I have been doing SEO since the early days of Alta-Vista. And over the years, SEO has changed a lot.

One thing I have learned during this time is SEO is a bit of an art, but still measurable. With the array of tools available to web masters, it is very easy to track what your changes have done to your rank. But be aware of this, sometimes it seems pretty random.

For example, I was working on Red Toad Solution’s site over the last few weeks and was alarmed that the Page Rank had suddenly dropped one place. This is bad, but I am not in a panic. Obviously there is page rank juice bleeding off somewhere, and it’s just a matter of tracking it down, fixing it, and wait for Google to re-index a couple of times. Regular content means Google visits a lot, so not a big drama.

The bottom line with SEO is you can’t fool or trick the search engines for long. You need to focus on the following three things:

1. page load time
2. relevancy
3. quality of content

I won’t go into detail with the above, but will cover some things that you should not do that can actually kill your site with the major search engines.  If you do these things, you may not get listed for months or ever as you end up on a grey/black list for indexing.

Keyword spamming

I recently worked with a marketing company who provided an apparent SEO ready site to be populated with content.

They had used old-school mark-up language for layout (tables, spacer gifs etc etc) so the site was a bit of a pig to load. (see point 1 above)

That was something we could deal with.  What was scary was they had put “keyword spam” in every single spacer gif and image on the site. Every single one.

The keyword saturation was well over 50% of the content. It was so bad I almost cried!  Just d0n’t do this. Ever.

Poor Content Quality

The actual content was full of grammatical errors, poor use of punctuation and basically substandard from professional writers. (see point 3 above)

Believe it or note, Yahoo and Google actually can read.  A word processor can identify grammatical problems, spelling mistakes and poor use of words. What makes you think a search engine can’t?  Content has to be well written.  And engaging, which is where the next item comes in.

Writing Drivel

Speak to any marketer, and you will hear that there has to be a call to action on your web site.  Absolutely true.  But, the content has to be engaging and relevant to your visitor.  (see point 2 above)

If you are writing sales copy for your website, and all you are doing is trying to get the visitor to “click here for your amazing offer” your site is a big “FAIL”

Truth be told, that is ninety percent of SEO 101 right there. You can’t have a site there just to sell.  Leave that for your landing pages for Google Adwords where you have already established a connection to the visitor, or the landing page after they have been engaged with your content.

You site needs easy to read, engaging content.  If the visitor is engaged, if your content is quality and builds trust, then you might just get them to sign up for something.  But you want to make sure your visitor is there for the right reasons.  (see points 1, 2, and 3 above!)

Write pure sales copy on your site,  and it will rank poorly, and not bring quality visitors.  There is a reason most sites barely get a 1% conversion.

In closing:

Remember (1), (2) and (3) above, enjoy your site’s success, even against corporates who have much bigger budgets than you.