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What Accura Cast could never tell you about SEO

To spam me is to get my attention only to have me look for faults. Recently a self professed "" company known as hit my comments with some unsolicited link begging. That sort of thing is asking for a little examination

So I took a look at Accura Cast's public website and decided to see if there was anything I disagreed with. There was - an I think that the clients of Accura Cast may be interested in reading my opinions. I doubt Accura Cast will be so keen on this idea but then that is what happens when you get my attention by abusing my personal blog.

The sad truth is that these unsolicited begging letters (most often by email) are a common fact of life for web site owners. The site recently shifted up to a page rank of five and the spammy efforts of the desperate increased significantly. I fear this is just the start of the begging.

I went to visit where I read that: Most sites get unsolicited link exchange requests from questionable sites that would be considered “bad neighborhoods.” (link). That seems to be a good place to jump into this from.

So let me look at what I feel are fallacies promoted by Accura Cast with regards to SEO.

Do Accura Cast understand websites?

On How To Optimise Accura Cast state that there are some things hat make it hard or impossible to rank: Website that use dynamic scripts such as JavaScript, ASP or PHP and sites that use Flash can pose serious problems for search engine optimisation.

I beg to differ.

It would be a pretty poor webmaster that let a simple think like the site management system stand between the site and the search engine. Yet Accura Cast provide a basic SEO checklist that demands we Provided static HTML links to all pages on your website which is wrong on so many levels. It assumes a particular approach to website management without regard to the five specific outcomes of a successful website and seems more focused on keeping the client reliant on Accura Cast than on giving them what they need to succeed.

The Five Specific Goals of a Business Website are:

  1. Improve the reputation of the organisation
  2. Increase the number of sales or leads
  3. Increase Brand Awareness
  4. Improve business to customer communications
  5. Understand the market (customer to business communications)

If your site fails to achieve even one of these five goals then it has failed as a business endevour. When you present your site as two way communication which is needed to meet most of these goals then the site must interact with the user - it must change in response to specific input from the visitor. Comments, feedback forms, shopping carts and search are just a few examples of this dynamic and that requires that some engine sit behind the HTML and provide the fluidity needed.

I'll admit that Accura Cast have a point when it comes to flash and javascript - inclusion of these elements for their own sake or without an understanding of how they contribute towards the five goals of a business website will result in a site that is effectively useless. To say that PHP, ASP, Pearl, Ruby, SSI, Java or any other server side system for dynamic sites is a bad thing is to fail to understand what a website is and why you should want one.

Accura Cast actually list as a don't: Use dynamic page URLs. What they are saying is that for SEO the HTTP method GET is suddenly bad. They are the only ones that seem to think so. Google use GET extensively.

It is true that Google is hesitant to index where there are more than two variables in the query string (that which follows the question mark) but to say that they do not index it is wrong. For example I have been playing with Google Custom Search and had linked to search results - those search results now show up in search even though they have six or seven variables. The whole thing smacks to me of not understanding the subject at all.

Even if you do not want to show the engines variables there is no need to say that static HTML is the answer. The technology has existed for a long time to write the request as a path based URL. Take for example which is where the Accura Cast spam was found - my blog was written to take itemid=1116 and still does. To make the URL look nice I used one of a number of methods to take a path based URL and convert it when the script is summoned so the script gets variables and the URL is a path.

This works because I know that the different parts of my blog - posts, archives, index and so forth need only object specific reference data to load the correct page. One script serves up over a thousand blog posts plus three years of archives and a host of other meta parts. To speed things up I use a page cache system so I build the page once every so often but aside from that it's generated on request. It is also generated the same way each time until it is asked to react.

Take for example when someone comments - that comment becomes part of the way the page is presented from then on. When I log in and post - again things change but this is good and how things are supposed to happen.

Why I would not hire Accura Cast

Going back to the basic SEO checklist it also lists - Listed comma-separated keywords in the keywords meta tag. Frankly this is a stunning example of why Accura Cast is currently not good enough to work on my SEO.

Talk about out of date!

They also have a list of dos and don'ts here in they assert that you should Place common mis-spellings in your keywords meta tag. So, let me get this clear, they are saying that this will have a significant impact on your SEO. Really? That's news to me.

On a top ten list of things to be sure you did a keyword list anywhere other than the content plan is frankly a list item wasted. Google and yahoo ignore the meta keyword list to all practical effect because it is too easy to abuse. Any SEO firm that gives meta keywords the time of day is, in my opinion not worth the hire fee.

Do as Accura Cast says not as they do

I find hypocrisy a thing that gets me angry very easily. It upsets me especially when I see businesses being ripped off by hypocrites. Now I'm not entirely saying that this is the case with Accura Cast but I am also not expressly saying it is not the case. Accura Cast's SEO checklist it also lists - Placed keyword-rich copy in the top half of your page.

Above the fold on the Accura Cast website you will find (as of writing) the phone number, a huge site logo, a small menu and some other visual eye candy. The content is below that. The Accura Cast SEO checklist explicitly states that this content needs to be in the first half of the page.

More than that anything that matters in terms of what you are trying to do should be above the fold and that includes the headline. Accura Cast have a MyBlogLog presence (with apparently no friends) but what happens when you click to the blog? You are hit with the full corporate message and have to start scrolling down the page to even find the headline.

now look at niche marketing expert Andy Beard's website. Andy would be the first to tell you that he is no programmer nor a web designer and a pro designer could maybe tuck a few corners in more neatly for him. Yet none of that matters because when I click his feed headline the first thing I see is his logo followed by the headline.

Also above the fold are Andy's most important adverts, the start of his naviagtion, feed subscription graphics and some social widgets. Andy does not hold back - those feed graphics are huge but they are not so huge that I can not see where to start reading as soon as the page start to render.

Do Accura Cast understand HTML and images?

Going back tot he SEO checklist again I see that they list two very odd things. Added descriptive ALT text to all images and Specified image height and width for all images. Now let me talk about these HTML properties for a moment.

The truth about the alt tag

The alt tag is not a place for you to stuff keywords and no is it the palce where the description or caption goes. Let me say that again the alt tag is not the caption for the picture. That little "tool tip" is not produced by the alt tag.

The "tool tip" is produced by the title tag which is where your description should go. Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser makes empty title attributes equal to the alt text which is why you see the "tool tip" in IE. The alt tag has a specific purpose and it is so often abused that it is a wonder it is any use at all.

The alt tag provides test to be shown in the event that the image does not load. The alt text tells the person what they would have seen a picture of it they had been able to see the picture.This is because an image is content.

If the image is not content but decoration then it does not need to be given an alt text because it does not need to be there at all. Images for decoration should be added via CSS (if at all). All other images are content and need a ttle tag (for whent he image is there) and an alt tag so that people know what the image was of.

This is not for some hard core HTML-nazi reason but because under UK law business websites have to be accessable tot he disabled. Alt tags are part of that. It has nothing to do with SEO.

It is the same reason why Andy Beard does not worry about having a H1 for his blog title. He has no trouble ranking for the phrase "Andy Beard" and so does not need to optomise further for it. I know this because as author of the page What Andy Beard accidently taught me about CSS and SEO and a person that talks with Andy from time to time I have had the opportunity to read Andy's review of the page (on

What about the image sizes?

My question about exactly. What about them?

I have never in all this time ever read or listened or watch a single SEO ever even hint that things like image size attributes have any impact on search engine results. Here are a ffew good reasons.

  1. Image height and width are formatting not content.
  2. If I wrote a search engine I'd test the image sizes myself. As far as I know search engines do this alredy.
  3. How are two numbers indicative of the content relivance of my page?

My sarcasm aside this has to do with good design that does not resize suddenly as it renders and nothing to do with SEO. But let us take them seriousely for a moment and assume that and MSN have been adding the use of image atributes as some sort of tie breaker score bonus for the last six years. So what?

Even if this was the case it changes nothing. The SEO benefit would be so small that all I would need to beat you would be an extra link or a few more paragraphs of focuses content. Any SEO that has to worry about possible tie breaker scores has not reaslised that when comeptition is that tight only someone with the vision to lead the company and it's site to new levels, new niches and new ways of attracting traffic and links is going to take things forward.

In a situation where minor fluxuations win or loose the day yo are an entie order of manitude below the place you need to be. In our case the SEO would need to stop thinking "one more link than those guys" and start thinking "how can I be better then all others?"

If this is with links this is the question not of where can I get an extra link but how can I find the tipping point and double my links every three months?

Do Accura Cast beg for links?

This is a big question. Along with begging for links, offering reviews and so forth (in what ammounts to a complex link exchange) spamming and related activities are strongly connectied to bad SEO and bad nieghbourhoods (linking to such can hurt your search results ranking).

The spam I mentioned before claimed to be from Accura Cast and seemed to be for a big project. So do they beg for the links they get?

It seems so. If not they then someone that works for them. As they seem inclined to take the long weekend off I might not get an answer from them until tuesday.

Concluson - What would I advise?

First I would point you to SEO Book and suggest that before you hire another company that you read it all through and sumamrise it's points to the board and the IT guys in a report. Then and only then would I suggest you are ready to start doing it for yourself or hire some one to do it for you.

Being that my fieldis IT I would suggest that my compnay would be able to offer some SEO services but as part of a unified whole which includes your public facing content, your copywriters, your designer and your market research team. SEO does not happen in a vacume - it is part of your advertising and promotion and as such should be treated with a lot mroe seriouseness then it often is.

Even so, ranking first in Google for a billion different keywords is no success at all if your website does not meet these pre-SEO requriements.

  1. Does the site work right now?
  2. Does your site meet two or more of the goals for a business website?
  3. Have you tested the sites usability to see if an untrained user can navigate the site and make a purchase?
  4. If I use a browser you were not expecting does the site break?
  5. Can you tell me why would I want to stay on your site once I am there?

In short is the site ready for the public and ready for humans to get what you are giving? If the answer is no then all the SEO in he world is not going to help you. Honestly, I'm not being funny - I've had junk pages rank well for good words and what good did it do me? None - I got the traffic and then I'd loose it again.

What of Accura Cast? They do nothing for me - it's all there in potential but in my opinion they need my comany to put them back on the right track. As I can not realy recomend myself ithout being highly biased I'd recomend whoever ranks first for SEO search terms now and still ranks for them in two months time. The chances are that they know their stuff.

I feel that my company can do the job but that is only because I know I can do the job and I'm the Managing Director. SEO so often stands for Snake Extract Oils - or it might as well do for all the truth that some SEOs offer. Accura Cast did get recognised by Google for a highly successful use of AdWords and perhaps they should stick to their prime skills because frankly they have made some massive beginners mistakes and it could cost them.

I don't mean it could cost them having people like me score points off them by writing long posts showing where they have been weakest. I mean it could cost them and their clients lost traffic and lost business due to being blocked from the search engines as spammers and manipulators of the results. Ultimately the only way to rank for a specific phrase is to produce content that is most relevant to that phrase - sooner or later everything else evens out and only relevancy remains.

Have you even hired someone to o SEO only to discover they don't know as much as they claim or have you been the subject of begging letters and link offers? Perhaps you have a similar story to share or can correct me on a point or make it better. This is your time to shine so think about adding a few words of your own opinion int he comment section.


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