Forbes has an article today about small business SEO. It starts off well enough with a quote from Rand:
“For many businesses, a Web site is the first way that your clientele will look at you–even if it’s just to find your address and phone number,” says Rand Fishkin, founder of Seattle-based search engine optimization consulting firm SEOmoz, which aims to increase the odds that search engines will happen upon a given site. “The quality of your site is often a measure of the quality of your business.”
It’s only at the end where it goes seriously off track with this:
The key to SEO: selecting 50 to 100 key words most relevant to your products, services and target audience. The more those words appear on your Web pages (within reason), the higher up the stack your site will tend to appear.
And finally:
Finally, for those launching a new site, be sure to prime the pump first before going live. That way you can take steps to move up in the search ranks even while making final tweaks behind the curtain.
Simply ask your site host to attach meta tags–hidden programming code easily read by search engines–that include your top 20 keywords in order of importance to your business. The tags will drive traffic to your site when people search those keywords. Create a greeting that says something like “This site is under construction, but we will be up and running shortly.”
By the time you officially launch your beautiful, bug-free site, it will already have marched up the search stack.
Articles like this cause thousands of companies to go bankrupt every year. These companies sit back happy in the knowledge they have keywords and they have meta tags so the traffic will come rolling in any day now just like that helpful article in Forbes said it would.
I’m going to email Melanie Lindner from Forbes (pictured left) and arrange to discuss (perhaps over dinner) first of all the fact that meta keywords tags are useless and then the big thing she missed – links. No site in the world can rank without links, it’s what the entire SEO industry is based on.
This was a guest post by Ritchie a business continuity expert
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ll come along to chaperone
It does go to show the dangers of journalists basing their research on Google queries though.
Clearly Melanie needs a diverse range of opinions from different SEOs to get a broader picture of today’s search industry. As such I’ll be happy to provide my own take on the situation over a cocktail or two.
I’ll believe anything she tells me!
Every time I read something like this so blatantly wrong in a major publication like Forbes, it makes me wonder how much other stuff they’re getting wrong, too, that I would have no idea is wrong. Makes me question every single thing they write.
My thoughts exactly Shane. The reputation that Forbes have mean a lot of people will accept this kind of advice without question. Very dodgy journalism.
Melanie Lindner looks Beautiful but doesn’t sound the same on SEO! And Patrick, not all reporters know the technical side of SEO or an expert themself. I bet she must have few of her colleagues (who have no clue about SEO /who think SEO is all about stuffing keywords!!) if they knew somthing about SEO just to add up to the content and also shows poor research over the term!
Is she aware of Google & Wikipedia.. she could have done few search to spice up the article! We can’t blame her.. she got the whole idea of SEO wrong..and let’s excuse her!
And yea.. she looks gorgeous ..
Searching for her name on Google brings up FaceBook & LinkedIn profile… if someone is interested in 
!! Oops
Find me on Twitter
Vinay she took the time to interview Rand about SEO so why not spend an extra few minutes asking him to read it through before publishing? I’m sure Rand wouldn’t want his name attaching to any misleading information.
More comments from Patrick AltoftWell… We have numerous “SEO Experts” in Denmark preaching the same B.S. over and over again – and too many companies buy their crap. Also Danish newspapers tend to print the same crap. I really don’t know what to do about it other than keep blogging, educating and so on.
And… I’ll be happy to invite Melanie Lindner to a silent island resort where I can educate her during a couple of weeks
I actually spent a good part of the interview explaining CSS vs. HTML and talking about how websites function – we never got into any depth of detail on any topic, and she never even asked me any SEO questions. I’ve talked to a lot of reporters for a lot of stories, I think is just a case where the intent was to present a very simple, beginner level article, but I really wish journalists would start the practice of sending stories through editors who could critique the accuracy and quality of the facts being presented. It is disappointing to see the misinformation about keywords so blatantly wrong.
Incredible! She is beautiful but please! please! remember that is better to keep your mouth shut rather than trying to explain something that you don’t have a clue about!
Good find. Gives me hope that the beginner oriented online marketing site I’m working might be useful to a few people.
She’s a naughty girl, Patrick, for writing a misguided piece like that. I would go over there and spank her for that.
She looks good, so I’m going to let here get away with this one!
Thanks Rand.. for the update! @Patrick.. I guess Rand gave us a good overview of what went in the interview..!
.. Did you try contacting her.. any success? Let us know. May be she should subscribe to BlogStorm to know SEO better 
?
Not Sure about you Guys, as for Me, I have just discovered my new SEO Guru.
Patrick you are sacked
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