Is SEO Spam? What Search Rankings Do You Deserve?

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Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who focuses on web spam, and he's their main spokesperson when it comes to SEO and spam. According to Matt, web spam happens when website break the rules "so that their website shows up higher than it deserves to show up."

 You may not want to consciously spam Google, but do you want to show up #1 for rankings you don't deserve?


What? Um, Brian, What Search Rankings Do I Deserve?

Let me give you an example.  If you're Ford Motor Company, do you deserve to rank for the search "cars"? 

If you answered yes, think again.  There are dozens of auto manufacturers that also deserve to rank for "cars". So who gets to be number one?  The website most optimized for "cars"?

No, most likely, the site that wins is the one that deals with the entire topic of "cars".

If you only represent one manufacturer, you don't deserve to rank for the entire topic.  If you want to rank for that, you need to create an info portal that deals with ALL cars.  For example, the #1 result right now is cars.com, a portal that helps you research, buy, and sell cars. 

(In fact, two of the top four results are for the movie "Cars"- so the search results have to deal with diversity of manufacturer and meaning.)

 

Is SEO Spam?

Matt Cutts is quick to clarify that "SEO is not spam."  There are ways to optimize sites to make sure they get the rankings they do deserve.  But SEO is not voodoo, and if it's done ethically (white hat, not black hat), it can't get you rankings you don't deserve.

Isn't Good Web Design Enough?

No. 

Web designers usually are not SEO experts.  Their job is to design a site that looks good and is functional- hopefully they know enough SEO to not block you from good search rankings, which they can actually do. 

For example, entirely Flash-based sites seem cool, but they're more complicated to optimize.  Search engines don't read Flash nearly as well as HTML.  There is a work-around, but it requires not just the normal SEO but the Flash FLA file also needs to be enhanced.

SEO can help you in a number of ways, including:

1. Fix web design issues that block good search rankings
2. Enhance web design to make sure you rank for the keywords you deserve to rank for
3. Show you what content areas you need if you want to rank for keywords you don't deserve

How to Deserve Mo' Betta' Search Rankings

If you want to rank for keywords you don't currently deserve to rank for, check out the third item above.  It implies changing your website strategy, possibly even part of your business strategy. 

If you want to be an authority on a more general topic so you can get more search traffic, you need a content development plan. 

You might need to identify someone in your organization who can and will blog. 

Or you might have lots of internal documents, sales documents, or white papers you haven't put online yet.  You can leverage those information assets into better search rankings.

Your Next Steps

Contact a good search engine optimizer.  They can assess your website's current content and service offerings, help you understand what keyword targets are reasonable, and give you an idea what you'll need to do to rank for more general or lateral keywords.  Executing both optimizations and optimized new content takes time and labor, and should be done with white hat techniques only.