Google’s T-Mobile Ad On Why To Do SEO

Jun 14, 2007 at 11:24am ET by Danny Sullivan

My mobile phone company in the UK is T-Mobile, and I had to laugh when I was flipping through the latest in-house magazine I got from them. Apparently, as the headline of an advertorial tells me, "Search Engine Optimisation vital to enable business to compete online." And to learn more, I’m told to check out the Google UK business area that features prominently (though not solely) AdWords.

Really, I was most intrigued by the text of the ad. Here are some pullouts:

Why not ask your web designers or content management team if your site is getting the best from Search Engine Optimisation.

Maybe because someone who does SEO might understand SEO better?

You can improve your ratings in web searches by making sure that your site and its contents are search-friendly. For example, keywords relating to your business should appear regularly in the content, titles and in your ‘meta’ data — the tags and labels inserted into the HTML code.

OK, it doesn’t explicitly says to use the meta keywords tag — which Google doesn’t use — but it gets kind of close :)

Overall, it’s not a bad ad. Just kind of funny to see Google pushing SEO, rather that AdWords.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

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6 COMMENTS ON Google’s T-Mobile Ad On Why To Do SEO

mollermarketing, June 14th, 2007 at 11:45 am ET:

About a month and a half ago I read a post at an SEO Blog that said Google was leaning towards banning paid links. Is that still true? And if it is, it’s kind of interesting that they are promoting you to “buy” Adwords listings with them. Isn’t that a bit contradictory? What’s Google’s official stand?

Philipp Lenssen, June 14th, 2007 at 12:33 pm ET:

“keywords relating to your business should appear regularly in the content”

What a brilliant idea, to have a company homepage where one talks about the company business! I would also suggest hyperlinks pointing to your world wide web product pages to make it really stand out!

rustybrick, June 14th, 2007 at 1:11 pm ET:

Ha, thanks for sharing…

Maybe readers can hire Avenue A/Razorfish to help with their SEO work?

Gabe, June 15th, 2007 at 1:22 pm ET:

Did they spell optimization wrong or is that a UK thing?

Danny Sullivan, June 17th, 2007 at 1:50 pm ET:

That’s how optimization is spelled in the UK.

Teddie, June 17th, 2007 at 6:51 pm ET:

Google says SEO is vital…that’ll keep me cheerful all week. Thanks Danny.

It’s interesting that this appeared in a mobile phone magazine, with a clear visual reference to mobile search, perhaps Google was hinting that they want more optimised mobile content because our studies which featured in Revolution magazine in February have shown that mobile friendly search content is generally non-existent (much less than 5% of normal web content), most brands don’t feature, or the quality of the results and websites is attrocious?

Even with the transcoder which does some good work, more appropriate optimised mobile content would help them out a lot.

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