It was a Wednesday afternoon during the winter and unlike most Southern California days, the weather was dark and gloomy at about 3:30PM. Phone rang and I got the call.

I said "RegisterEverywhere.com - how may I help you." The fellow on the other end said "I sure hope you can, cause I think I've screwed up buddy." So he went on to tell me that he just spent the last 18 months writing unique articles that had no keyword stuffing and lots of substance. He then wrote unique title tags and unique meta description and meta keyword tags for every page of his nearly 12,000 page site and he used all sorts of tools that check the percentage of keyword usage vs. total content on the site. He then put together an on-site traditional sitemap and a Google sitemap.xml file. And just like all the forums say, he waited for the search engines to re-index themselves. So he did. He waited and waited and waited some more. He then went back to the forums and the sites that had preached that content is king and asked them what the problem was. He received his response from lots of oracles and SEO experts and the judgment was rendered on his site.

Forum members had said he had used Microsoft Frontpage to put the site together and that Frontpage added all sorts of code that makes your site and I quote "unfriendly" to the robots (man these robots are sure anal and some, you know who you are, are so narcissistic). The forum oracles had the solution- hire a CSS coder to re-code the site and make it and I quote "clean."

So this poor fellow spend $850 and a guy from India that he found on a freelance site to re-code the whole nearly 12,000 page site in CSS and make it "clean." By the way, as he was speaking I ran the site on the W3C code validator and low and behold 136 errors and none of them were the futile errors of the name tag missing.

So he was calling us befuddled, confused and frustrated as to what he had done wrong. I mean, thousands of sites on the Internet claim when it comes to search engine ranking (natural rankings of course) content is king. Well well well. Here was a guy with an older site, hosted on a non-spam flagged unique IP address, with nearly 12,000 pages of unique content, all with unique meta tags that was not being ranked for a single competitive keyword with no major search engine (except MSN).

RANT -  By the way, my dear engineer friends at MSN. You know what this  means:

xyz.com/Get-A-Better-Way-Of-Ranking-Sites-Cause-You-R-Too-Obvious. But, please don't get mad at me. I love you....Seriously. I do. I own lots of Microsoft shares and I desperately want them to go up and stay there. Friends can be honest with one another.

Back to the story-

So the guy said what is the problem. What am I doing wrong. After patiently listening to this fellow as I could honestly feel the pain in his voice, I said "links." Links he said. I said yes, you need links to point to your website from other websites. He said, but that's spam. Spam I said. He said yes, you cannot just point links to a website. The poor caller was so mislead by so called SEO experts that he thought links, something the entire Internet is built on, something that the highly respected engineers Alan Page and Sergey Brin (co-founders of Google) formulated and based the PageRank algorithm on, was "spam." Can you imagine that! Wow, this type of misinformation is hard to overcome. Sometimes I feel I am a mis-information decoder, but I am too late. They have joined the misinformation and misinformed cult for FAR too long and I can no long reach them. So the caller said, I am going to research your site further and call you back. I visited his site today since I had bookmarked it, and I saw that too familiar Godaddy placeholder. Yes, the site had been laid to rest and was no longer. Oh website poorly optimized website, from bits you come, and to bits you shall return.

Moral of the story - Don't waste time trying to do stuff yourself when there are true professionals that you can hire that will handle things for you. Although you may think you're saving a bundle, you are going to cost yourself much more money than the amount of money the true professional was going to cost you!

---

Categories:
Search Engine Optimization | Search Engine Marketing | Keywords | Content Writing | Link Building