I did some work for a couple of guys that wanted a ‘Cash for Gold’ website. They were in the metals business, and local, they were legit. Nice guys too, I dealt mainly with one of them, which made the relationship less cluttered. Anyways, I explained how SEO works, or will not work for that matter. ‘There are no shortcuts. I explained the ‘niche’ they were aiming for was extremely competitive, and I would do my best to place thier website, but there were no gaurantees. The SERPs for the keyphrase ‘Cash for Gold’ was 135,000,000 at Yahoo, and 16,000,000 at Google. Note: Google filters out more irrelevant junk than Yahoo. Anyways, the website got built, with Content at a minimum, which is not my plan of attack, but hey, what do I know.
The website got published, and off I went to do ‘my thing’, which no one I do work for seems to understand. Tons of busy work. I plopped thier URL on my websites, on this blog, of which I wrote something that Google always seems to pickup. I sat behind my PC and pounded away to prop up thier website with Backlinks. This included Forum Signatures, Directory Submission, and tons of Yahoo Answers, as well as Blog Comments. I got close to building nearly 4000 Backlinks in less than a month. Along the way I noted that Yahoo, and MSN were picking up the website early where Google was being stubborn. They were indeed showing up in the SERPs for some pretty decent ‘keyphrases’, and, much to my chagrin, they were getting some Conversion. People were filling out the online form, this seemed like success to some degree, it was a good thing.
Then came the changes. I suggested adjusting the content for keyword density because the website owners were obsessed with the key phrase ‘cash for gold’. The content got adjusted, then a few days later, I was asked to readjust it which meant downgrading the Keyword Density. What followed next, was daily changes in asethics, and questions about fluctuations in the SERPs. One of the websites owners was looking at the Source Code of competing websites, and wanted adjustments in regards to keywords, and key phrases in the Meta Tags, as well as in the Title. No big deal, keep these guys happy, why not let them have thier fun and success. One of the guys noted, ‘I think I understand this now’… meaning the SEO. Following up on that premise, I was told by one of the guys that he had looked at the Source Code, and had noted that some unknown ‘characterers’, more specifically, <b> and </b> was preventing the key phrase, ‘cash for gold’ to be completed. At that point, I snapped, couldn’t hold my water anymore. What this guy was refering to was the HTML Code that specifies Bolding of a word, which is a valid SEO Tactic. I replied to the email by saying, ‘this is too much, I’m done, goodbye…’. I didn’t even want to expend any energy explaining what he misread.
The bottom is that there are no shortcuts in SEO, at least not nowadays. Thinking that adding Keywords to the Meta Tags would improve your SERPs may have been true 10-15 years ago, but not today. The Internet has gotten more sophisticated, and competitive. If you want good position and conversion, you gotta work at it, and readjust only when you have let your changes get analyzed and processed by Search Engines, which usually takes 2 – 4 weeks. That’s it for now, another one bites the dust. Cash for Gold !

