I haven’t posted much lately. Mostly that is down to a new role I have as a Web Developer now. As per usual I am not going to give away the name, but it is a fairly large media company here in NZ. Obviously it is working within their digital department, “digitizing” what they currently have in print.
I have only worked there just over a week, and already I see things that still astonish me about SEO in a real world sense. Generally I like to think that all developers that code for the web should have a good grasp of SEO technologies. And hopefully keep up to date with the changes that search engines implement. It isn’t always the case, but most people atleast have a good understanding of what will and won’t rank.
Interestingly enough I was talking to someone on my team about SEO. His actual job title is “SEO Developer”. As I got talking, I could tell that he seemed to be sticking by the book. And any sort of “contentious” issue that would get debated to no end at a SEO conference was a simply open and close case for him.
Things such as nofollow links and meta tags were an absolute 100% no impact on ranking issue for him. To me, especially nofollow links, I have a believe that they do work. Blog Comments while devalued, still seem to give me some sort of boost in the rankings. Whether that is because of the rank, or just because my website is “out there” is something that I could argue all day long. We talked about it for a while, and all I tried to get across was that nothing in SEO is a yes or no answer. Everything is shrouded in mystery and it is only with testing for yourself can you see what works and what doesn’t.
Even worse, he told me that <strong> and <em> tags around your keyword had absolutely no effect on SEO rankings. Once again maybe something that could be argued either way, but I think it is probably up there with things that you should do anyway. You can check out here for SEOMoz talking about different ranking factors : http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors
Anyway, I am drifting off my original point here. The SEO Developer also mentioned that our department also hired an external SEO company to work on our sites. After asking them what they did, it seemed they made several onpage SEO enhancements. e.g. Keyword in title tag, keyword in H1 tag. The usual on-page SEO stuff. I questioned about inbound links and what they were doing offsite SEO wise. The other guys in my team didn’t 100% know the answer, but said that before we hired them, we weren’t ranking at all, and now we were.
ooookkaaayyy
Let me just point out something here. The website in question is one of the largest, (probably top 2) in it’s industry. There are 173k links pointing to this site, of which 158k are pointing to the homepage. The homepage is a PR5 page. However before the SEO company was hired, the keywords they “wanted” to rank for were not in the title or H1 tag at all. This alone would (in my eyes) make them very slim chance of making it to the front page for this particular keyword.
So the SEO company changes the H1 and title tag to be the exact keyword. And we start ranking. But is that an example of how a SEO company can get us ranking? Even though the website itself had over 173 thousand links pointing to it before they even got going.
That is what you call money for nothing kids.
O and just FYI. The SEO company itself does not rank for it’s title keywords within Google.com or Google.co.nz. If that isn’t a good indication of who is ranking us, then I don’t know what is.
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Mix keyword research with seo and great content and you should get ranked! Just keep it simple.
