Don’t Trust SEO “Professionals”

• Tweet
• Share
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• Share

This is a guest post by Dan Stevens in response to the earlier post by Neil Adam.  Should you wish to guest post in this blog, please visit the guest post guidelines.

There are massive amounts of valid information online on practically any subject in every field of occupation. That is a given, and I’m sure we’re all grateful to have the internet as the ultimate resource. However, this bottomless pit of data contains so much junk that it is sometimes practically impossible to sift the chaff from the hay. No niche is immune to this plague of disinformation, and the field of SEO is especially prone to misinformed content publication. Why is it so you may ask? Well that is mostly because SEO has always been viewed as guesswork and “shamanism” combined with data analysis and search algorithm speculation. It has never been, nor will it ever be a clearly defined occupation, and the SEO pro will always be a jack of all trades.

That said, the vagueness of it all is partly the reason for many proclaiming themselves SEO professionals. These guys (you know who you are) do more harm than good with their misinformed content publication, and I would like to dedicate this short post to set a few things straight in regard to Neil Adam’s article on the basics of SEO.
If this seems like a rant – that’s great, because that’s exactly what this is.

I will follow Neil’s points one by one to try and illustrate to the best of my abilities where he is wrong, as opposed to where he does not deliver at all.

Starting out with the claim to help the reader understand how SEO works, he describes it as “…a very simple process of adopting some techniques with which you can easily achieve a higher rank in the search engines”. Who are we kidding here? Does anyone really believe that SEO is a simple process? I’ve witnessed seasoned SEO/SEM pro’s freak out more than once during the first and most straightforward process of a preliminary keyword research while planning an SEO campaign, and now I’m supposed to take Neil’s word on it being a “very simple process” that is merely an adoption of a few techniques that will magically boost your pages SERP rank. To tell you the truth, this seems like the meaningless wording politicians use when they want to say something to appear knowledgeable without actually saying anything. Keeping it vague and uninformative is not the way to go. SEO is not a matter of following some technical guidelines and Voila, you’ve dominated your niche. It is a matter of what we know about the way search engines work with what we speculate on human search behavior online. It is a combination between the way people search and the way search engines help them, which is supposed to make a specific page easier to find by users looking for specific information.

Neil goes on, saying absolutely nothing again, with the following empty statement:
“So, when you perform search engine optimization on a particular website, make sure that when someone types a particular keyword that is relevant to your website, your site comes up within the 1st page in Google or Yahoo.” Give me a break…I won’t even dignify this load of vacuous waste of characters with a response.

Moving on, he tries to comment on the significance of SEO to your blog or whatnot. Does he? Not really. “It is a fact universally acknowledged that if you apply the latest on-page optimization techniques, you can boost the traffic to your website, but it is not that only SEO can increase the page rank of your website”. A universally acknowledged fact, right? Wrong son. Traffic, Page Rank (PR) and SERP position are independent parameters which are only indirectly linked, and that is always (and I can’t stress this enough – ALWAYS) case specific. I could “apply”, as you say, the best and latest on page optimization techniques and receive absolutely no traffic whatsoever from search engines because the keywords I’ve optimized for are not the ones users type in as queries. Moreover, on-page optimization does not affect PR. It is the popularity of your content (i.e. your IBL-Inbound Link Profile) that affects your page’s authority, PR and trust rate. Other that that, claiming that X is a “universally acknowledged” fact doesn’t necessarily make it so. Do your homework man.

“You must be well aware that search engine optimization is just the last touch that makes your site more accessible to the visitors who search online”. Last touch? Well of course it seems like it’s the finishing touch if you completely ignore the fact that SEO begins way before you’ve even got a word of content written down. It begins even before you’ve picked a domain name, with a keyword research effort in your desired niche. I’d go deeper into this for the sake of Lye’s readers, but that would take a post of its own, so I’ll just refer you to the following guest post on the right approach to domain names.

Now comes the most interesting part – the essential components of SEO. I will not even bother to comment again on various “SEO is very simple and basic” statements for it is obvious that optimization may seem simple to those who have absolutely no idea what it actually is. I will however comment on the SEO essentials Neil lays out for us:

Content is King – Right you are. You can sure quote Matt Cutts, or anyone of the millions who have quoted him on the same before. But how does content relate to SEO? Why don’t you even briefly discuss proper keyword targeting, duplicate content issues, proper web content formatting, image attributes and ALT tags? I could go on but I’ll save you the time. When I can’t provide any information on a certain issue, do your research or just give it up. I’m not even saying that the info should be new and groundbreaking, but providing absolutely no value is inexcusable.

Site Design – Simple designs rank higher than complex and impressive sites? You’re just dead wrong on that one Neil. I give you exhibit A – Your own DIY site, and the DIY niche. Every single page appearing on Google’s first results page is a complex and impressive website, content and video rich. If you’re still not convinced, I give you exhibit B – Just Google “Web Design” and see which sites rank higher, the simple or the really impressive ones. What I’m getting at is this – contrary to what you claim, Neil, there is very little significance to web design in terms of SEO. It is not your design that affects your SERP rank. Design is significant when your site is built in a way that is not what we like to call “Crawler Friendly”, because then the SE crawler can’t reach and index all of your pages. But once you have a decent internal linking scheme, a comprehensive sitemap with a “robots.txt” to help the crawler on its way, you’re design is great in terms of SEO. Flash sites are problematic in this aspect, but that’s another issue altogether.

Meta Tags – Meta tags are far less significant than they used to be 3-4 years ago. But that’s OK. I mean, they still carry some value, and mentioning them is perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is the following, and luckily the last, of Neil’s ignorant statements: “The meta-tags should be heavily built with keywords phrases and heavy content”. This not only wrong, but harmful. Have you heard of keyword stuffing, Mr. self-proclaimed SEO analyst? Let me guess – you haven’t.

I will conclude this short rant at this point with a final, two-part statement. First and foremost, I seriously doubt that Neil is even remotely aware of the severity of unprofessional crap that he generated here. That is because I don’t believe he is an SEO Analyst. Analysts are mathematicians holding PhD’s in algorithm related fields at the very least, and to tell you the truth I don’t need a PhD to recognize a load of ignorant crap created for the sole purpose of getting another link to a useless website at the expense of an unsuspecting blogger and his readership. Moreover, I’m pretty confident that Neil is a pseudonym for some lowly SEO amateur.

Secondly, Lye – I respect your blogging effort and I really enjoy reading your posts, but you have to display some discrimination here. You are solely responsible for anything that is published on findmyblogway.com, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want any part in the harm that content like this causes. There are young webmasters reading this stuff and taking it all seriously. Not all of them will take the time to actually research it all on their own, and we have to display some responsibility.

Lye’s note: I tend to resonate with Dan Stevens as he is the content manager of KeywordShack. He knows what he is talking about. Looking at how Neil never bother to respond any of the comments made in his post. I got to raise my hands up and apologize to readers of Findmyblogway.com if that post has misled you. I took full responsibility as it’s me who approve the guest post. This is partly due to my ignorance on SEO. I will be more careful and stricter in approving guest post to avoid this from happening again. Sorry guys.

No related posts.