We caught up with Laura, a regular contributor to
Jane and Robot, to talk about SEO, how small businesses get it wrong, and the inherent dangers of trusting content on the Internet.
The thing we see a lot, that we're helping many small businesses with, is that SEO is often seen as just "a code thing" where you go in and optimize meta-tags and source code elements. And it's not that you don't do that, it's imperative that search engines and screen readers are able to get to the code and figure out what's going on and what the page is about, but the bigger picture is often overlooked especially since a lot of the people who are in SEO come from Web development backgrounds. In the bigger picture, search and social are marketing channels. So we have Web developers doing SEO -- and they should be because they understand what's going on inside the code -- but when a small company hires an SEO company, or hires someone in to do SEO, it's oftentimes focused primarily on optimizing tags and getting links, there's just not a bigger strategy. People often don't think outside of that box of "what's your company trying to provide, what are people searching on around that, and how are you going to reach those people and make money?" It's not just optimizing some title tags. We see that a lot, with any size of business.
I don't think there's a rule around keyword density. Some of these things - like obsessing over page rank or keyword density - are still a forethought. In SEO, especially now that algorithm and industry changes are less jostling, I think you have to take a step back and look at those along with the bigger picture again. If I had to weigh usability against SEO, I'd always choose usability. Keyword density is something I don't think about -- I think about whether what I'm writing is beneficial for my readers, because if it is, they'll share it and they'll link to it. They're going to do all these things that are going to be so much more important for SEO than whether I have two keywords in there or four or six or ten. I'm not saying it's not a factor -- as a best practice I try to tell people to use their product name instead of "it," or use keywords instead of "click here" in their links, but I don't set rules on or obsess over keyword density other than to use keywords when and where possible without compromising usability. In the end, when you have something that's valuable to your clients, that's going to do so much more for you for SEO than whether you have a certain number of keywords in your pages.
The whole idea of "SEO is dead," I get it because it definitely has leveled out in many ways, but it's not dead. When I left my in-house role at Yahoo! and signed on with NineByBlue I was surprised at how many people are banging down Vanessa's door. She's helping not just companies, but industries -- how to work with being online and being accessible to search engines and to people, and how to reach their business goals. There are so many bottlenecks all over the Web, including in government sites, which is one of the industries Vanessa's helping, and there's a lot to do. In the future I hope that we can make a difference, and I know Vanessa is doing that now. She's talking to people in industries that don't really get this and to make the changes they need, on an industry level, not a site level, to make the changes they need to make to adapt to the way we work today on the Internet. The other thing that I hope we can do, I don't know that we can change it, but it's really opened my eyes coming out of in-house and working with NineByBlue -- I see SEOs just repeating each other and not really going in and trying to figure things out for themselves. It's like drinking the SEO Kool Aid -- I understand that SEOs don't have the answers, but what NineByBlue does, most SEOs could figure out how to do it for themselves, although many haven't. I feel like there's not as much innovation in many of the people who are taking on SEO as there could be, and I would hope that that could change a little bit somehow.
The more that I've stepped out, the more I've seen really, really, really terrible advice, especially in search marketing. It's really hard to discern what is good advice versus what is bad advice, for most people, especially in SEO. For example I saw someone who wanted to pay $30-$250 for 30 original SEO articles, and I just think "Oh no! People are going to read those!" I would say, to keep people on the safe side, they should learn where the trusted sources of information are. Not just in SEO, but any information you consume online. It's really important if you're trying to learn how to do things for your business, to find those trusted sources for your business, not just the first thing in the search results all the time.
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