Some of the advice I read about SEO is crap. I am going to highlight some of the crap in this article. I am also going to explain how Google is social media. I also plan to use poor spelling, poor grammar, and a few crap drawings to make my point.
Before I go on I want to introduce myself a little more, I am Pat. I grew up in the USA where I was homeless for much of my youth. I was taken out of an abusive home when I was 10 or so. I never went to school again. I have a fifth grade education. Really. Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies had more education than I did.
I left America when I was 18 and didn’t come back until I was 30. I worked with humanitarian aid groups in war areas for most of my twenties. I spent my life for the most part trying to get laid by humanitarian hotties in Africa,Russia, Kosovo, Albania and other sweet places, but the one thing I have cared more about than anything else in my life and the thing that brings me the most joy is writing.
Writing is what we do in SEO blogs, SEO advice columns, and the SEO world is filled with a great deal of people I respect because they love writing too.
I want to highlight today that Google (and Universal) is social media.
Perhaps you don’t see that yet, but it is true.
Google is the most advanced form of social media out there. It is the most sophisticated system of sorting websites based on… drum roll… the preference of people.
No matter how many on page and off page factors that you optimize, those factors will take a back seat to how people feel and react when they use a web site.
Many of us have a very good reason for having faith in SEO tactics, the main reason being is that it worked so long. We sorta saw creating websites as….
But it just isn’t that way anymore is it? Not for real projects. SEO is tough, and one of the main things that I think is crap about SEO is that people are not given enough importance.
I seem to hear that these are the places you get traffic from…
What are those things really? Search engines, Direct traffic, and links? I see traffic sources more like…
In the above image “networking” is what we used to call “direct traffic”, “recommendations” are what we used to call “links”, and “list of websites ranked by recommendations and networks” are what we used to call “search engines”.
This simple concept, of appealing to people instead of search engines has been around for a long time. Mostly as a joke because it frankly was easier to go the route of manipulating a search engine than to actually appeal to people.
But it really is about people now.
I hate reading SEO articles that remove people from the picture. This would be the “crap” I was talking about when this article started.
I want to puke every time I read an article about Titles and their importance. Titles are important, but the reason they are important is their appeal to people. Far to often we hear about non-people reasons titles are important. Or worse, we dole out advice about making sure everything is correct and professional and good. Screw that, if you article is relying on proper punctuation or spelling to survive, then it isn’t worth writing. Naturally I understand the need to, in certain situations, be professional, but I have to tell you, that you are mostly college educated people writing to a population of mostly not college educated people.
This need to out professional each other creates a crap user experience. It also removes the natural language out of your websites and defines you with dazzling clarity as a certain type of website. I tried to illustrate this in an over simplified way in an article I wrote for SEOmoz called “Most Internet Users are not Savvy, Why are You?” .
I get pissed off when I hear comments like “If I see a misspelled word, I lose trust in that article and it’s author”.
Fair enough, but I don’t, in fact I think that it is a snobby assumption to think everyone is like you. Most people don’t give a rat’s ass.
If a photo of Jessica Alba was on a page that has misspellings on it, do you think people would say “I’m not going to look at this picture because I do not trust the author.”
They will look at the picture, and the reason they will look at the picture is because… the picture is what they wanted. People will use shit that gives them what they want, period.
The biggest factor in SEO is providing people what they want.
Everything else is mostly crap.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Wells said.
ps. the people over at smallbusinessbrief are enjoying your site.
Tata,
Evan
“I get pissed off when I hear comments like “If I see a misspelled word, I lose trust in that article and it’s authorâ€.”
Sentences like the one above are the ones that cause people to lose trust in an author. “It’s” means “it is.” “Its” is possessive. There are at least three spelling errors or incorrect word choices (“to” instead of “too”, for example) in this article alone. You may think that writers who have perfect spelling and punctuation are trying to out-do each other, but the truth is that they understand that spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a part of good writing.
Bloggers write for a living, and therefore should be very, very good at what they do. To some people, incorrect spelling is a sign of a lack of attention to detail. Some readers (including myself) may think if you aren’t proofreading your posts carefully enough to catch these simple mistakes, perhaps you aren’t fully researching what you’re writing or checking your sources.
Apples and Oranges, cmk, you speak of writing.
I speak of communication.
> Some readers (including myself) may think if you aren’t proofreading your posts carefully enough
Myself may think that *you’re* violating concordance.
> to catch these simple mistakes, perhaps you aren’t fully researching what you’re writing or
> checking your sources.
I think that perhaps you aren’t fully researching what you’re . . . checking your sources, either. Eh? For starters, you might try Strunk and White’s, where you would see that this construction is ambiguous and stylistically poor.
Myself really thinks that some people aren’t getting laid. Maybe instead of reading S&W tonight, cmk, you should chat up some babe. This is not meant as a dig, but simply to highlight an inherent opportunity cost; the more time one spends on the form of one’s message, the less one can spend on the content. And I think Pat’s (brilliant) point here is, “what do people really value? Form, or function?”
P.S. Yes, it’s Saturday night. I see the irony. My weak excuse is that my girlfriend out of town.
Geesh, this is getting all fancy.
I like beer.
It has bubbles in it.
First of all Alex, I’m a woman. I also can’t figure out what connection you’re trying to make between “chatting up some babe” and spending time on formulating a message.
As for Pat – you see writing and communication as two separate things. I see writing mistakes as a barrier to communication.
CMK, thanks for the reply and clarification.
I do think many people share your opinion that writing mistakes are a barrier, but the point I was trying to make (perhaps lamely, I am often often lame) is that many people do not share that opinion, and those “people” are often those who are unfamiliar with a subject, or easy sales (the people we want at our sites)
Alex/Cmk: I think the one of the points of his article is that most net users are not like you guys (experts), or me (graduate from college in physics and now attending a Chinese language institute).
Cmk: I agree that lack of attention to detail (spelling mistakes) is correlated with research prior to writing articles. But it isn’t causal. Discarding an established person’s credibility based solely upon spelling, complaining about it etc, is pretty close minded.
Regarding your critique of “it’s” and “too,to”, when was the last time you were confused by their improper usage? Thankfully context almost always clears it up. If you had said non-natives english speakers might be confused by his sloppy use of homonyms, I fully agree. But otherwise, its quite pedantic and ivory tower like to get so worked up over it.
I trt to follow truth wherever it leads…even if it leads to a poorly spelt blog that constantly talks about farts and poop. LOL! He helps me be less stuck up.
Taiwan Girls love foreigners: My Taiwanese friend (girl) reveals how foreigners can get hot chicks in Taiwan!
Now Pat, based on your “social network” model of the internet, do you think I will get lots of “networking”, “recommendations”, and rank high in the “list of websites ranked by networks and recommendations?”
PS. This post inspired me to, from hence forth, create content based on the social network model of the internet. I can’t wait to roll this out.
Thank you,
Evan
Pat – I understand your point about the differences in audience perceptions. I hope you didn’t take my comments as a dig at you personally, but rather an open statement about bloggers in general.
Also, I wanted to make the point that I don’t discredit a blogger based on one spelling error. I start to lose faith in bloggers that repeatedly make the same mistakes. Another issue I have with spelling errors is that no one seems to fix them. A post that comes through on my Google Reader with errors almost never gets corrected on the live site. A perfect example of this is a fairly recent Search Engine Journal article where they misuse “steak” for “stake” several times throughout the article, even though they used it correctly in the headline – http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-myspace-merging-news-corp-wants-yahoo-25-stake/5148/
cmk, I think alex was making the point (although I don’t think you caught on) that you made a mistake (misteak?) in your first post; you used “myself” incorrectly.
There are very, very few writers – even the extremely educated ones – who don’t make mistakes from time to time. You (cmk) seem to want to divide writers into two categories: those who make mistakes, and those who don’t.
In reality, the two categories are: those who make mistakes (and probably know it) and those who make mistakes (and think they don’t make any).
Great post, Pat! You are absolutely right that SEO, SEM, usability, and any other internet buzzword begins and ends with human beings and how (and whether or not) they understand, enjoy, and talk about what we do. Thanks for the reminder.
Lorissa!: Yum, Hello. thanks for commenting.
cmk: Howdy, a great suggestion, if spelling errors get you down is to contact the author. They will usually appreciate it, and it offers a great opportunity to interact with someone in your field.
Also of note: I see all preconceptions the same way. They are poopy. Judging someone by their spelling is poopy, like judging them for over things, like the way they dress or their sex, or their race. Obviously I am taking it to an extreme by saying that…
Or am i?
Hmmm.
In any case, preconceptions: poopylisious.