LSI, Google Branding, Flash Pages, and more SEO Magic Dust
What’s with all this magic dust going around? A lot of this stuff is nothing new, but there’s a lot of people speaking about the ‘latest/greatest’.
I’m sorry to break the bad news, but some of this is getting out of hand. There have been many websites that rank high, and LSI may little to do with the rankings.
Example 1
A lot of these websites don’t think about LSI, and yet they rank high in the SERPs. Hackers are notorious for getting authority domains to create pages that will rank on Google. A great example of this is Yale & MIT hacked. These websites do not contain viagra but they were on the top pages of google for ‘buy viagra’. If these pages weren’t about viagra (maybe mortgages), I’m sure they would stay a lot longer in the SERPs. The point is that Yale is an authority domain, and anything it spits out is considered ‘golden’.
Example 2
Google branding is another example. Can it be that branding will help your rankings or Google will see that
Soft drinks = Pepsi
Soft drinks = Coca Cola
Hey let’s do a google search to see if any brand name companies appear in the top 10 for ‘soft drinks’.
Nope….nada…zilch
Let’s try “airline airfares”
You will notice that all of the sites have airline airfares in the title tags.
A lot of these domains have “airline airfares” as the anchor text in their backlinks.
If Pepsi or Coca Cola had ‘soft drinks’ in the title tags, I’m sure it would make a great difference in their rankings.
When people come to your house, you don’t ask them if they want a ‘soft drink’. You ask them if they want a ‘coke’ or ‘pepsi’.
When you plan to fly somewhere you look for any airline that will give you the best price.
(unless you’re looking for perks like mileage) Keywords/Brand….gotta know when to use them, and 99 times out of 100..you will need to use keywords.
Example 3
SEOMoz posted a case study on a site called Open Cube. This website was on page 1 for the keyword ‘seo’, but the website wasn’t offering seo services, didn’t have the seo text on their website, and didnt even have the text SEO in their anchor text! So how did they rank for SEO? They included the keyword SEO in their title tag, and of course had help from having 1 million backlinks. So one question I have is where is the keyword variation in the anchor text since they didnt even use the keyword SEO?
Example 4
Flash pages. It is ‘well known’ that flash pages cannot rank on Google. Is it because of the flash or because too many myths going around? It is more of the 2nd one because flash indeed can rank on Google. Text does not have to appear on the page for it to rank. Flash pages have their text in images so there’s nothing for google to read. Perfect example of this is when George Bush’s profile link at the White House was appearing #1 for the search term ‘miserable failure’. This search term did not appear in the webpage, but because it was included in the anchor text of thousands of links, it came up as #1 in Google. This is also known as Google bombing. Flash websites just needs more work (backlinks), and you can be #1 just like George Bush.
Example 5
My website. Yes I’m writing about this seo blog you’re reading. Not many people know this but this website used to be a wine website. I have heard a lot of ‘seo experts’ say that if you buy an old domain to make sure it is ‘relevant’ to what you plan to use it for. Yea I’m sure you heard it yourself. If you plan to use the website for real estate, then make sure it was a real estate website before. Yea good one. I wrote a post about how a 2 yr old boy got this website on page 3 of Google for the keyword SEO within 49 days. My website is on page 4 now because I changed the title tags too many times, and I’m sure google didn’t like that one bit. I only had a few hundred backlinks that were pointing to my site when I was on page 3. Everyone in the top pages have over 10,000! Hey at least I’m on page 2 for seo blog. 
Here’s my take on all these experts. You need to stay away from ‘most of them’.
Most of these ‘experts’ work on well established websites, and when their rankings change, they think they found a gold mine.
Why do only a ‘few’ seo firms hire newbies? Because only a few people in the world know that hiring newbies is the 2nd best thing than working on a new website. A new person brings a fresh perspective, and will tell you what is working, and not what worked 5 years ago.
A newbie can find a nice backlink, and will credit this new link as the recent in SERP change. They notice patterns a lot easier than the old farts that know every aspect of SEO, but forgets what actually works.
Two answers from two different people on a simple question.
What’s the best SEO factor you can apply to any website?
Expert: <sighs> well it depends. depends on this or that, and when you get to that, then it will depend on this and that.
Newbie: backlinks
Me: How do you know?
Newbie: I have been writing content for weeks, and never got noticed. I added backlinks, and now I’m ranking everywhere.
If you dont have the luxury of hiring someone then create ‘new domains’. These domains will help you research/record on what works, and what doesn’t work. SEO experts are data collectors. Always collecting data on what works, and what helps.
Stay away from those who say ‘they know enough to be dangerous’. Those folks will give you bad advice, and you’ll lose your rankings. That is pretty dangerous stuff to be messing around with.
