The Maine SEO Blog

A few years ago a book came out called Moneyball. It was about how Billy Beane, GM of a small market team, the Oakland A’s, competed and beat teams with a much bigger payroll, like the evil Yankees and the beloved Red Sox.

The idea was that baseball teams had been measuring the wrong things when looking at players: batting average and pitching speed for example. Instead, he looked deeper into the data and found that on-base percentage (which would include walks, hit-by-pitches, etc.) and pitchers who got ground outs were much more valuable, and completely ignored by other teams. In this manner he built a successful team at a fraction of the cost of the Yanks or Sox.

Did it work? Well, some of those big market teams took his advice (why did he share that info anyway?) and the Sox have won two world series since. Now on-base percentage is viewed as an essential metric for hitters, and shown on NESN for every at-bat.

It feels like the same sort of transition is going on now in the SEO world. The leaders in the industry seem to feel that we’ve been measuring the wrong things.

• Last week I read an article by Stephan Spencer called The Latest SEO Trends and Metrics which argues we’re measuring the wrong metrics.
• Just now I read 5 Reasons Why Rankings Are a Poor Measure of Success by Jill Whalen, who claims she hasn’t checked clients’ rankings in years. This is an excellent article that clearly explains why rankings are more subjective than you’d like to believe.
• A few weeks back Google blocked Web Position Gold, a tool used by SEO professionals (including flyte) to measure if and where their clients appear in the first three pages of Google.
• When Nicki in our office manually attempted to check a client’s visibility last week Google banned her after a dozen checks! In fact, the ban affected other computers in our office as well. (Not her fault; I think I asked her to do it. Shame on me.)

For years I’ve argued that search engine rankings don’t matter, Web sites don’t matter, and even conversions don’t matter. The only thing that matters is you sell enough widgets, book enough rooms, or mobilize enough people to your cause. Of course, conversions, attractive Web sites and good search engine rankings all lead to those successes.

So, do search engine rankings matter? Yes, I believe they do. Good search engine visibility will continue to help businesses and organization bring in new traffic. However, measuring is getting tougher as personalized search and localized search continue to evolve and affect search engine results on a person-by-person level.

Perhaps we should be less worried about our search engine rankings, and more about whether those results are driving qualified leads to our sites.

The world of SEO is such a strange one. No one really knows what is best to do. So it’s not really a science: it isn’t as though there’s a proven formula to follow in order to rank better (and therefore profit). It’s really much more of an art: where certain artists have had more success with different tools (be it graphite, watercolor, or oil pastel), with different mediums (canvas, paper, multimedia), and with different styles (impressionism, modernism, abstract). Sorry for the tangent, I’m a dabbling artist myself – it’s easy to relate.

Back to search marketing…I had my second official SEO training seminar with Jill Whalen at High Rankings last Friday. (My first was with Dan Thies in Texas.) Jill is an SEO guru and has an incredible amount of knowledge and experience in the field.

Today, as I sifted through the notes I took and Jill’s presentation, there are so many new things I learned! I’m just going to touch upon a few: some “freebies” if you will – specifically the ones that made me say, “Woah! REALLY?!” This is where my art tangent comes in: even between just the two trainings I’ve been to, I’ve seen differences between what SEOs think/say. Which is what makes it so great! Each SEO will teach what has worked for them, so these are some of the things that have worked for Jill:

• You do not need to update your site frequently. That isn’t to say NOT to update your site regularly. Basically, all you need to do is update naturally. Most good SEO policies follow this “natural” growth idea. Another is that your copy does not need to be a certain number of words, simply what is (you guessed it) natural.
• You do not need to submit to directories or search engines. Gone are the days that search engines will only find you if you submit your site to them! To check what Google has indexed, use the site:your-site command.
• The most important on-page optimization is in the title tags, body text, and anchor text. Headers don’t need to be keyword rich, according to Jill.
• Finally, you do not need a sitemap, or even a Google Sitemap for that matter. Sitemaps are really only good for sites that have a large number of products – that way, products can be found more quickly and efficiently.

That was just a taste of tips and tricks I found from this training session. To find out more, why not take Jill’s class, or better yet call flyte today!

Nicki Hicks
Student for Life