GeoCities died yesterday. This has led to mass mockery of old-school GeoCities pages. Others have some sympathy:
Put yourself back in 1996. Imagine you’ve just pitched your tent online, and you’ve been given a blank page and 15 megabytes to tell the world about yourself. Think about how intoxicating it must have been to be able to do that for the first time. Wouldn’t you, too, have gone a little heavy on the blinky text?
I was there in 1996. Heck, I still have the diskettes for a beta of Mosaic here at my desk – an install that requires multiple 3.5″ floppies. And it’s true: For the early adopters, GeoCities was a place you could set up and get your feet wet. You could put your site into awesome webrings – the concept that later launched a million reciprocal link exchanges, and even could be given a nod as a seed for the whole Google linking algorithm.
I think a greater point to mock for that era were the number of companies who started setting up web sites, and putting them entirely in the hands of their ‘geeks.’ Now, I love geeks. I am a geek – but I’m also a geek trained in branding, marketing and communications. Back in 1996, a lot of the geeks in charge of web sites were none of the above. But ‘web pages’ were computer things, so they handed them to computer people. Many of them made abundant use of such treasures as the blink tag, because any new piece of knowledge had to be incorporated somehow. This early round later led to various battles for control of web sites once marketing departments realized that maybe they didn’t have a huge audience yet – but the audience they had was getting a warped view of their brand.
So raise a toast to GeoCities, the first taste of the Interwebs most old-schoolers ever had, without which.
Despite the recession, I’m in a fortunate place where we still hire talented SEOs fairly regularly. No hiring freeze, no reduced demand for services, although sometimes the traffic we’re after is in decline.
And as I talk to those who would label themselves SEOs, I really have to disagree with their self-assessments. Here are a few things that I see as failure points in their claims:
If you claim to be an SEO, you need to have a web site. Your own web site. maybe even 3 or 10. It can be a blog. It can be pictures of your dog. But no web site, and I will doubt you. Claiming to be an SEO and not having a personal site is just suspicious for me. (Exception: You work on sites outside of your work for other groups, like a non-profit.)
You’d better have a Gmail account. Seriously. You’re an SEO without a Google account? What?! I may wear a tinfoil hat as far as Google services are concerned, but I do, in fact, have something like 5 Gmail or Gmail-powered e-mail accounts. (I’m using it as the back-end for e-mail on one of my domains.)
You know what ‘Vince’ is. I’m willing to be flexible about knowledge of ‘Florida.’ But know the big recent stuff. Read. every dynamite SEO I know reads the industry news – at work, at home, on the bus via mobile device.
You come in to tell me about your good ranking for a term like ‘plastic patio furniture.’ I don’t give a rip for rank. Did you make phat profit on traffic from the term? No? Then what’s the use? I have a site that ranks great for the term ‘boldly.’ Woo hee hoo. It’s a completely useless referral term. Rank is stank.
You have never submitted a site to a directory or requested a link from another web site. Don’t tell me you’re an SEO if you’ve never done either of these. They’re basic. If you haven’t done them, I’m supposed to buy that you understand the nuances of domain strategy?
You aren’t using FireFox. The things you can do quickly and without thought in FireFox are so significant that failure to do so tells me you overvalue manual processes. Efficiency:We likes it.
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Sure, recession = employer’s market. But even during the boomtime of ‘everyone needs SEOs! Everyone can be an SEO!’ much of the above could be seen as an engagement factor. Want to transition from dead trees to web marketing? Go build yourself a site and doink with it. Talk about how you did it, what you did, what you learned. That goes far with a lot of legit web marketers, because you know what? They didn’t teach me black-hat in business school. I learned it over double-shot mochas farting around with a domain I didn’t care if I blew up.
Recently, there’s been another big resurgence of love for the meta-keywords tag – well, at least among a certain class of clients with whom I work.
This obsession and love is, obviously, pretty easy to rebut – you’ve got Danny Sullivan’s 2007 manifesto on the topic, you’ve got Wikipedia, and there are a billion more options. Yet, it keeps coming up.
In most of the cases I see, it’s because a client isn’t ranking as well as they think is their due. They seize on this as an option. In most cases, they’re in competitive markets, and they need to invest more completely in site promotion – off-site factors like link-building, public relations, brand building, and etc.
Many clients hate this as an answer.
Everyone is always going to want some element of on-site optimization – work on content, magical meta-tags, a new domain, etc. – to be the cure-all to whatever SEO woes they feel themselves to suffer. in some cases, redesign (or re-code), or the addition of content (to improve the keyword universe for which a site can compete) will help, don’t get me wrong. But once certain fundamentals are in place, it’s about socialization and promotion.
A site owner controls their site. It’s hard to control site promotion. Getting links requires legwork, networking, sales ability, and drive. Tweaking a meta-tag? Requires access to a decent CMS – and, if the fundamentals are in place, the tagging is probably not going to be a magic bullet.
On-site work is easy. This is not to say it’s unskilled. But it’s easy because you have control. Site promotion requires a lot of third-party buy-in, so it’s much harder. Hiring people to do it tends to be more expensive. And it’s a lot less attractive as a concept than ‘if I change this meta keywords attribute I will RULE THE GOOGLE!!!!’
It’s been a while since I had the energy to say much in these parts. While still working as an SEO, I’m also spending a lot of time optimizin’ the littlest Kosbab:
I’m going to make an effort to update a bit more often, however.
Now, I know that one of my ‘issues’ is that I don’t necessarily drink the Kool-Aid, but I am underwhelmed by the Google SEO Starter Guide
released today.
Some of it is nice, especially for novice webmasters/small business owners. A lot of it is the basics of developing a site that meets a basic standard of ‘does not suck.’
But there are two limiting factors, for me. The first is that some of it is going to get some of these small business owners fussy about things not worth fussing about. How flat is the directory structure? What kind of keywords are in page paths? Sure, it matters… but not so much so in many cases as to get upset about what exists. Renaming a page to use a ‘better’ term, even using proper page-level redirects? Isn’t nearly so important as some of them would have it be. It becomes something to ‘blame’ perceived underperformance on that may not merit such a badge. But it’s simple and obvious.
The second, of course, is Google’s regularly-scheduled push of self-interest. And, sure, self-interest is perfectly ok. But the need for an XML Sitemap, and the push to use Google Analytics, is really all about self-interest. A good small business site is unlikely to need an XML Sitemap if the page structure and hierarchy is built properly in the first place; using an XML Sitemap to make up for such a shortcoming is lame. The usability factor in such a case is a negative factor. And insofar as Google Analytics is concerned, I just don’t like the trading of business data for the tool, and reliance on a third-party over whom you have no contract with is always dodgy.
I anticipate mad hijinks for many who work with small business owners with websites. Not that we didn’t have said hijinks before, but it’ll be a new flavor.
Links: So, Google is helpfully telling us about links this week. Their conclusion? Make a decent web site with good content. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the corner snoring.
Meta-Keywords: Oh, how I hate the meta-keyword tag. Many of my company’s clients are approached by so-called ‘SEO experts’ who clearly have little but a copy of SEO For Dummies under their belt, and they analyze the meta-keywords tag and proclaim my company incompetent.
The Natural Search Blog is suggesting that having lots of crud in the meta-keywords tag may be a negative signal to Google. If I can find a way to demonstrate this, happy days will be here.
GAudi:
I shall quote Susan, and proclaim the video-to-text indexing they’re doing at http://www.youtube.com/youchoose to be ‘Really cool.’ I’ll also say it’s much needed and overdue. The real question is going to be what happens as better indexing methods start showing up all the places people have the same video? The present distribution economy for video encourages people to upload videos on a billion sites. Speech-to-text can start identifying duplicate videos… then what?
A Day in the Life:
Speaking of incompetent external consultants, and video, the following fine YouTube video shows a day in the life of one of my most ninja-esque Search Marketers, unborking the borked:
Keynote:
Everyone can create content.
Think like a publisher.
Think about distribution channels.
Get users to opt-in and pass the content along.
Engagement is a metric.
I really miss the days when people used the term ‘black hat’ to indicate fun-yet-illegal SEO techniques that took some style and technical know-how to pull off effectively.
It seems like the n00bz all want to define ‘black hat’ as ‘anything Google says is naughty!’ Of course, that would include things like keyword stuffing, which takes all the subtlety and class of a hammer to execute.
As someone who is a pragmatic SEO – which is to say I wear whatever hat is needed for the weather conditions – this makes me sad. When I do black hat, I don’t want to be grouped in with a bunch of asshats in dunce hats. I want to be classed with pirates and ninjas and dark lords of the Sith.
…when any jerk could get venture capital for a web start-up, even without the faintest clue how the service would ever make money?
It’s excellent to see that such big dreams can still be made reality. I genuinely do not comprehend how Cha Cha will ever monetize the mobile search thing they’re doing. They already eliminated the guided search they were doing, which would have at least allowed for display advertising on the interface screens. Within an SMS, they have 160 characters for an answer to any question. Advertising isn’t going to happen, unless they spam people separately, and that’s already considered semi-illegal in most cases.
As near as I can figure, the new business plan is to be acquired by the Yellow Pages, or Google411.
I wonder what dumb idea I can have to get a $10M VC round. I can be inspired by the movie The Producers
(the 1968 original, with Zero Mostel, if you please). Only I’ll try to avoid singing, dancing, or jail, and you’ll thank me for avoiding the first two.
