Gerry McGovern, New Thinking
Bringing someone to your website is just the first step. Unless they complete a task you have wasted time and money.
The Google homepage is one of the most poorly search engine optimised websites on the Web. If you search for “search engine” (There are 6 million such searches every month.) then Google appears way down the list on the second page of search results. Alta Vista (the king of search engines in the mid-Nineties) appears third. Google is doing a lot wrong.
SEO experts tell their clients that Google loves content. Well, not on its own homepage it doesn’t. Last time I counted there were 39 words on the entire page, and not a single one of them contained the phrase “search engine”. It gets worse. If you look at the title tag for the Google homepage it says “Google”. That’s all. Just Google. That has got to be one of the worst title tags ever written.
In the world of search engine optimization, Yahoo is a much better homepage. It has hundreds of popular words and over a hundred links. Search engines just love Yahoo. So, why is Google so appalling at search engine optimization? They don’t need it, you might say. They’re Google. Yes, but Google wasn’t always a giant. It was started by two students and from the very beginning it had a really simple homepage.
So why is Google so successful? Because it understands one very important rule … Read the full article, (includes link to Judith Whalen’s article; Just say no to SEO articles) at New Thinking …