Search Engine Visibility at Godaddy

 
Today I worked with someone who
is a GoDaddy customer. He is
signed up for one of their add-on
products. As I recall, the name
of the product is Search Engine
Visibility.

Unlike many other tools like it,
this one is fairly accurate. It
gives accurate advice as to what
you need to do to optimize your
website for the search engines.

Of course, this only works if your
site is hosted at GoDaddy. I have
no idea whether or not this add-on
product is also available to other
hosting companies. Maybe it is
exclusive to GoDaddy and maybe not.

Here's a link to Godaddy's help page
for getting started with Search
Engine Visibility:

Getting Started with
Search Engine Visibility

Some of the best recommendations
that this tool makes include:

• Pay attention to keywords
• Pay attention to keyword
  density.
• Make sure one keyword stands
  head and shoulders above all the
  others
• Pay attention to title tags
• Pay attention to H1 tags

Admittedly, the tool does not
necessarily tell you to do all
of the above directly. Rather,
this is a show, not tell, tool.
It shows you what needs to be
done rather than telling you what
needs to be done.

In short, this tool complains
about your web pages until you
fix them. It uses the top-ten
approach. It has a top-ten list
of complaints about your site
expressed in terms of search engine
visibility.

While no tool like this can ever be
100 percent accurate in its advice,
this one comes pretty close. Keep
in mind it is an automated tool, not
a live person.

One of the things I like about the
tool is that it favors simplicity
over absolute accuracy. It keeps
things simple for the first-timer,
for someone who is new to
search engine optimization.

For those who are new to the term
search engine optimization,
it is often abbreviated as SEO
when written about.

So basically, Search Engine Visibility
is an SEO tool.

One of the errors that people fall
into when trying to optimize their
web pages for search engines is getting
lost in all the details. It's easy
to lose the point of the whole exercise
because you cannot tell which details
are more important than other details.

This tool is helpful in this regard.
By ranking its top-ten tips 1 through
10, it gives you a clear starting place.

I can quibble with the ranking of the
tips but I won't quibble too much.
Perhaps my biggest quibble is the tool
ranks the keyword meta tag and
the description meta tag too
highly. These days, meta tags are far
far less important than the body of
text that makes up your web page.

On the other hand, having a
keywords meta tag and a
description meta tag can
do no harm. You might as well
have them if you want to.

That said, the tool still does a pretty
good job of focusing your attention on
the things you need to do to make your
web pages more search engine relevant.

Relevant. That's really the key word
here. This is a search engine relevance tool.
This tool says nothing to you about authority.

Authority is one big leg that SEO stands
on and relevance is the other big leg.
So basically, this tool only gives you one half
of the equation.

You gain authority when other people link
to your website. You gain relevance when
you write your web pages in such as way as to be
topic specific. Both are important.

Because it is easier to measure relevance
than it is to measure authority, I assume
that this tool favors relevance.

Or maybe it's just the opposite. Because it is
so easy to let Google measure your authority
for you by inquiring of Google to find out what
your PageRank is, maybe this tool only worries
about relevance and let's Google tell you
what your authority level is.

In either case, Search Engine Visibility is a great
tool for beginners.

Ed Abbott