« Best Blonde Joke Ever | Main | PHP is Dead »
January 20, 2006
SEO in the Morning
This morning I woke up before my alarm and found myself with an extra hour to kill. I did what I normally do and started catching up on the thousand and one feeds in my inbox. There wasn't much news to read. (I'm convinced all bloggers operate on west coast time.) So I started picking over yesterday's headlines, the biggest of which was Google refusing to hand over search data to the US Justice Department (go Google!).
However, I must apologize for misleading you because this entry has nothing to do with Google or the privacy implications surrounding their descision. This entry was prompted by a quote I read in a Chicago Tribune article about the Google story.
Other Internet search engines also appear to have complied with the request, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20 LLC, a New York-based search engine marketing firm. "It looks like Google against everyone," he said.
What caught my attention wasn't what this guy said or even that every other major search engine is readily handing over their data, it was his company's name. 10e20.
(This is how my brain works before 8am.)
I'm a math minor who spent way too much time staring at his TI-82 calculator in highschool. 10e20 is calculator shorthand for the number 10 times 10 raised to the twentieth power. In other words, it's 10 followed by twenty zeros. Or, if you take it a step further, it's 1/5 as long as the number Google was named for - a 1 followed by one hundred zeros.
(This is going somewhere, I promise.)
Well, that's a cute name, I thought to myself. I wonder if it was intentional, or if they just picked a name out of the air. I got curious, googled them, and found their webpage at http://www.10e20webdesign.com/.
Once my eyes finished adjusting to the neon orange color scheme and figured out where on the page to look, I realized that this company is actually in the SEO business. Seriously?
I'm probably gonna get sued for slander for saying this (especially since I've never met the people behind this company, or even heard of them), but damn. Their website looks like a business disaster waiting to happen.
Companies like this really bother me. After a quick browse around their site it looks like their entire SEO strategy revolves around keyword stuffing, bolding random words, and frightning customers into submission with loud text screaming "YOU ARE LOSING CUSTOMERS."
Did I mention the phrase "Website design services, Internet marketing services, graphic design services, Flash design services - all at low rates with fast, friendly customer service." appears twice . . . on the same page?
So, to 10e20, a few tips:
- Drop the table based layout. Switching to a CSS layout will not only put your content in semantic order (which really will up your SEO rankings!), but it will also decrease your page's file size. The home page alone uses TEN tables!
- Again, use CSS for formatting. All of your text is styled with <font> tags. This *really* increases your page size and makes updating your content a nightmare. I even found a few places where you have <font> tags surrounding 's. There's no excuse for that.
- Speaking of content, add some! Don't just throw out marketing words like optimization, affordable prices, and user-centric. Actually tells us what your strategy is. You've got two options when it comes to turning visitors into customers. 1) Wow them with your content so they'll never even consider your competitors. 2) Confuse them into submission with your marketing. Guess which one you're doing?
- Lose the stock photography. We've all seen these white background, policitally correct, *boring* images before. Your customers want to see you! They want to feel a connection with the people they do business with. Use real pictures.
- Finally, get rid of the link farms. Calling it a "link exchange" doesn't make it any better.
tech | By tylerhall | 08:36 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/28965
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference SEO in the Morning:
