Why Google Wants you to be an SEO Wookie

Every search engine marketer knows that the dark side of SEO — the black hat, Darth Vader style tactics deployed by thousands of Storm Troopers to game the system for short term benefit — has given the practice its shady reputation.  Too bad a few thousand bad apples have to spoil it for the rest of us, because those connected to the Force and all things good in SEO are making the search universe better for all, and even have the loyal and sensible support of Google itself.

It’s kinda simple when you think about it.  Google wants to serve up relevant search results — giving customers what they want reinforces the value of the product.  Keeps them coming back for more.  Most importantly, keeps those ad dollars flowing.

A big issue for Google (and Bing!) is the plenitude of sites on the Interwebs that are poorly optimized.  In essence, these sites are failing to tell Google what they’re about. If these sites can’t communicate properly, Google can’t serve them up as highly relevant results to its customers (and allow them to make that cheddar).

Why not, then, deploy kind hearted SEO Ewoks and Wookies to help out?

White Hat SEO couldn’t be more kinder and gentler in its most simple form.  The mission, as previously mentioned, is to help sites tell search engines who they are and what they do.  Elementary things like doing proper keyword research and writing proper meta tags can work wonders for website visibility, among other suggestions provided by Google itself in its SEO Starter Guide.

In the end, White Hat SEO is a win-win for everyone involved.  Client gets more visibility, SEO guru gets paid, and Google indexes and serves more relevant pages (see: cheddar). Oh yeah, and with the completion of each honorable optimization project, the forces of good advance every so slightly over the forces of evil.

Image credit: Dryjack at Deviant Art

My Brother the Sailor – Building Links through Good Content

Matt Cutts and other SEOs often say that the key to good SEO is good content.  They usually say this cryptically, and some of these talking heads seem to be regurgitating the company line without knowing the rationale behind it.

My brother the sailer, who I discussed in an earlier post about Facebook and blogging, has hit upon this concept somewhat accidentally.  I may have mentioned to him that getting back links to his site is a good thing for SEO, but it doesn’t take an SEO master to deduce that getting your sailing blog excerpted on the well-trafficked site Sailing Scuttlebutt is good for business, which is what he did.

Checking out my brother’s analytics account this week has been a trip.  His traffic is up 886%.  He also scored a link from another industry site a few days later, which helped to drive even more traffic.

Short term, he gets a nice traffic boost.  Long term, he gets two very juicy links from high quality sites that each have a page rank of 5.

Matt Cutts has not been shy about saying that high quality back links are the way to rank well.  What my brother is doing is what Cutts and the other experts mean by good content.  Good content and the pitching or promotion of that content results in links.  Links from high quality sites are votes for your site.  These votes are how Google decides that your site will rank ahead of the competition.

Leveraging YouTube for Video Search Results

Google will return video based on how it understands user intention, so video won’t always show up.  For example, “How to take a slap shot” will pull up video results since it is implied that the user is looking for instruction.  ”Hockey sticks,” on the other hand, will pull up text results and shopping results, as it is assumed that the user is looking to either research or purchase hockey equipment.