By Allan Maurer

If you want to achieve more than temporary high ranking on the major Web search engines, don’t cheat, say experts. So called “Black Hat” gimmicks may provide a brief surge but will eventually backfire. The real trick is simple: provide regular, original, first party content.

Jake St. Peter, president of Raleigh, NC-based Coalmarch Productions, got his search engine optimization baptism working for GoTickets.com. St. Peter discovered that once GoTickets.com reached a certain size, doing SEO by hand proved daunting. “I used a couple of box solutions like Yahoo’s Store, but met too many limitations and barriers,” he says.

When he met Thomas Ingham, a programmer, he teamed with him to create Coalmarch. “His concern was the back end Internet stuff, not SEO, and we teamed to combine them in one product,” says St. Peter.

Together, they created Coalmarch to develop a content management system already prepared for search engines.

Black hat methods fail in time
Right now, St. Peter says, one of the biggest topics in the SEO field is the way Google is trying to combat paid links. The new algorithm as of about two months ago looks askance at sites that suddenly go from zero to 1,500 backlinks in days.

“We do buy links,” St. Peter says. “But we make sure we buy them on relevant Web sites taking about the same subject matter. But some people choose to exploit that one aspect and end up tipping Google’s algorithm. If you go down that road, you’ll tip the scale and fall off the ends of the earth.”

St. Peter notes that there are plenty of “black hat” methods SEO optimizers sometimes use to temporarily bump up a site ranking. “We’ll be doing SEO for a client and see people above us and then see they are key word stuffing, every three words is a key word. Three weeks later, they’ll be gone.”

You can do a lot in a week or two along those lines, St. Peter says. “It’s like anything illegal. Eventually you’ll be caught.” We’ve dealt with clients who hired a company to do SEO, then comes to us saying, ‘They got us banned from Google.” Once banned, he says, a company may have to do six months of groveling to be indexed again.

Flash doesn’t register with SEO
“A lot of development companies claim to be SEO experts,” he says. “But they’re not. They outsource to another company or they have read an SEO message board or two and they’re self-proclaimed experts.”

“Unless you have someone who truly understands the magnitude and depth of what goes into constructing an SEO friendly site, you can end up with a completed site that you’d need to start over and rebuild.”

Clients come to Coalmarch with Flash sites that don’t have any html, for instance, he says, a comment echoed by Chris Young of Synergy Point, based in Tryon, NC. “We still see clients with sites built entirely in Flash with no html content to optimize. I’m surprised at the number of sites still built that way.”

He notes that design companies like to do that and companies want their sites to stand out visually over their competitors. “So they gloss over or forget what it’s really all about,” says Young.

One answer to that is to treat Flash like images: provide html tags like replacement scripts for visually impaired readers. “Replace it with text and load it up with keywords as well,” he says.

Stay focused on content
“We’ve lost jobs where we pitched a job focused first and foremost on content with the graphic look secondary. Six months later the company wonders why it’s actually doing worse in SEO rankings.”

Young points out that one of the easiest ways to SEO success is to piggy-back something new on something already high in SEO rankings. His company developed a page for guided rock climbing at Chimney Rock Park, a town outside of Asheville, NC. “Their site had an enormous amount of content, 300 pages, a lot of good inbound links, and ranked well enough with Google that when we put up a page for them, it instantly popped up as number one for geographical terms such as Western NC, or Asheville.

“It shows the power of having a high ranking. It gives anything else you do a leg up.”

Young says other clients, though, made wrong choices that adversely impacted their Google rank.

“We had a real estate agency that wanted to market itself as a different kind of real estate company. They wanted to show themselves as helping you find a “special kind” of home. So they had us change their title tags so they did not mention real estate. We removed them. Within a month, their leads dropped when they were leading in the Asheville area before. They called us and asked, ‘What’s happening?’

“We said you took the term ‘real estate’ out and that’s what people use when they want to search for real estate. That’s how people think.”

Content is king
Young’s advice mirrors St. Peter’s. “Stay focused on the content. Ultimately, we want users to see that content.”

There are general rules to follow, he notes. “Make sure your keywords are in the meta title. Use an H1 tag at the top of the page. In the first paragraph, make sure those keywords appear again.”

It really follows a lot of general writing practices, he adds. “You’ve got a short time to capture someone’s attention. You have to do it upfront. The fact that search engines do the same thing is almost just common sense.”

Coalmarch’s St. Peter notes that one of the reasons blogs may help boost a Web site’s ranking is that it puts original content on the site regularly.

“It’s because you generate a lot of first generation traffic,” he says. “The more content, the better.”

If for instance, you have a ticket selling site, you’ll get more traffic writing a story about the history of the Yankees and a recent Yankees Mets game, because if people search for the history of the Yankees or Mets, boom, your site comes up.”

St. Peter says you can do SEO for yourself if you’ve got the time. “Google algorithm changes come up every two to six months. Things working three years ago no longer carry that much weight. Things come and go. You need to stay informed.”

Those without the time to fully understand the up to 25 elements that search engines look for should hire pros to do it for them, most SEO experts say.

St. Peter warns that software programs offering to handle SEO for clients are limited at best. They can help with basics such as the keyword density on a page or automating ranking reports. But, he says, “Google doesn’t like them.”

St. Peter and several other SEO experts we talked with say that worrying about dozens of search engines is a waste of time. “We concentrate on three, Google, MSN, and Yahoo,” he says, “although Ask.com is coming up a bit.”

On the Web: www.Coalmarch.com; www.synergypoint.com

 

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