I see a lot of misinformation out there about SEO, and it’s never going to end. When ignorant SEO-clueless people see an ad for “get #1 for any keyword!” they’re going to pay attention, and they’ll probably pay up for some fraudulent ranking service. (Hint: the only people who can actually “guarantee” you a top spot in a search engine would be the search engine, not some random dude advertising on Google Ads).
The SEO Strategy Spectrum
There seem to be two sides of the spectrum when it comes to SEO strategy. On one side are the “content purists” and the “over-optimizers.” I just thought of these two terms off the top of my head, so I’ll explain what I mean.
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A few days ago, I received an email from a potential client for what would have been a pretty small, straightforward coding project. He informed me he found me through a tutorial I wrote about adding a widgetized footer to your WordPress theme. (Yes, I know it’s over three years old, but it’s still a very popular practice to include content in the footer of your site.) He wanted me to code something similar for his own site.
I responded saying that I could do it (I wrote a tutorial about it after all), told him about my hourly rate, and that it probably wouldn’t take more than a couple hours. A pretty reasonable estimate.
What he responded with
He came back saying that he doesn’t use a per hour fee for any graphic work. Okay, whatever, I’ll just multiply my hourly rate by the number of hours I estimate it will take and use that as a fixed rate. Simple.
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One time I got an email from a “SEO expert” telling me that my site was doing so poorly in search engines because one of my pages had a few validation errors and that I needed to hire an “expert” like him to “optimize” my site so it would rank better. Here are the facts:
- The site ranked in the top 10 for phrases like “free wordpress themes” and “wordpress themes” which are pretty sought after keywords in that niche.
- The site averaged about 30,000 total visits per month from search engines (mostly Google) for other various long tail keywords.
- The site had about 400,000 incoming links from various websites, quality content, and a good reputation within its niche.
- The XHTML validation errors were because of a YouTube video I embedded. The default code YouTube provided caused a few errors in validation.
Anyone with half a brain when it comes to SEO will know that a strong link profile, quality content, and a solid reputation will trump a few validation errors on a page (with the exception of a few edge cases).
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.CO is the country code for Colombia, and registration was just opened up to the general public yesterday. Yes, there have already been some big sales like e.co for $81,000, Twitter acquiring t.co, and Overstock buying o.co for $350,000.
Who Is Buying Them
As far as the biggest sales go, it appears large corporations are grabbing them up for vanity purposes. T.co, for example, will be used by Twitter for some sort of link shortening service.
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Just like Theme Lab, this site is now sporting a brand new design by James McDonald. For posterity, here’s a screenshot of the old design:
The Change
While I did get a lot of compliments on the old design, I wanted to go in a more “professional” direction with the site. I’d love to know what you think in the comments!
Oh, and if you’re one of the like…5 RSS subscribers I have here, come on out of your RSS reader and take a look.
