The Danger of a Little Bit of Info

While surfing through my Google Alerts this morning, I was pleased to see USA Today giving some coverage to search engine optimization and search engine marketing in their small business "Ask an Expert" column. Unfortunately, the more I read, the sadder I got. The article was a key example of the type of half-understood information that gets spread around to small business owners causing confusion and generally leaving them no better off than they were before they read the article.

The article featured quite a few inaccuracies, most of which are worth addressing just to make sure the small business market remains clear on what they really do need to know.

When you type key words into Google and those fortunate few websites get listed first, that is search engine optimization.

Actually, that may be the RESULT of search engine optimization. But the listings themselves are nothing more than search engine results.

While there are several things you can do to your site to make it more attractive and thus to increase its search engine compatibility (see below), the main thing to understand is that SEO is "a popularity contest," says Rafeh. The important thing, she says, is that you have a site that is clean, visually pleasing, and easy to navigate, that way "people will like the site, have a good user experience, and want to come back." This translates into increased traffic, and the more popular your site is, the better insofar as SEO goes. So an easily navigated, well-designed site is the foundation upon which you must build.

This one is clearly an example of a good concept being misunderstood. While SEO is, in many ways, a popularity contest, how "popular" your site is with users has almost nothing to do with how well it will rank in the search engines. He started off on the right note here...it's important to have a good, clean site that people want to come back to. The reason for that isn't because that alone will increase your rankings, it's because that will encourage other people to link to you and the links will help your rankings.

This is sort of a nit picky response, but the reality is that many small business owners will read this and wonder why their "popular" site still doesn't rank well in the engines.

Whatever keywords your customers would (hopefully) use to find your site must be used throughout your site, but especially in your meta tags (the title and words describing the page).

Ahh...those darn meta tags again. At least he mentioned the Title tag...but once again, this perpetuates the myth that keywords need to be shoved into meta tags for better rankings.

Choose and use these keywords carefully. Avoid using broad terms like "skis." Instead, you want to use more specific terms like "Solomon freestyle skis."

This is actually excellent advice and it was nice to see it popping up in a mainstream publication like USA Today.

Because one thing search engine spiders look at is the quality of links in and out of your site, be sure to get some quality links. One way is to pay for a commercial listing at Yahoo! Having Yahoo link to your site helps, even if you have to pay for it.

It is similarly a good idea to engage in some quality link exchanges with other good sites.

Again, good ideas written in a hazy enough way to make them confusing. While a Yahoo! link may help your new site get found and spidered, it's not really going to be the key factor in a great ranking. Also, "quality link exchanges" is such a loose term that there's almost no way it won't be misinterpreted. Instead, small businesses need to focus on building linking relationships the same way that they would build any other type of networking or business relationship. They also need to focus on creating a site and content that are worth linking to.

Overall, it's nice to see the mainstream media picking up an interest in search engine marketing, but it's also increasingly clear that our industry still has a long way to go in regards to education.