't. The later cause lots of problems by 'dumbing down' the services and associated pricing. Because they have expertise in other areas, it is assumed that they are good at SEO too (and can do it for a great price). This kills the service and negates the 'good' people and companies providing SEO services more than anything else.
Finding someone to blog about your business and link to you is pure genius.
It works not only for you but also for the blogger. It is free PR at it's best with the added advantage of driving traffic to your door via links as Peter says. Providing that the blog is well read and publicized.
I post on a forum that reaches both real estate agents and vendors. I had one of these vendors contact me to review his product and tell him what I though (as a direct result of my establishing my expertise by posting on this forum). Well, I thought it was a really good product so I blogged about it on a blog that reaches thousands of real estate professionals. The short of it was an very large increase in his business. I have increased my readership and that resulted in a couple of new clients! Great for us both. BTW we still stay in touch so I made a friend too.
Great article. I am part of a growing list of photographers who are befitting from proper blog posting as well as general link building.
I also host a free link generator at my site. I will trade links with any legitimate web site or blog.
Thanks,
Rob Oresteen
While I don't like broad generalizations Mr Kent's point on web designers that only say they know about SEO is far too common. However, to try and extend that to all web design companies by saying “I have never met a web design company or web design consultant who understands SEO,” may stretching the point.
A good Web Design/SEO/SEM (Search Engine Marketing) company is going to have a person or department dedicated to SEO/SEM. They will work with the designer to create a site that is not only well optimized but looks good. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, this costs more initially. However, the cost of not hiring a good Web Design/SEO/SEM company will be much higher in the long run.
Recently I found this web site http :// validator.w3 . org I thought my site was Search Engine Optimized. Well after running the URL I found errors on the page. There where only three errors and with so many browsers on the market the three errors are enough to make my site non search engine friendly.
SEO is a funny term. I say this because I have found in Yahoo I am ranked # 1-10 using a single search term or the term plus one or two words.
Yet when I go to Google I am at rank 50-90 using the same search terms. Yet when I SEO for Google my page ranks drop off everywhere else.
I guess you can’t please all of the engine all of the time, so just please most of the engines most of the time.
A few good tips on SEO The following items are key to a good SEO ranking
Good Luck Hemet CA
@ Rob
"free link generator" - Get rid of this immediately! It's not something you want on your website or blog, and certainly not something you want to admit to having. Engaging in manual link building practices is the way to go. The automated stuff is pure CRAP--easily spotted! If you want advice on link building, query Eric Ward, Jim Boykin, or Jill Whalen on your favorite SE. Sorry, I know I could list a few other link building studs/studettes.
Mr Kent's harsh view about web designers is a complete farce. I do agree that the majority of web designers (or people who believe that they are a web designer because they can put up a website) don't know the first thing about proper SEO, but many do. Probably the same ratio as stated about SEO professionals. I'm part of a web design team where all three designers practice most of the ideas expressed by Mr. Kent, and haven't found a so called SEO "Professional" yet that knows what they are talking about. The two need to work together, and listen to each other. A true web designer will understand most aspects of building a website, not just the look. In my experience most clients didn't listen to the advice of the designer about SEO and didn't put the time into working on their site content or keywords, then when the site doesn't rank well they blame the designer. We can't write your content for you, we can only help.
My last comment I talked about SEO and it being funny. Look above at my name Greg and click on it. One small typo can change everything. Therfore remember to validate what you do.
BTW it was a typo and SEO is not.
My site doesn't have a robots.txt
Is this important as it's common on my bad requests report? My site is one with invisible style! Already have the book and started SEO recently.
SEO is a commonly misunderstood science. Just like how small businesses think they can hire a web designer to create a MySpace clone for $200, they also assume SEO is just a matter of adding some keywords. So long as the customer doesn't understand what he's buying, sellers will sell false services to take advantage of the ignorance.
I too believe most clients do not actually understand just how much is involved in truly optimizing even a small site for organic seo. I consider myself a web designer; however, I spend a great deal of time researching and applying all tasks related to creating an effective web site, including SEO, Usability and Email Marketing strategies.
The contracts I use breakdown tasks I consider expenses, e.g. photography, copywriting, in separate sections, as optional, depending on what the client intends to provide. If they intend to provide the content, I explain the significance of strategic placement of keyword phrases and offer recommended page titles and URIs.
I also section SEO and go to great lengths to explain the additional efforts beyond designing an intuitive, navigable site, such as, competitor site comparison, keyword research, page title significance, meta data, back-linking strategies and semantic markup with keywords strategically placed in links and proper tags.
Even after explaining the significance of SEO if the client intends to see much traffic within the first six months of the site's presence, most clients elect to not spend the additional fees associated with the intensive SEO effort involved. They either come back later and ask for the SEO package, or elect to try a PPC strategy. Otherwise, I suspect some blame me for my "lack of SEO experience" and move on to another provider.
I by no means consider myself an expert; however, as a web designer I believe it my responsibility to spend a minimum of 20-25% of my continued education on SEO, Email campaigns and other Internet marketing strategies. Perhaps I should spend a bit more time on basic communication skills, as I obviously must not be convincing enough with my explanation for the necessity of a detailed SEO strategy.
I'm a starter in SEO, and have learnt quite something in the past few weeks via ebooks and video tutorials. I just bought SEO for dummies latest edition and hope it'll help me do better in my area! Thanks to MR. Peter Kent for these tips.
I will certainly buy PK's book but would like to draw your attention to The Thirty-Day Challenge run by Ed Dale in Australia and Dan Raine in the UK.
They are teaching this month of August and with their teaching my site went to #1 in Google blog search, #1 in Google exact phrase match, and #16 in Google broad search - in less than 24 hours from scratch!! (536,000 competing pages!!)
If you haven't heard of 30DC, or missed the boat - participate next August '09 - you will really learn SEO. Check out the link - by the way - it's FREE !!
http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/invitefriendsmembers.php
LOL at the web designers knowing SEO stuff, as someone with a design background I would question if that is totally the case, but having worked with plenty of designers, especially now in my Online Marketing role, I can only concur that a very large percentage of web designers and developers really haven't got the faintest idea of what a search engine requires! Great article, keep them coming!
I've read Peter's book SEO for dummies and found it excellent but having just read the interview, I'm a little annoyed at the intimation that web designers don't know anything about SEO - "I have never met a web design company or web design consultant who understands SEO"
While I wouldn't say I'm a world class expert I like to think I understand it enough and I'm sure I adopt all the best principles when building a site (which is the best time to implement seo) If its not web designers who you should hire to make your site seo friendly then who!? surely it would have to be someone who knows web design or how to edit code?
I'm aware of rogue web design companies (even know a few!) charging a fortune for sites and deliberately leaving them 'unfinished' from an seo point of view but we are not all bad!
I would agree with Leon. I think the problem is that most website design companies are satisfying the budget of the customer. Sure we stress that we will make your website SEO friendly, but we are not being paid thousands of dollars to do the SEO work that is required to get the top ranking.
Good article, and thanks for the tips. I'm new in the SEO field, and I'm reading SEO for dummies at the moment, really good book for SEO. And thanks Bruce Neil for letting me know about Thirty-Day Challenge, I'll definitely check it out.
In reading all the comments; mostly from SEO's I guess this is an example of writing a blog on a thread to get attention, thanks guys, for the insight from a DIY.
I tend to read articles like this, but never have commented. This time I felt that I should say something.
We decided this year that our company needed an internet presence, and, somehow, we thought that everything else would take care of itself after we had a website up and running. Oh what a foolish thought! After doing some research about SEO, I discovered that Peter Kent had a new edition of his book out. The earlier edition had been given rave reviews by its readers, so I bought it. Peter Kent gives solid advice that even those of us that are new to the field can follow. And the best thing about it, it works! Simple pieces of advice, all of which make lots of good sense. When I saw this new short article with Mr. Kent's name on it, I just had to read it. ........again, good solid advice that I will use.
I find that as a web designer most of my clients come to me with similar horror stories about their last web designer.
There is a falicy that If it looks good it is not search engine friendly. The most popular functionality in all our site these days is Content Management - This includes access and help in Meta tags. I have personally coached and emphisized the importance in putting the time in to writing SE freindly copy and updating meta tags. But you would be surprised how many of my clients years after launching sites - still have dummy text that I put in for bios, testimonials etc. They want it done for them for no money. They are usually looking for the easiest way for the lowest output of cash.
In reality we can't work for nothing. SEO requires time - A lot of my clients are not willing to pay for that time. What do you think they tell SEO companies once they realize that they should have listened to us and try to seek help. I can guarantee that it won't be that the web designer warned me and I didn't listen.
I have the opposite problem with clients they don't usually listen to us or trust us because they think that we don't know all the tricks and the SEO guys do. When mostly we are just telling them to write good content that people will want to read.
One way links are important because if you write good content - people will link to you - in blogs or other places.
It's simple - A Search Engines main objective is to give the best answers to searchers requests. So if you don't have the best answers - Why would you expect to be high in the search engine queries?
It's an old show biz term - Give em what they want!
I guess I fall in the web designer category without any SEO skills, however I am contemplating really putting forth the effort to improve on this so that my clients become more successful which ultimately reflects well on me and in turn, I get more referrals...even if I don't charge SEO fees.
Basically, I aim to code pages that are SEO friendly and accessible but have traditionally allowed the client to provide the content. This will be changing, hopefully this book allows me to help guide them more on this front.
Clarke