“But I Want It to be Easy…”

That’s what he said to me. Easy. He wants it to be easy.

I don’t blame him, we would all like it to be easy. Without having to work too much, or do the hard stuff. Just stay in our comfort zone and pretend we are making progress. We wont be, but we can always find a litany of folks to blame for our failure. Not us, we just want it to be easy. And doing it right is, well, just too damn hard.

Oh, I’m sorry, I am talking about a client of mine in CA who wanted to have his site be found on Google. He wanted to know why his site wasn’t being found. He wanted it to be found, and knew that I work with a lot of sites to help them create more visibility in the search engine world.

Some folks refer to it as SEO, but that term implies something that I think gives a wrong impression, namely that there is a set of ‘things’ you can attach to your site to ‘optimize’ it for the search engines. Yeah, and that’d be, you know, easy. I believe that success in the SE world takes determination, effort, skill, a little luck and tenacious attention to detail.

He pulled out an article that he had saved written by someone in his industry who was very successful and was now an advocate of SEO. The tactics expressed were;

1. wrong
2. outdated
3. against Google TOS
4. would result in disaster

But the techniques were, you know, easy, and didn't require any effort from him.

Just hide some copy on the page (Google will terminate the site), or fill your title with 250 keywords (Google will adjust, uh, negatively), or grab a whole bunch of domains and simply forward them to your site. (Yeah, that’ll work.) Not.

A good friend of mine had a ranking of 4-5 on any given day, he played out well in the searches and as he kept tweaking the page his results were getting better and better. Then he went to a seminar a few months ago and was told about a tactic (forwarding domains) by some ‘Guru’. My friend then purchased 10 domains at GoDaddy (hey, they’re cheap – especially if you only get them for one year) and pointed them all at his site. It was really easy.

Last week he was sitting in my office wondering what the hell happened. Not only was his ranking gone (0), he had no indexing at all. I was very perplexed, as his site was very SE friendly and should be well received. I finally asked him if he had done anything to the site. He said he had only been doing what we told him to do, but had tried to help his ranking with the multiple domain tactic he learned at the seminar.

Oops. Google does not like that crap at all. And to think that he listed 10 - all one years – just compounded his ills. We are killing all but his main domain, one for his blog, and another will host his portrait only information. We will have to do this and wait, submit, wait and hope that his main domain gets picked up again. There is no guarantee, but we will try because his domain is very good and it is worth a try.

And, it will be hard. He will have to do even more than he was doing to overcome the low point index he has achieved.

Look, let’s just take a moment and review some simple truths about SE’s, the web, and marketing overall. Google wants everyone who searches on their site to get results that are the most appropriate. That is what they do. Deliver the results that matter to the person who is searching.

So along comes SEO ‘gurus’ who attempt to change that simple process. They want to ‘trick’ the search engines to deliver your page, which may not be as relevant as someone else’s for that search parameter. They feel that the searcher is too stupid to know the difference so once they click on your page you will get a customer. Yeah… sure.

I make a Google search for ‘San Diego Architectural Photographer’. Someone who has himself a whizzbang SEO Guru, has used those terms, hidden his text, spammed the keywords… you know, all that cool stuff. And Google hasn’t discovered it yet. So instead of finding an Architectural Photographer in San Diego, I get listings of someone who has decided to place pages of links with, tada, AdSense on the page. I hit the page – it ain’t what I am looking for - and he hopes that I will click on something on his page and he will make 18cents. I don’t, ever, but I now have to click back and try again. Or I get a lithographer who has decided he wants all the architects in San Diego to know about him so he hijacks keywords that aren't related in order to capture that demographic.

And then I try again.

And Google looks bad because they didn’t deliver what I was looking for.

So it is in their best interest to get rid of the crap so they don’t look bad.

My first rule is: If you think you are ‘getting over’ or ‘tricking’ or somehow doing the least needed to succeed in SE world, you are kidding yourself and could easily end up with a domain that is simply not found.

Being relevant is what you must aim for. There are lots of things that you can do, and that Google will love your site for, but only a few of them are, well, ‘easy’. Preparing your page is simple and easy. Making sure your site isn’t a total Flash site is easy. Having relevant copy, page text, page name, meta content and clean code is easy. Making sure your web designer has a clue about what you want to achieve on the web is, well, somewhat easy.

But that relevance thing, the most important thing, means that effort will be exerted. You will have to be dedicated to doing a little more with your website than paying the hosting bill. An SE friendly site will be dynamic, changing, living and relevant to those who are seeking what you offer.

And, like all things worth attaining, simply not ‘easy’.