Wednesday, June 4, 2008

SEO Rumors and Bad Information

Everytime I talk to a new client, I have to spend at least some amount of time dispelling things that they have read or been told that are either outdated, or just untrue. I recently ran into a blog post from a local realtor on Active Rain that, innocently enough, passed on some erroneous information that was said to have come from her "very competent" SEO advisor.

I got interested because I had not even heard about the tool in question, though I'm embarrassed to admit it. Google has come out with Google Suggest that is in beta and may eventually become a part of the Google Search itself. I assume they are testing it to get opinions from searchers as well as to fine-tune the tool.

There's an excellent write-up about Suggest HERE at GoogleTutor.com. I will borrow some of the article below:

Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing as you type into the search box, and gives you suggestions in real time.

For example, if I key in the word “malibu” it tells me there are 4,110,000 results. But if I then key a space after the word, it provides a list that includes these choices:
malibu (782 results)
malibu boats (782 results)
malibu ca (31,100 results)


Seems pretty clear to me that the numbers that are given as suggestions are of the resulting PAGES in Google's index for each suggestion. Unfortunately, people are now spreading the rumor that it acts like Wordtracker's Keyword Tool. The various keyword tools give the number of SEARCHES on certain search engines per day or per month. This is not the same thing as the number of resulting webpages that are displayed with a search, obviously. The information is not telling you how many people are SEARCHING for those phrases, but how many pages there are in Google's index. Big difference!

Either this realtor on Active Rain misunderstood her "SEO Guy" or he has misunderstood the new Suggest Tool. I posted several comments to the blog and clarified the issue, but I didn't question who the supposed SEO person was (the people are all local to Myrtle Beach) nor will I put any links or name names here.

At any rate, the Suggest Tool is kind of cool. It will add an extra element to searches, not for the webmasters or SEO people, as was wrongly stated, but for the end-user instead. If you are searching for Myrtle Beach real estate, and you only type in "Myrtle Beach", then the Suggest Tool will help you along to realize that it is better to be specific.

The SEO waters are getting murkier all the time. I fear eventually so many people will have been ripped off by the false claims of companies who don't know what they are doing that they will no longer have the faith to allow those of us who can help them to do so. Every web person who reads a few blogs or forums and learns how to link is suddenly an SEO expert.

See Myrtle Beach Website Design for more information.