Strange SEO Phone Call

I had an odd phone call from Leicester, UK. The guy on the end had an extremely strong Indian accent and I found it difficult to understand him. He was saying that he had seen me on a certain web site and he was looking for someone to do his e-marketing. He did know a fair bit with what he was talking about, though I did get a feeling he was still rather pumping me for information on terms of how to increase his organic searches.

Search engines fascinate me, Google fascinates me since its not just a search engine in terms its not just about keywords, but its programming as a phonetical aspect to it. Have you noticed if you type a mis-spelt word into Google or a word that sounds like another one and it returns a different word in the “did you mean” link. The challenge of coding for what something sounds like is a highly complex task.

If Google uses phonetics then I wonder what would happen if during the optimisation stage you used not only primary keywords but also phonetics and commonly mis-spelt words related to your content? I never tried it, though its possible that using voice recognition to write everything, I may unintentionally end up testing this one day!

I found out the guy with an extremely strong Indian ascent appears to work for a company with a .net domain name that could easily be confused with another company with a dot com. It looks like the site has been coded to standards expected by search engines in terms there has been use of appropriate header and name tags. Specifically, the document content, Alt, title and meta tags are confused and are full of stop words.

The pages titles are very badly written and I’m not surprised {company name} is having difficulties. The first keyword used in a meta tag is very important indeed and under no circumstances should it ever be your brand name, unless you are such a massive name that you already have very good brand recognition. (ie people already know you). If people don’t know you, then its highly unlikely they’ll be searching by your brand name. Using the brand name in position 1 of the meta doesn’t help to establish a new brand, on the contrary it just makes your site harder to find.

When choosing keywords for a web site; what you are actually looking for aren’t words you WANT to associate your site, but words or phrases that are already being used that can be related to your pages. This often means by slightly rewriting content in order to have the correct ratio of keywords between the title, meta and text. If you have a too high ratio of keywords then your site will be penalised as being a possible spam-dexer. If on the other hand this ratio is too low then you may well be missing out on possible revenue making opportunities. The trick is getting that balance and I won’t pretend its an easy thing to do – Its not.

An over optimised web site is actually just as bad as a site that has been badly prepared for the web and de listing is a regular event. I stay within the guidelines and always work steadily building traffic by using valued content. You cannot short cut the process or fake it. What is the point? Why not just put in a bit of effort to make decent content.

company.net using this as a main company then when someone else owns the .com (a major web host in the states) isn’t a great idea either. Google will always point to the .com first. In my experience, if the dotcom isn’t available and you’re not an organisation then use a different name.

Sometimes, people make the simplest of mistakes when they start their business will have a dramatic negative affect on visitor numbers, making the process of SEO a difficult and expensive one.