Effective Link Building Service: 100% Organic: Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?

**Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?**

**by Jill Whalen**

Building links is a struggle we SEOs all face. Of the three pillars
of SEO (content, architecture, and links), it's the link authority
pillar that i's usually the weakest. Looking at sites individually,
formulating your approach, sending personalized emails, picking up the
phone to speak to the webmasters - it's a lot of hard slog. If only it
weren't so darned difficult and time-consuming to acquire high
quality, relevant links! Yet without such links, you won't be able to
earn the trust, authority and importance required to rank, and your
optimization efforts will fall short.

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by the SEO elite. One that's scalable, efficient and high-impact.

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If you've read any of my articles on SEO over the years, you know my
pet peeve. It's the wasted time and money spent to perform useless SEO
parlor tricks that have little-to-no effect on the bottom line.

With the latest brouhaha over PageRank sculpting, the boondoggle
nature of many techniques that pass for SEO has become clearer than
ever. A boondoggle is defined at Wordnet
<http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=boondoggle>
as work of little or no value done merely to look busy. If that
doesn't sum up PageRank sculpting via nofollow links for the past
year, then nothing does!

And I'm not only talking about PageRank sculpting. That's just the
most recent and most obvious example, since Google Spam Czar Matt
Cutts' claim that they pulled the rug out from under nofollow links
ages ago. I'm talking about all the useless SEO tactics that have been
bandied about over the years.

Two of the oldest are the fixing of the Meta keywords tag, and the
submitting of URLs to search engines. Gimme a break. When's the last
time a Meta keyword tag fix or a search engine submission ever
brought additional website visitors? Yet these types of offerings are
the backbone of many SEO firms' services.

It's no wonder that many outside of the industry think SEO equals
voodoo or black magic or worse, spam.

A lot of SEO is just that

Some of the reports and proposals I've seen provided to clients by
SEOs are often laughable. I saw one the other day that claimed the
search engines couldn't follow image links and the client would have
to redo their website to use text links instead. (Search engines can,
of course, follow image links perfectly fine and always have been able
to&sure hope that client didn't pay for that advice!)

Even the creation of XML sitemaps are for the most part, a
boondoggle. For large ecommerce sites, these might provide some value,
but they are certainly not a necessity for most sites, despite what
some SEOs would like you to believe. Sitemaps are popular among SEO
companies because they sound all cutting-edge techie and super-duper
Googley, yet they're easy to generate. In other words, the SEO can
baffle the client with bullcrap and charge money for something that is
likely to be unnecessary, and unlikely to have any effect on targeted
traffic and sales.

And don't get me started on H1 tags. Old school SEOs swear by them,
and often suggest if you don't have keywords in them, your page is
doomed. Yet, take them off a page and you'll be hard pressed to see
rankings or traffic changes from Google. Try it yourself. Remove the
H1's from your page, and use a different HTML tag for your headlines.
Leave it that way for a few months and check if you see anything other
than the normal fluctuations you'd see anyway. Put the H1s back in and
watch what happens&that's right, nothing!

Unfortunately, our industry is beset with people who are making
unnecessary changes to client websites based on unfounded theories
that at best produce the teeniest boost to the site, and at worst -
fix problems that never existed in the first place.

Here's another example. A few years ago, SEOs started recommending
rewriting perfectly good URLs just because they didn't have keywords
in them. While in theory, this is good practice if you're redeveloping
your site and the URLs have to change anyway. Keyword-rich URLs do
look nicer and appear to be more relevant in the search engine results
pages. But years ago, it could take anywhere from a few months to half
a year to obtain good rankings on the new URLs. Google was placing a
lot of emphasis on URL age and authority at the time, and were also
more suspect of redirects than they are today. So starting over with
brand new URLs (even with 301's in place) was often causing more harm
than good.

Today, Google does a better job of indexing the new URLs and also in
passing the popularity of the old URL on to the new one so it's not as
traumatic as it once was; however, it's still not something I'd
recommend doing just for the keyword factor. Yet it's often one of the
first things mentioned by SEO companies as necessary to the SEO
process.

Not all SEO is a boondoggle

This is not to say that all SEO is a waste of time. Far from it.
Compare the value of boondoggle SEO techniques with simply making
smart Title tag changes. Now there's something that can indeed lead to
long-term measurable results in the search engines. Other techniques
that make a difference when done correctly are the flattening of the
site architecture (for real, not through nofollow attributes), the
descriptive naming of internal anchor text, as well as the rewriting
of content to better speak to the target audience. And of course,
having a link-worthy site and getting the word out about it to the
proper channels will always be worthwhile.

Client involvement is key

Don't get me wrong, this is not an SEO is dead article. SEO is alive
and well if you focus on the things that matter. Part of the problem
is that the things that matter are often a lot of hard work that need
client involvement, whereas the boondoggles can often be done strictly
through the SEO company. Most clients are too busy to get involved,
which is why they're outsourcing their SEO in the first place. But a
professional SEO company cannot get long-lasting, needle-moving
results for a client that isn't willing to help.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and
not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Jill Whalen <http://searchengineland.com/author/jill-whalen/>

, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside
of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing
networking organization <http://www.semne.org/>
, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High
Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter
<http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/>
.

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Effective Link Building Service

Thursday, July 16, 2009

100% Organic: Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?

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