But every so often someone sends me something that makes my blood boil. Well yesterday I had 2 emails from 2 separate people, who I’d given some advice to on public forums.

I won’t name them here, but I will cover the downright lies they’ve been told, and the bad service they’ve received from their SEO consultants.

To clarify: SEO Consultant 1 is a web designer specialising in SEO & Social media, SEO Consultant 2 is a company using dubious telesales tactics and mentioned in several places elsewhere for ripping customers off.

SEO Consultant 1 told his client that:

• Google no longer uses title tags
• The META description isn’t important
• Link exchange is the way to good listings
• No-one searches for your search phrase anyway

This was blatantly to cover up the fact that he’d done no work on the site and achieved nothing.

Well, let’s put those lies to bed:

• Google DOES use the title tag – in fact it’s one of the most important parts of onsite SEO. Granted, it’s not the be all and end all of SEO, but it is a major part, and without it, you may as well not bother. If every page of your website simply has your company name as it’s title tag, then you’re not going to be found for anything else. And don’t get me started on the dreaded “Home Page” title tag. The simple fact was, the SEO had done no title tag work and was claiming that they’re not used any more by Google in order to dupe his client. That’s wrong.
• The META description IS important – it’s the description that Google shows when your site shows up in the results, and can be the difference between someone clicking on your listing or not. Of course, if you don’t have any listings anyway because your SEO hasn’t done the work they’re supposed to, then I guess the description tag doesn’t really matter after all…
• Link exchange CAN be a good way to help your listings if everything else is in place, but the link exchange page that this client was given was a FFA (Free For All) links page where anyone could sign up and no checks were made. This meant that the site could be linking to unrelated sites, and there was no check in place to ensure that reciprocal links were given. I’m not a big fan of reciprocal links, and it’s been proven that one way links from well respected sites work far better to enhance your SEO, so although this cold be said to help, I think the client was misled.
• “No-one searches for your search phrase anyway” – well, I’m sorry, but this makes me REALLY angry! In the first instance, why wasn’t proper keyword research done to find out whether the phrase chosen was a) suitable, b) achievable and c) worth optimising for in the first place. If hardly anyone is searching for it (which, as it happens, was a blatant lie – it’s one o the most competitive searches on the web), why on earth bother optimising for it in the first place?

The client involved had paid for a year’s SEO up front and from what I could tell, received very little. The site had 9 backlinks showing in Google, of which 6 were internal links from the site itself, there was no Webmaster Tools account, and in 5 months there had been no reporting, no help and advice, no status checks – nothing.

SEO Consultant 2 promised his client:

• Full website optimisation
• In 6 languages
• Keyword research
• Ongoing reporting

For just £295 up front and then £50 a month.

As the £50 was due to come out of his bank acount, the client asked what had been done so far. He was presented with a 3 page word document telling him what to change the title and META tags on 3 pages of his site to read. As he said to me:

It can’t have taken them more than 30 minutes to produce, and I could have done it myself!

So, far from the ‘full website optimisation’ of his 100+ pages, he got given (bad) advice on how to change 3 of his pages. No content advice. No Webmaster Tools account. No offsite optimisation advice. No page structure advice. Nothing. Just 3 badly formatted pages of a Word document that to be honest my 9 year old stepdaughter couldprobably have written better, and her first language is French!

No mention of the 6 languages optimisation he was promised (which is impossible anyway as the site was only in English), or keyword research.

When he queried this, he was told that he can’t have been promised what he was, and all calls are recorded. He asked to hear his recording and this was rapidly altered to ’some calls are recorded’.

Now, I’m going to put the ‘you get what you pay for’ argument to one side – the guy involved feels a bit stupid, but he was promised a lot, and most of it was blatant lies.

Is it any wonder that this industry has such a bad rep?

I will hold my hands up and say i’m not perfect. I’m not the best SEO in the world (there’s always something to learn from someone). And do you know what, I’m scatty as hell! But because of that I’ve put systems in place that mean that every site we optimise goes through a number of checks, and a whole process from start to finish. Once a site is ‘finished’ it goes into another process line that makes sure that ongoing recommendations and reports are sent. I like to think we keep in touch with our clients, and that goes some way towards the many people who come to us because they’re been recommended to by current clients.

Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Everyone forgets, misplaces something, or has software / hardware issues that mean things don’t go quite to plan. But to blatantly lie to your clients, tell them things that are clearly untrue and provide them with substandard work? That’s scumbaggery of the highest standard.

When I speak with people like the two companies being ripped off above (and no, I didn’t pitch them for work) I feel ashamed to be in the industry I’m in.

As this is an automated translation, the results are a bit hit and miss, to say the very least!

If you’d rather that your site wasn’t translated in this way, or you have your own translated pages, tell google not to translate the page by using the following tag:

<meta name=”google” value=”notranslate”>

What this means is that the page in the cache will load quicker for the visitor, and the search terms will be highlighted.

However, problems arise when the cached version of a page and the current version are out of sync.

You can tell google NOT to cache your page by using the following META tag in the <head> of your page:
<meta name=”GoogleBot” content=”noarchive”>

The problem here is that the description that ends up in ODP isn’t always what you want, as it’s reviewed and submitted by a volunteer editor.

To make sure that description isn’t used, google recommend using the following META tag in the <head> of your website:
<meta name=”GoogleBot” content=”noOdp”>

Search engines don’t tend to follow it and it really serves no purpose.

If you could really tell Google to revisit and reindex your site every 2 days in this way, don’t you think everyone would be asking it to revisit every 2 seconds?

And even if you did ask Google to revisit every 2 days, and it did indeed do that – how many sites out there are updated that often anyway?

Every page should have a unique title, description and Meta keyword tag.

If each page is optimised for its own content, the chances are that you will give the correct content to a person’s query, as that will be the page that shows up in the search engines.

What’s in this tag is usually what is displayed in the listings given after a search I’d always advise a different description for each page if possible, and start with your keyphrase – that way it will be highlighted in some search results.

So your META description tag could go something like “Divorce lawyers Canterbury – Wilson and Co are divorce lawyers with 18 years experience based in Canterbury”

If your tag content is apples, pears, bananas, oranges, no one word has any more importance to the search engines than any other.

If your tag was “apples, oranges, apples, bananas, pears, kiwi, strawberries, apples”, then evidently ‘apples’ is the more important word.

Put the same into practice with your phrases

However, those that don’t use them may start using them again in the future, and those that do may stop.

Those that don’t use them won’t penalise you for having them, and those that do, will penalise you for not having them.

Confused yet?

Simply put, it’s better to include META keyword tags on every page of your site than to not.

They’ll either do you no good or some good, but they won’t do you any harm.