Something really amazing happened today. I had sent a home page copy to a client and he said his SEO team was reviewing it. Today my client, totally confused, showed me the SEO’d version and I was stumped. As I said in a previous post that I’m not an SEO expert. Although I get my clients’ websites on the first page of Google and Yahoo!, I never market myself as an “SEO expert” simply because I feel that relevant content, and lots of relevant content, is all you need to SEO (search engine optimize) your website. The SEO expert of my client re-wrote my copy in the weirdest way I’ve ever encountered.
As a confidentiality matter I’m not going to put here the original text, and that doesn’t even matter because the point is not that. The SEO expert first of all, needlessly inserted the keywords, and again, the point is not that. The weird thing was, he wrote the keywords and key phrases in a mix of sMalL CaPs aND biG Caps and he said this would get my client better ranking! And this copy is for the home page. Just imagine how the visitors will feel after reading such nonsensical text. What all goes on in the name of SEO! And then he enclosed particular phrases within <h1></h1> tags without realizing that the HTML header tags break the paragraph and appear in the separate line. Something like:
Do you know I can
<h1>Search Engine Optimize</h1>
your website?
According to my blogs CSS formatting this text appears like:
Do you know I can
Search Engine Optimize
your website?
How funny it sounds in the middle of the paragraph, SEO or no SEO.
Fortunately, my client stuck to my version of the home page copy.
But really, do such things work?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
That is quite frightening to see! And even if it did work would anyone actually get through a paragraph or two before giving up and heading off elsewhere?
Useful articles, offering tips and news that your audience value is, as you say, the best way of drawing in people and ultimately search engines.
Others will link to you and highlight your work through their own sites and this is so much more effective than UpPerCase woRds or other strange ‘tricks’.