As much as I love Revenue magazine, I just had to bring them up after reading one of their articles about podcasts. The magazine is great, and this is probably going to be a trend either way, but please don’t advocate catering to the search engines instead of visitors!

Here’s what is going on: podcasts. They’re getting more popular, and eventually search engines will be able to index them based on audio content. (Pretty cool, huh?) But how will the search engines rank the podcasts?

Supposedly by keywords in the content, just like regular pages. Which will lead to keyword stuffing, so that when search engines can analyze the audio, they find the right keywords in the proper density.

You know those crappy articles that read like garbage due to being written solely for search engine rankings? Well, it looks as though podcasts may start to sound like garbage!

Well, they will if people take the advice of Mike Moran who wrote the column in Revenue. (See pages 28 and 34 of the July/August 2006 issue.)

He says something along the lines of choose the right vocabulary for the podcast to match visitors’ search terms. While vague, it sounds like a subtle reference to SEO techniques if you ask me! Personally I would prefer podcasts that use whatevery vocabulary fits in naturally.

C’mon Revenue, don’t turn into a magazine for search engine spammers!

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I’m sure you’ve seen this headline by now if you subscribe to any newsletters related to internet marketing. The email goes on to endorse the VEO Report, about creating sites for visitors instead of normal SEO. Hence the name, Visitor Enhanced Optimization.

This ebook is supposedly endorsed by Google, in that Matt Cutts (a G employee) was interviewed for the creation of this book. Matt also gave permission for some snippets of their conversation to be revealed in the book. So great, it’s endorsed by Google. Google also provides free guides about things such as working with Adsense. Did just reading that guide skyrocket your Adsense income?

Think about this, too. Every time an ebook comes out exposing some secret method of increasing your income, everyone and their mother start to do it. And Google notices. And promptly changes their algorithms to decrease any effect of the technique. Take article writing and submission, for instance. Once that became popular, Google simply devalued links from article websites and increased penalties for duplicate content.

What scares me is that building websites for the visitor is how I build my main sites. That’s how I started out, for two reasons: 1, I was a website visitor more than a marketer, and 2, I didn’t even know what SEO was. So if people start overusing these methods, could we see a change for Google to make these methods less useful? Is it possible that the big G would screw with internet marketers at the expense of their visitors? Maybe, maybe not. You never really know these days.

And now that I’m thinking about these algorithm changes, who says that Google isn’t already changing their algorithms to make this VEO less effective? Maybe that’s the only reason that Matt Cutts allowed some of his stuff to be published - he knew that Google planned to change the stuff anyway! Man, wouldn’t that be a low blow?!

Notice I didn’t say I read the book, so maybe it is awesome. I don’t know. Colin McDougall did make a nice site supposedly using these VEO methods, and amazingly it has some very nice rankings. So if everything is true, damn right it’s worth $79 to know how to create websites that get great rankings fast, all without worrying about SEO!

But there are two questions: 1, is it all good info without hype? and 2, will you actually put any of the info into practice?

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