This last week I downloaded the updated SEO Beginner’s Guide from SEOmoz.org. It is packed with information and recommend everyone new to search engine optimization read it. I have been reading it and it has been a great read. It talks about things that I have learned already, but then points out minor details to things that I never thought about.
We had a client that we had to get some optimization done for and so we did it. The downside was, the keyword that was focused on was “endodontist,” but we should have been smarter than that. People do not search for endodontist as much as they search for the term “root canal.” Thus, we had to redo the SEO and focus on root canal.
Furthermore, the client brought up another concern, it was about SEO and keywords. I have heard from a few trusted sources that keywords did not matter, but I wanted to find out for myself. I did some research and found out that Google places no weight on keywords and Yahoo and Bing did a little, but that most likely changed. However, most of our clients want to rank on Google and do not really care about Bing and Yahoo. Nonetheless, we, as a company, understand that we should perform and rank well on all search engines. I kept on reading and digging and found that keywords do not really matter. They are good to place commonly misspelled words that you would like to rank for, but that’s about it. Here’s an article that talks about it.
Another article I read was a summation of Matt Cutts’ movies about SEO. One of the summaries was about when Matt talked about keywords. He said, “I wouldn’t even spend 0 minutes on it personally.”
That being said, keywords are a waste of time and even writing this post, was probably not worth it, if I were Matt Cutts that is.
Another article was about purchasing links. I know that link building is vital to search engine optimization and I have spent some time this last week building links for several of our clients and looking into methods on to effectively do it. One of the ways it is possible, is by purchasing links. You pay others to go out and get links for you or you just buy links off of others. This can work and the article talks about how it did work in all tests they did. However, once they were removed the rankings dropped. They also referenced one of their friends that owned a business that bought some links for their website and were blacklisted by Google. When you get blacklisted, you are unable to rank for anything on the search results and it is extremely difficult to gain trust again.
In summation, building links is worth while and the time must be spent on getting quality links, not just going out and purchasing them. Another lesson, is that keywords do not matter, but you can use them for some commonly misspelled words that you want to rank for. Last, download the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization!
