Real SEO Help for Non-Web People

Category: Internet

Published: 10/13/2009 04:30 p.m.

I'm a recent hire into the Internet Marketing world.

The company I work for sells websites built on different CMS platforms. The main SEO stuff I do is what Derek would call "making good websites". Titles, headlines, urls, and good content that isn't copy-pasted from old paper pamphlets (or worse, just images). No black-belts or dark arts, just simple stuff that can take some time on larger old sites. The problem I have is when Derek says "Its so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool."

Some of our clients don't know a thing about the internet. That's why they pay someone to setup a wordpress blog instead of doing it themselves. It's not obvious to them because they don't work in the internet (like Derek has for 13 years). They work in sales, or in manufacturing, or even in marketing. And most of the time, they aren't interested in learning our trade any more than we are interested in learning theirs.

Making a grilled cheese sandwich is obvious and easy, but I still buy mine (at a markup) for lunch. Does that make me a fool? I also don't change my own oil in my car, even though I know it is very easy to do. I wouldn't say I'm a fool for doing so. The same is true of my laundry, which I send out.

Just because something is easy to do or obvious doesn't mean you are a fool for paying for it.

The reason SEO exists as a service is because Google can find millions of pages that have Welcome Homepage in the title. Is that helpful content to someone looking for a specific website? As I hinted earlier, some of our clients' current websites are all in flash or are all images of fancy fonts that are tough for a person to read, let alone a robot. We fix that for them, at a fee, because not only do they not know how, but they didn't even know they were doing it wrong (See Stage 1).

I follow simple, obvious advice to make content readable and searchable within the site, along with the search engines. I make good websites.

I want as badly as Derek does to have a good experience when I go to a website. I hate ugly designs, and images for text, and poor navigation. My job is to take people who have bad websites, and to turn around and give them good ones. I honestly have no idea how to botnet a zombie for linkbait (did I say that right?) and I wouldn't if I knew how. I get very upset when I see keywords stuffed in footers or as white text. I hate those bad practices, as they poison the Well of Google for us all.

Good SEO is what Derek calls making good websites. It's obvious for people who know how to make websites, but in this day and age, there are many people who need websites but don't know how to make them. You can call what I do selling snake oil, but it's not. What I do is not cheating or shady or some kind of secret. It's just stuff that other people don't care to learn or do themselves.