Just when you think people may be starting to understand what Search Engine Optimization is all about, and how it can help your site - you come across a Website that just doesn’t get it such as this one from the Gruniad (old joke about the name, they’re famous for typo’s)…

It’s all about search engine optimisation these days, readers. See, ORGY the more words SEXY BITS that interweb types search for PARIS HILTON COVERED IN GREASE that the Mill HOW TO GET A GIRLFRIEND, YEP JUST ONE WILL DO, IS THAT ASKING TOO MUCH? sneaks into this article the higher up it will PARIS HILTON COVERED IN KETCHUP appear on Google…

Is that what SEO is? Merely stuffing keywords into the body content and sticking <Strong> tags around them? Well, they did place the term Paris Hilton in the title tag, a <h1> tag, and in the alt tag of the image of Paris Hilton (the description tag reference a post from another day, looks like they forgot that one); so they are trying to see if they can rank for these terms.

Why are they doing this? Surely, the Guardian is a well respected newspaper / site in the UK.  Do they really need to resort to this kind of rubbish (ranking for non-relevant keyword terms)? No they don’t, and the reason they’re probably doing it is just because they want to see if it works.  Or, possibly because they want to see if they can get these terms to show up on the analytics reporting and embarrass whomever presents the reports. Why? Well, it’s because this particular section of the Guardian is known for it’s humor and wit (or in some cases failing attempts at both).  And, because the site itself is well trusted, with a large number of incoming links…they stand a good chance of success.

Photo by casaroger, fake ketchup added by me

How is it doing for them? Well, after a few hours they were already ranking first for “Paris Hilton Covered in Grease” and “Paris Hilton Covered in Ketchup”.  Although, you really have to wonder how many people are going to search for those terms (according to KeywordDIscovery that would be 0). Even if people are searching for them, how pleased would they be to find upon arrival at the site they didn’t find their hotel heiress covered in condiments as promised, but instead found a recap of daily soccer rumors for July 3rd? Probably not too thrilled, so they’ll mostly head right back out the way they came.

This all gets back to the issue of relevance. Whatever your goal is for your site, your content should support that. For you to increase your conversions, you need to funnel people in in specific ways.  Tricking them onto your site may increase your traffic, but it’s going to substantially reduce your conversions, and that’s what really counts (unless of course, the only metric you’re measuring is traffic, in which case I’d suggest also adding time on site and bounce rates into the mix).

Filed under: Analytics, SEO on Monday, July 7th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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