Recently, I’ve been looking at some sites offering SEO services for clients and it struck me how unprofessional some of those sites looked. First, there were a couple of them done in this long sales letter style (which of course doesn’t help in this particular case). What’s even worse though is having stuff on your site that looks as spammy as if it was created 8 years ago and not updated since then. I’m not gonna do any finger pointing but the owner of the site (who is a well respected person in the community BTW – so I don’t want to expose him on this) will probably recognize his site if he sees what I’m talking about here.
Well, what I mean is there’s keyword stuffing in titles going on like it’s 1998. Some titles of note:
Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Optimisation Company, Search Engine Optimisation Services, Search Engine Rank Optimisation
PPC, Pay Per Click Advertising, PPC Bid Management, Cost Per Click, Pay Per Click Banner Advertising, Search Engine Advertising
– or (this is from a different site, but the owner is also pretty well known):
Search Engine Consulting SEO Consultant Search Engine Optimization Consulting
and my favourite one:
Seo Service, Search Engine Optimisation Seo, Search Engine Optimisation And Seo Services, Positioning Seo Services, Seo Search Engine Marketing, Seo Consultancy
And I mean this was all stuffed into titles! Gosh, even self respecting blackhats don’t do it any more…
Other, lesser known SEOs at least try to make it look legitimate – like this one:
Keyword Research | Search Engine Optimization SEO Services – Link building and content management for SEO in Google, Yahoo and MSN
What can be the reson for this sort of screwup? Either incompetence (which in this case is out of question for me as I know who these people are and how respected they are in the SEO community – but wouldn’t be so much out of question for a potential customer) – or pure negligence, be it due to lack of time to take care of their own sites, or laziness, or maybe short-sightedness? OK a potential client who doesn’t know the first thing about SEO won’t really know the difference – but how about those who have read/heard something? Besides, don’t forget the SEs (ok you know I mean Google don’t you) have becoem stricter on keyword stuffing – so tactics like these, while being a more or less effective short term solution for targeting your keywords, might not let you rank #1 for your own name in the long term.
P.S. Another pet peeve of mine with titles is when you cannot identify a site from a page title. Hence, good page title:
SEOmoz  | Services >> Site Analysis Reports
– perfect from the point of view of both the company identification and the site structure. On the other hand,
SEO Services – Optimization, link building and Consulting
is just keyword stuffing lite – pretty descriptive but that’s all there is to it. If I were to look for your site in my browser history, how would I identify it and pick it out of a list of other sites with similar keyword stuffed titles?
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