Timing may also play a role in what you want the public to see. For example, you may not want a press release published before a particular date. Think what would happen if Apple’s own employees published announcements of the company’s new products a day before Steve Jobs presented them! 25.SEO: A Career with a Future It’s not unusual for those working in respected fields to be asked questions by those just entering (or re-entering) the job market. Naturally, the newcomers want to know about the future prospects of those fields. Search engine optimizers face those questions regularly. So what will the field look like five or ten years from now? Is it a good career choice? This question pops up with some regularity on SEO forums. It has been discussed more than once on our own SEO Chat forums. Before we address whether it’s a good occupation to pursue, there is a great deal to consider. Is search engine optimization an actual career or more of a skill set? With what skills should a good SEO be armed? How much money can be made in the field? What does a good SEO need to do to get ahead? As to the linking area, there are a variety of issues connected with finding out how many back links you have, to say nothing of getting those back links in the first place. The area of “other issues” simply deals with points that didn’t seem to fit neatly into one of the other three categories. That doesn’t make them any less important however. Without further ado, then, let’s start discussing the things you need to make sure you’ve done with your meta tags and on-page optimization when performing SEO on a web site. The field itself has not been around very long. Starting in the mid-1990s, it fell to webmasters to optimize web sites so that they showed up high in the search engine results pages. A landmark of sorts was reached in 1996 when the first email spam touting SEO services started hitting electronic inboxes. Usenet references to SEO did not appear until 1997. Nowadays, a search on the phrase “search engine optimization” in Google (without quotes) yields well over 43 million matches. The acronym SEO delivers 118 million matches. There are forums, blogs, articles, companies, independent contractors, and many web sites devoted to the pursuit of SEO to make money one way or another. With all that action, one would suppose that it is a promising field. The technical issues category deals with the kinds of things that are easy to check with a computer, (usually) easy to fix, and probably don’t affect your users on a conscious level. Even so, they’ll affect whether a web surfer is likely to find your site in the search engines and follow a link to become a visitor. Once the visitor arrives, some of these factors will also affect whether or not he or she wants to stay. 34.Picking An SEO-friendly Web Designer As an SEO we get two kinds of sites; those that were designed in the past and where the designer is no longer involved, and the sites where the design is either ongoing or we are working with the web designers from the start. Both of these have their pros and cons as an SEO but there is a clear advantage of one over the other for the client. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - The Wrong Kind of Exposure When I talk about the wrong kind of exposure in this case I don’t mean bad publicity. I mean exposing information to the public that they were never intended to see. Jordan gives one example involving a common web site management platform that stored site statistics in a folder labeled /statistics/. If that folder wasn’t password-protected, anyone who knew that such a folder existed could read it, which meant that “many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet,” Jordan explained. That security hole may or may not exist today, but the principle certainly holds: if you don’t want the whole world to see a particular file, secure it. Another example of the wrong kind of exposure is what happened when AOL published a search data report in 2006. Its publication was intentional, but it was not well thought out. Supposedly AOL tried to scrub the personal information off of the search data it published, so that searchers would remain anonymous. It didn’t quite work that way; at least one major publication was able to identify one of the users from her searches. The mess led to the resignation of the company’s chief technical officer. First, let's discuss the pros and cons to the SEO. If we are coming in after the design is completed there are more than likely (and by that I mean 99.9% likely) some structural and or major design issues that will need to be addressed. Unless the web designer is skilled in SE-friendly design we are going to have our work cut out for us just dealing with structural issues. On the positive side of this scenario, we're left to just work on the site with no designer taking it personally when we tell them we need to make changes (and that can lead to some issues). Finally, here are a couple of domain name mistakes I hope most of you know better than to make. The first is buying the .biz version of a domain name when the version is available; top level domains are still better known and more respected than .biz domains, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. And the second is promoting a site you don’t even own. Make SURE you buy the right site and spell it correctly in all of your marketing literature and advertisements. Now let's look at the other scenario. Working with a designer has it's cons which is generally – we're going to have a designer taking it personally when we need changes made to the structure of a site or challenging us when we're arguing that while an all-Flash site is visually appealing, it leaves something to be desired from and SEO standpoint. This conversation generally goes something like this (and all you SEO's out there can sing along): SEO – Flash cannot be properly read in the same way as HTML and we need to have easily spidered content for the search engines to see. Designer – Flash can be read by Google. SEO – But not in the same way. We need multiple pages of optimized content and Flash just isn't going to provide that. Designer – Well I disagree (probably read in some forum somewhere that a misc. guy had no problem ranking for “bob wyverniuschuck artist” with a Flash site) but even if that's true – it's the conversion that counts and this Flash site is going to convert. SEO – Yes we understand that conversions are important but so is traffic. If we can't get traffic to the site then a 100% conversion ratio is irrelevant. Designer – There are other ways to get traffic. SEO - Yes I understand that but this is what the client has hired us to do and has asked that we work together to build an attractive site that ranks well. Designer – I'm going to have to talk to them about this ... SEO - another big sigh in preparation to talk to the client about the fact that you DIDN'T say conversions are irrelevant, etc. etc. Not all domain debacles come from spelling errors. Some come from math errors – or, more precisely, forgetting to pay the bills. In 1999, Microsoft forgot to renew its Passport domain; in 2003, it forgot to renew its Hotmail.co.uk domain. In both cases, generous individuals paid the fees and handed the domains back to the software giant, but not all stories have such a happy ending. So this is the down side and an extreme example of it (for humor as much as illustration). But there's a big upside and that comes when you have the opportunity to work with web designers who know how important SEO is (as an SEO who knows how important a good design is). Working to balance the two can be a daunting task and having the skills of the SEO matched with the skills of the web designer can be a true blessing. For example, I may have a great idea to make a site more easily navigated by search engines but an ugly solution to implement it whereas the designer may have a more attractive solution in mind if they know the problem and the technical solution. Let’s move from spelling errors to a canonical matter. I suppose you could still consider this a spelling issue, though. Is your site spelled , Think fast, because you get to pick only one. Google, however, will see all three – and its duplicate content alarms will go off. You can avoid this issue by deciding that one site spelling is canonical and using the appropriate redirects for the other spellings. From what I have read, the current consensus for the best URL format to use isn’t any of the ones listed above, but , with the slash on the end. Whichever format you use, be consistent. Such a scenario has recently come about in our dealings with Moonrise Design. Moonrise contacted us in advance of their starting work for a client, had us sit in on conference calls to understand the client's needs and has since had us helping structure the site properly from the ground up. There is no resistance and we don't tell them what to do, we indicate the functions required – provide any technical background as necessary – and they implement it in a way that leaves the site FAR more attractive than if we had had to do it ourselves. Expert designers doing what they do best and understanding that what we do is SEO and the client wants to rank highly. Ah, it's a beautiful thing. Kalena Jordan writing for Site Pro News mentioned the client who thought he’d told a designer to buy CartoonCentral. The designer heard CarTuneCentral. The latter was available; the former was not. But that’s not the only kind of mistake you can get into with spelling. Remember that a domain name doesn’t show up in the browser in CamelType – so think carefully about what it might spell if the capitals fell in a different place. PenIsland is a deliberate parody site, but there have been cases of others that weren’t, simply because they didn’t think about what their chosen domains might spell with different stresses. It is this experience and reflecting back on other web designers we've worked smoothly with in the past that inspired me to write this article. The article is more for potential clients of designers than for the designers themselves. So for those looking for a designer – if you want your site to rank highly and/or you'll be hiring an SEO – here's what to look for. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - Domain Disasters What could be more basic than your domain name? Perhaps that’s the reason that so many SEO errors revolve around this basic necessity. Maybe it’s because I’m an editor as well as a writer, but to me, one of the more painful mistakes has to be misspelling your domain name. If you’re buying your own domain name, and you know how to spell well, that might not be as big an issue. But if you don’t, or you’re simply telling a web site designer to buy it for you, you can run into some problems. Picking A Web Designer There are two main considerations that you'll need to make when you're picking your web designer. The first is, can they build an attractive site and the second is can they build a search engine friendly site? Before I go into detail about the specific things you need to avoid, I’m going to tell you what I think is the biggest SEO mistake anyone can make if they’re serious about making money from their web site. That mistake is neglecting to stay on top of the trends and information pertaining to the field. Building an attractive site: I am probably the last person to ask about what's attractive and what's not. When the Beanstalk site was up for a redesign a couple years ago I hired a professional web design company to build it. I can't create pretty things but I know how to test and I know how to monitor statistics to see if the traffic is behaving as I would hope.
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