Some SEO Myths

Reading this morning, Habr stumbled upon the post “SEO-schniki do not know what they are doing” and, seeing in it an unreal amount of misconceptions about SEO, simply could not resist - registered and sat down to write this post.

I confess right away - yes, I do SEO. And for about 4 years (by the standards of the industry, this is not so little). During this time, I managed to put my hands on the promotion of the order of fifty sites (although now I’ve gone more into project management and integrated website promotion and development). So I know what I'm talking about. Although of course I can be wrong about something, but I am sure that in the comments I will be quickly corrected.

Let's get to the point:

Myth 1. Seoshnik only do that obfuscate the search results of their sites

I will try to explain where this confusion comes from.
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First you need to understand that SEOs are at least a combination of 3 groups of people .

1) Seoshnikov engaged in the promotion of client sites . This is probably the largest group - this includes employees of all SEO firms + freelancers.

2) Seoshnikov, promoting their sites. As a rule, these are webmasters / web programmers who are not willing to spend money on attracting professional SEOs and therefore are trying to promote the site on their own. In addition to them, there are professional SEOs who decide that it is more profitable for them to engage in the promotion of their sites, rather than client sites.

3) Roadways and other black seo people.

Now we will try to determine the goals pursued by each of these groups. The end goal is the same for everyone - to make money (I do not take into account altruists and other extremes, since their share is very small), but the ways of earning are different.

1) Website promotion client.
The ideal goal: to bring targeted visitors (i.e., those who buy the product / service, or perform another required action) to the site being promoted.

2) Promotion of your site.
It all depends on the purpose of the site. But most often this category of SEOs set a goal to advance on requests related to the subject of the site in order to bring to the site an audience interested in the subject of the site.

3) Roadways.
The ideal goal: to redirect as many people as possible interested in a particular topic to the affiliate site (or another site that somehow pays for traffic from doorways).

As you can see, initially the goal of "making secret" no one sets . But the issue is really often filthy ... So how does this happen?

Again, let's go through the 3 groups listed above.

1. Website promotion client.
Although initially it is assumed that traffic will only be whole, in fact the goal of any business (including the promotion of customer sites) is to make money. Therefore, if it is advantageous to add untargeted, ineffective and poorly relevant queries within the business model, many do so. Money does not smell ... And nobody remembers about the filth of the issue.

Some even do not disdain to use black promotion methods (in particular, spam), because they allow you to achieve visibility of the result with lower costs (again, the goal is to cut the dough, and not to do your job qualitatively).

Plus, schoolchildren taking sites for promotion (they just because of inexperience do not understand many nuances and “randomly” foul up the issue). No, of course, we all were once beginner specialists (I don’t also consider myself a guru - I still have to study, study and study), but some try to do their work efficiently and quickly, while others just want to quickly cut the dough, "After us even the flood".

2. Promotion of your site.
Many make sites solely for earnings on advertising. If this ad is generalistic (for example, teasers with yellow news), then the quality of the traffic is not important, its quantity is important. Therefore, by what requests come - not as important as the number of people who came. As a result, crap issue.

Often, site owners wanting to save money on a copywriter pay a penny, but in the end it’s not text, but just a set of keywords. But such texts may well take a good position, in the end, again, filthy issuance.

3. Dorveyschiki
On the one hand, they are interested in first of all targeted traffic (as it gives the best conversion, which means there will be more income). But the very essence of doorways (automatic generation of pages for thousands of requests) does not imply any significant selection of keywords. Therefore, the traffic goes on all requests, at least slightly related to the desired topic - the number here is more important than quality. Hence the filth of the issue.

Honestly, I practically didn’t deal with doorways myself (I tried it 2-3 years ago, but I immediately realized that it wasn’t mine). Therefore, I may not know some nuances, but in general I can imagine the picture.

As a result, doorwayers probably get more than anyone else, but the traces of their activities, as a rule, are quickly removed from the search results. At least in the issuance of Yandex / Google, I see doorways extremely rare.

In addition, doorwayers do not disdain zagazhivaniem white resources (forums, blogs, comments, and any other sites allow you to add your content) until hacking. And this is a reason to hate them. I came across this personally (I’ve spammed and hacked some of the sites I’ve been working on) and therefore I’ll never deal with Black SEO myself (as I know how the injured site owner feels and I don’t want it to anyone).

So whether SEOs foul issue? Initially, no one sets such a goal (except, perhaps, for doorwayers, but this is a special group of people - it is impossible to judge about all SEOs by them). In fact, yes, the issue is littered, but not by everyone, but only by those who treat their work as a simple way to cut down Babal. Unfortunately, there are now the majority and this problem of the industry - there are not enough qualified specialists (who would understand what they should do and why - I will write about this below). There are not enough adequate customers who would understand that a student for 100 rubles will simply not be able to perform such work qualitatively.

Therefore, the first thing to do here is not to try to eradicate SEO, but to try to make it civilized - then the issue will be cleaner.

The global problem is that most want fast money. And this applies not only to SEO, but to the mentality of the majority of Russian people (and not only Russians, but our love for freebies is especially strong). I am sure that in other businesses where there are similar opportunities is the same garbage.

But back to the myths:

Myth 2. Seoshnik works a little, but gets a lot.

Again, looking about who we are. A seoshnik in an office can, like any office plankton, work from 9 to 6 for a salary of 35 thousand. If we are talking about a freelancer, then everything depends on talent. Lack of sleep quickly loses customers, because just can not do their job well. And if a person is talented, so why should he earn little by working a lot?

For comparison, an ideal sysadmin can do nothing at all, but receive a cosmic salary for it, because he has once set everything up and now everything works like a clock.

But SEOs cannot do this - even if it leads the site to the first place for all requests, the search engine can easily change the algorithm as a result of which the site will fall and you will have to start from the beginning. In addition, new requests periodically appear - they also need to be worked on. And so on to infinity.

Myth 3. Seoshnik write govnoteksty.

SEOs themselves usually do not write texts. SEO copywriters do it for them. And what quality the text will be directly depends on the skill of the copywriter.

The SEO task is to select queries for which the text is optimized. The task of the SEO-copywriter is to correctly enter these requests into the text. The task of a good copywriter is to make this text not only optimized, but also selling. And for this you need to talk with a business representative (find out the features and competitive advantages of the product). Further, the text must be beautifully decorated (here, ideally, the services of a designer who can prepare suitable illustrations do not interfere). The resulting page needs to be correctly composed (I mean the text itself), and many stupidly copy it from the Word into a visual editor (I think everyone knows what comes out of it).

The cost of one page (if we are talking about a quality page) will be about 1000-10 000 rubles (not counting the cost of its promotion) .

How many site owners can afford it? ..

So do not be surprised - if you have been allocated 5,000 rubles to fill the entire site (say, fifty pages), then the quality will be appropriate. Seoshniki here are guilty only in the fact that they agree to work on these conditions. But one will refuse - there will always be another ...

If the customer has no money, he can try to write the texts himself, but how many people will condescend to writing some kind of texts, if they can be ordered for 30 rubles / 1000 characters? ..

Myth 4. It is enough to promote the site to the top, and immediately there will be a barrage of customers.

Alas, it is not. I hope that the site owners will still understand that before promoting the site, you need to work on it properly.

Gentlemen customers, SEO is a great tool, but it will not work well if you have not taken care of the following (this is an average commercial website):

1. Fast working and load-resistant site
2. Decent design (and quality layout)
3. Convenient to use site or at least fully working site
4. Current and complete information on the site
5. A site that helps potential customers get answers to their questions
6. Selling texts
7. The possibility of receiving feedback (and willingness to continue working on the site)

Without this, investing money in seo is simply not effective (especially if we are talking about some plastic windows). Those. besides a search engine promotion specialist, a web programmer, a sysadmin, a designer, a copywriter, a usability specialist, a marketer, a web analyst and, finally, a CUSTOMER REPRESENTATIVE, who perfectly understands all the details of his business, should work on the site.

In the case of a limited budget, naturally, a number of roles can be performed by one person, but the quality will then be lower if you involve a specialist for each task.

Myth 5. Seoshnik can give guarantees.

No, he can not. After all, positions do not depend on him, but on the work of a search engine, which cannot be directly affected by work (unless of course he has no links with executives, leading developers, or key search engine shareholders).

Myth 6. You just need to make quality sites, and visitors themselves will come to you.

If you have created a really high-quality, useful and interesting site, they will come, but most likely not from search engines. After all, if you do not even comply with the basic requirements of search engines, your site cannot even be correctly indexed.

Myth 7. If there were no SEO, then the issue would be extremely relevant.

As it would be, in fact, no one knows, but let's try to dream ...

If search engines didn’t give any recommendations about the technologies and algorithms of their work, then in my opinion there would be 3 types of sites - authoritative (like Wikipedia), relevant (quality sites that answer the user's question) and randomly relevant (corresponding to the query, but in fact they do not give an answer - they hit the top accidentally, only by coincidence, and by the fact that there was simply nothing more suitable in the search engine database).

It would be better or worse, the issue that we have now personally, I do not dare say ...

In addition, (as a result of myth # 6), part of even very high-quality sites, but not satisfying the requirements of search engines (for example, made entirely on AJAX, without some additional optimization for search engines) could not even be indexed.

As a conclusion , I want to say that SEO is most likely not going anywhere, at least as long as there is a lot of traffic through search engines to make it interesting for site owners. As long as this is the case, they will inevitably look for promotion specialists, which means such people will be (if there is a demand).

Therefore, in order not to receive instead of search results a bunch of foul-smelling mass of brown color, I personally urge both customers, and performers (SEOs), and search engine developers to develop this industry and work on its cultivation. There will be a civilized SEO - there will be much less garbage in the issue than it is now. I just don’t see any other way out (well, don’t you think seriously that now someone can ban SEO?).

I am pleased to answer your questions and comments in the comments (but only if they are constructive).

PS: I apologize for the confusion, typos and bad punctuation - until I can find time to read and edit the text. Perhaps I will do this later.

PPS: Having spent almost two hours of this time on this post, I am afraid that I wasted it. But he could not restrain himself. And yet I hope that there can be at least 1 person who will draw something useful from this soul cry ...

update: wrote it last week, but for some reason, then this post was never published. Today I received an invite to Habr, after which I decided to publish this post. Unfortunately I cannot publish a thematic blog - I don’t have enough karma ...