Top SEO tips or a scam advert on Facebook?
For the last few days I have been seeing the ad on the right showing up in Facebook. It offers 50 top SEO tips from 8 experts.
Naturally, since SEO and online marketing are my business, I was curious. So I clicked on it. I have to say I am appalled. I do not know who I am more appalled with to be honest. The creator of the ad or Facebook themselves.
The page it links to offers 5 SEO tips… and I really hope these are not the top 5 SEO tips!
There is no mention of a company name or registered business number. There is just a form looking for your email address. In return for your email address you will receive the other 45 SEO tips.
More worryingly (is that actually a word? spell check doesn’t seem to mind), A lookup of the web page using Whois (http://whois.domaintools.com) shows that the site is registered to “WhoisGuard”. In other words whoever is behind this site is hiding their identity by going through a company that does just that for them. Alarm bells going off for anybody else or is it just me?
I was in the middle of writing a post about PPC ads on Facebook and Google when I stumbled across this. Needless to say, it may well colour my findings in relation to which is the best bet. Do you want to advertise your company in a place that could very quickly become known for scam advertising?
Lets address the actual SEO tips on the page (I’m not publishing the url because I don’t want to be responsible for any traffic going there).
- Put your main keywords in the TITLE META TAG of your page. Separate your keyword phrases with the “|”or “-” character. Your page title makes a huge impact to your SEO ranking.
This is misleading. Yes the title tag is extremely important. The number of characters should be kept down below 70 and the text should be enticing to humans (who are the traffic you want) as well as search engines. Try to keep your keywords / phrases near the beginning of the title. As for separating with the “|” or “-” characters… that has ZERO impact on SEO and is purely for how it looks. - Focus on targeting KEYWORD PHRASES rather than single word keywords. There could be millions of pages on the Internet that contain a single-word keyword and searching for one brings untargeted results. If your page is about hair care, then that’s the keyword phrase you want to focus on.
Badly worded, but the essence of how this works is that the longer the keyword phrase (eg. “SEO tips revealed” – 210 thousand competing pages on Google), the less competition there will be for it (eg. “SEO” – 204 million competing pages on Google). You should not abandon single word keywords. It is just easier to rank for longer tailed keywords. In their example targeting just the word “hair” would make sense too if you ask me! - Get links from authority sites in your industry linking back to your site. Submit your site to quality directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web.
Oh God!
This used to be great advice…. DMOZ in particular. But Google have announced that they will not be using DMOZ any more as part of their ranking algorithms. In general, if you are doing your SEO in 1984 then this is great advice. For those of us in the here and now, while not detrimental, listings in directories has very little of the impact it once had. - Get quick links back to your website by posting comments on relevant blogs. With your comment include a link back to your site. Use one of your main keywords as your link text.
(Banging head against wall). Anybody who has ever owned a blog will be aware of just how much spam appears in the form of comments. If you were creating a search engine algorithm, and were aware that 99% of blog comments are spam, just how much weight would you give to a blog comment in terms of it helping a site to rank highly? Search engines are not developed by a spotty 14 year old kid in a bedroom, they have teams of doctors working on them… point being, they are not stupid! - Include the META Keyword tag in the HEAD section of the HTML source code of your website but keep your the keyword list to less than 10 phrases.
Where is my Stone Washed Denim Jacket?Yes friends, the 80′s must be back! I shall make this short. Google ignore the meta keyword tag! (and if you’re in Ireland, then frankly Google is the only search engine that matters).
This is the 5 tips that they showed in order to entice you to sign up for another 45 of the same? Come on… it’s just an email grabbing scam.. surely! Obviously I don’t know what their intentions are, but bad advice and hiding your identity do not make me trust easily.
Facebook, what are you doing? Do you not vet your advertising clients in any way whatsoever? Or is it just a case of get the money in and make your targets?
