I am kind of getting sick of SEO fever among people who do not understand SEO. I find that people who truly understand SEO are not talking about it every day, and people who have no idea what effective SEO consists of are the ones bringing it up all the time.

Some facts about SEO (definitely only scratching the surface):

SEO is Fucking Expensive

Effective SEO, especially for adult sites, consists of building many sites across many different, unrelated IP addresses, and using complex linking methods to send spiders and robots through a preselected route encompassing all related sites. Typically, SEO specialty firms charge around three hundred dollars per hour for SEO consultation. If you are paying a lot less, then your SEO firm probably does not know what it is doing. Ideally, you can learn SEO yourself and pay nothing besides the maintenance costs of your network of sites, but even using this method, large amounts of time need to be devoted to tracking and developing effective keywords for your sites. How much is your time worth?

SEO is Based Around Creating Large Amounts of Unique Content

You are not going to be number one in the search engines if your site has no content. It is as simple as that. When developing a site you are going to SEO the hell out of, your first task should be creating a large amount of content based around your keywords. Without content, search engines will see right through your site. Having a large amount of images with keyword-heavy alt tags does not do shit when compared to having a several hundred word article about your keywords. When you have a content-heavy site about a specific subject, you are already lined up to do very well with search engines.

SEO is NOT Invisible Text and Simple, Keyword-Dense Paragraphs

Search engines see through both half-ass methods to optimize a website. I know it is an amazing feat, but some groundbreaking programmer has found out a way to compare your site’s background color to your site’s text color. Robots see right through that invisible text on your website and you are usually penalized for it. It never works to your advantage, so don’t even bother.

Search engines also see right through paragraphs containing a large percentage of your keywords. They view this as keyword spamming and will usually penalize you for it. Each search engine has a different ratio of keywords to content that it considers keyword spam, but be asssured that a paragraph containing 90% keywords in a random fashion will be ignored. Don’t waste your time. Make sure your content is useful and readable.

Firms That Do Not Know About SEO Should Not Offer It

I am tired of encountering design and development firms who think they are able to tack on SEO to their list of services after they buy a single SEO program and have not done their research. SEO is a fairly complex science, and simple things like using effective alt tags, writing content geared towards your keywords, and choosing the right keywords will bring up your site’s ranking, but to really experience a solid ranking increase, you need to talk to an SEO expert who knows what he is talking about.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Technical Writings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.