Punk Rock and SEO mistakes
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is a lot like Punk Rock once was; it’s largely unexplored territory; it flies in the face of authority, finding tricks to use existing technology to do new things it was never designed for; its practitioners are full of holy fire yet often can’t quite play their instrument yet; and for a brief time it’s a fad everybody wants in on.
I love it. I love being out on a frontier, feeling the grit and grime of getting results and getting things done. I love the sense of exploration and discovery, of a playground that is ever changing, moving and always on the verge of slipping away from you.
SEO is all the rage these days, and with some good reason. There does seem to be a lot of confusion as to what it is, how to do it and what it will do for you, though. Google for “SEO mistakes” and you get pages of search results, all pointing at top-ten lists that are slightly, or in some cases wildly, different. Much in the same way that the Ramones at their first gig would have an actual fist fight about what song to play, Search Engine Optimisers are all telling all the rest of us we are wrong. But there are some mistakes too obvious to ignore, like Sid Vicious’ guitar not being plugged in during shows. (Too many punk references? OK, I’ll stop now.*)
I will list the mistakes I have encountered in the wild. I was listening to New Model Army as I wrote this, and I decided on a whim to use NMA song titles as headers. So, without much further ado I give you:
The New Model Army list of SEO mistakes
Sooner or Later
(After the fact)
Often, people build a site first and do the SEO later. The Optimisations then sit uncomfortably between the original site elements as if they don’t really belong there. Worse, often choices made during development make search engine optimisation tweaks impossible without structural changes to the site, in effect creating a choice between not doing it at all, or rebuilding the site in part or whole.
Bad old world
(Ignoring the power of code)
As an extension of the above, I often encounter situations where people don’t bother to look at their code at all. Sites with code from ten years ago when the website was first built and some SEO slapped on. This is money down the drain.
Much like how a good rock song is 80% beat and 20% the rest, but the drummer never gets the groupies; a good search engine optimised site is 80% good code, 20% other trickery. Google, Yahoo, et all (This is actually less of an issue for Google, but a major issue for most other search engines) need to traverse your site, figure out (using algorithms without rhyme or reason) what it’s all about and index it. Good code structure helps them by presenting the information in a way that’s logical to computers, presenting the crawler/bot with a clear hierarchy and easily traversed information structure.
Bad code structure may not show on the outside, we humans tend to reconstruct order from chaos. If the drummer is drunk, we’ll dance to the bass line. In fact, when I sang in a punk band (I can’t sing, but this was punk…) I took my cues from the bassist, arguably the only band member who could actually play. The drummer, well… he had twice as many arms as the drummer of Def Leppard.) Computers don’t ‘work’ that way.
These words
(Ignoring the power of copy)
Many a great song has bad lyrics. I mean, come on: “It’s not his fault that she died, he liked his chick fried, now his face is on my shirt, we won’t forget his famous smirk” it may be a great song (don’t ask me, I never liked The Exploited much) but what kind of slap-em-together, train-of-thought lyrics are those?
But they get the message across. Writers want to write good. (Made you cringe? Good.) They don’t want to juggle keywords. Some of the best sites out there in regards to information content or entertainment value have really bad SEO because the writers care more about good titles and poetic writing than they do about getting people to actually read their articles.
Like I once explained to one of the most entertaining writers in financial reporting I know; you may write the coolest, the most rockin’ (the guy is the punk-rocker of finance writing, trust me.) piece, but it will sink into obscurity if you don’t get bums on seats. Art for art’s sake is fine, but not if your goal is to make a living.
Bad Harvest
(Excel-sheet blindness)
Pretty much every client or employer I’ve worked for had some luckless soul compile huge Excel sheets with Analytics data. They then tried to make sense of SEO data they didn’t really understand, but it was all in neat rows and columns and management loved it.
Much in the same way that coming in at number one in the charts is (temporarily, at least) good for sales but says very little about actual quality of a band or staying power, these Excel sheets told them nothing but numbers that might have looked better, or worse. Going up, or down.
For example: Average time spent on a site may indicate good performance (People stay and read, or they are done quickly.) or bad. (People spend a lot of time looking to find what they need, get ‘lost’ on the site, or leave quickly because they give up.)
Sales figures mean nothing artistically, some of the best albums I own sold only a few thousand copies. Even Motorhead’s singer, Lemmy, often quips about songs they play that it was one of their best songs and they still have “boxes full of singles at [their] home”. In much the same way, mere Analytics results, bereft of context, mean nothing. They need to be offset against what your site’s goal is, and they need to be married to other ways of analysing performance.
Great expectations
Search Engine Optimisation is not a magic bullet. Nor is it guaranteed to work.
A site that offers good, and fairly unique, content and manages to get that little initial push (some marketing, a link from another site, etc.) will eventually build good traffic. Some sites I worked on were over ten years old, had found their niche, and did well. They also had terrible SEO.
Every once in a while I do all I can, employ every trick in the book, and results will disappoint. I’m honest about these things. If you hire me, I don’t make promises I can’t keep.
Which means: I don’t make promises at all. If it’s promises you want, there are competitors out there who sell them by the dozen.
Search Engine Optimisation is like baiting your line when fishing; you can get the best bait out there, sometimes the fish simply don’t bite.
Perhaps competitors are outpacing you. Perhaps you overestimated public interest in your subject matter, whatever it is; SEO is only one aspect of doing business online.
Perhaps your site is New Model Army: great content, excellent presentation, but no airplay or endorsement from the big players. You need to keep going and earn your fans one at a time.
Perhaps your site is The Sex Pistols; your market is there, you’ve reached it, there simply isn’t any more potential to exploit.
And perhaps your site is The Big Dicks, your drummer sucks, your singer can’t sing, your bassist only sticks around because you buy him lots of beer… you’ll never sell two copies if you press a double album. It’s harsh, but sometimes it just doesn’t work.
Believe it
(too much faith)
You wake up every morning and look at Analytics. Your figures look great. Traffic is building… but you aren’t selling. SEO figures are just figures.
An extreme example: one site I worked on enjoyed a brief period of high traffic because they had on sale a book about a very popular subject. It had a lady in a bikini on the cover and it appealed to a very broad audience. They were also in a partnership with a site known to level your server if they link to you.
So life was grand? After all, Analytics was practically singing the data while throwing confetti and doing a little dance.
It wasn’t. The rest of the products were decidedly more highbrow, and those who came for the lady in the bikini didn’t buy the book by the promising literary prodigy.
SEO, and results in your Analytics screen often lie to you. Never look only at what the proceeds are, but also whether you pocket them, or your shady manager.
Gigabyte wars
(traffic, traffic, traffic?)
Similarly, great SEO may not bring you great earnings. Traffic is not free; if you find yourself upgrading servers and hosting plans just to keep up with the volume of visitors to your site, make sure your site’s business model is actually based on traffic.
Using SEO to build traffic may be great. It’s easy, comparatively, too. Using SEO to get the right kind of visitors is hard.
Two visitors a day may be better than two million, if your site sells expensive services and both are buying. Two million is better if your income is derived from ad impressions.
Good SEO is only good SEO if it does what you need, just generating lots of traffic does not guarantee success.
Prayer flags
(Analytics as magic bullet)
I’ve touched upon this earlier, but it bears repeating on its own. Many companies employ SEO as last-ditch effort, often throwing good money after bad. Much like prayer flags; it doesn’t hurt, so do it. But if you have to blow your last money on a trip to the Himalayas to string them up; reconsider and see if that money isn’t better spent on refocusing your efforts to better suit your market, or, in extreme cases, on sustaining you while you look for another source of income.
SEO is a way of getting a good thing the attention it deserves; it’s not divine intervention or a heavenly miracle. If your business has no chance, it literally has no prayer. Stop praying, start over.
Aimless desire
Another constant in all of the above is: setting clear goals. If your goal is traffic, then optimise for high traffic. If it is to reach a specific audience, optimise for that audience.
Many SEO consultants will simply look at your site, look at it’s subject matter and push the site chock-full of keywords and other little tricks to get high rankings based on what is essentially already there.
For example: I’m currently working for a site aimed at people involved with minority issues, in a very specific way. Not, therefore necessarily or primarily aimed at the minorities themselves. Nor, obviously, is it aimed at the contingent of web-users with an anti-minority agenda.
In the current political climate it would be easy to get high traffic by aiming the SEO at people looking for a stick to beat the fear-Muslims dog, or those who want data to support their do-not-fear-Muslims stance.
While the latter might be a nice side effect, it is not what the site primarily aims to do, nor what would make it money. And all lofty ideals aside: no money, is no good work done. Even the most idealistic employee needs to eat.
So the trick is to look beyond the Analytics data, and see what the optimisation does, not just how often it does it.
Know what you want to achieve and aim for that. If you are hunting ducks, don’t waste your buckshot on elk.
Inheritance
The biggest, by far, mistake made in Search Engine Optimisation is to discard old content. Its SEO was bad, after all and you’ve got new, shiny and exciting, content in place.
But the best way to rank high in any search engine is to build up seniority. Perhaps your old site had bad SEO, it doesn’t mean it didn’t get indexed eventually, and it may well have achieved high rankings by merit of age alone.
Never throw away old content. If the information is outdated, add a link to up to date information, but don’t remove the page.
Long Goodbye
In closing, I would like to express the sincere hope that this posting has helped you to improve your SEO efforts. This is merely my list of top issues, the ones I encounter more or less regularly. I have no clear-cut answers or simple tricks. In the end SEO is a lot like punk in that it is DIY, Do It Yourself. You must find out what you need, and how to get it.
While there are some rules; a band has a drummer, one or two guitarists, a bass player and a singer, these rules do not necessarily apply all the time. I’ve heard some great music played entirely on old oil drums.
If it works; do it.
Just make sure it works. Don’t rely on a 4/4 beat and lyrics that scan to get you through. Leave that to the pop crowd. SEO is punk, it’s about getting there, not how you get there.
Happy Web Building!
* I lied.
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