It is a well known fact that the search engine optimisation industry has a somewhat poor reputation – sometimes this is justified, but mostly it is not. I along with many other SEO professionals offer a service which is based on doing a lot of research and reading to ensure we have as many facts about improving website positions as possible.
It can get a little irksome therefore when someone takes on an SEO job without knowing what they should be doing. Yes, this will harm the SEO industry.
Many people who dabble in websites think they know what is needed to boost a website to the dizzy heights of position 1 in Google…then fail because they just do not have the required knowledge. Even worse, they can harm their website profile.
Many people will know that backlinks are an important factor for ranking in Google so they may well go out and buy links without understanding the profile of the website they have just got a link from.
Many people will have heard of keyword density and will overuse the keywords they want to rank for.
Many people will still cloak content because they don’t understand the implications of what they are doing.
Ten years ago it was easy. Choose your keywords and use them in your title and meta tags. Job done. There were far less websites on the internet as well.
Over the last few years, the number of websites being created has got to epic proportions – just look at the number of results when you perform a search! Google have had to refine the way they rank websites to try to ensure they can pick the most relevent out of the 8 million results that have beem returned. That means that there are many factors at play for ranking a website, and things are constantly evolving.
Someone who performs SEO day in and day out will obviously have a much better understanding of what works for ranking well and what doesn’t, than Joe Bloggs who does his SEO when he has a spare five minutes.
If you are serious about getting good rankings for the right keywords for your website and you don’t have the time to learn in more than just basic SEO, you really should consider an SEO professional or agency to help you. Don’t expect them to tell you their secrets because there is no manual – every website is different.
Remember, just because you bought a book on SEO last week, it was written at least a year ago – one year is a long time in SEO!
To really understand SEO takes a lot time and patience – anyone can do it if they are willing to put in the time.
Most people I talk to think that getting to the fabled number 1 position in Google leads to untold wealth!
Unfortunately, that isn’t the case!
The web is a vastly different place to the one that existed 10 years ago, when all the big online brands made their name – there was very little competition.
Of course, if you get your site to number 1 in Google, then you have the chance to dramatically increase your sales, but it will not happen if your site is not to your customer’s tastes.
Creating a website that converts visitors to customers needs to be designed and developed with your customers in mind, while also being technically correct to please those pesky search engine spiders.
If you are serious about your website, the days of throwing up a site that your friend’s son has built for £20 are gone. There is more to a website than any one aspect – a good website that works will encompass good design, good development and a good user experience which will automatically help with your SEO process.
Within the last week an argument has raged about the existence of search engine optimisers and whether they are scammers or a legitimate profession.
The argument started out as a blogger decided to make a rather wild statement accusing anyone calling themselves a search engine optimisation specialist, a scammer.
The post was really quite immature in the way it was written, but the gist of it was that if website developers did their jobs properly, then search engine optimisers wouldn’t be needed. This is actually true. If every website was built following the basic principles of web design then the search engine optimisation industry wouldn’t need to exist. But not every website has been built by a professional web developer – some small business owners build their own site, and unfortunately, not all developers understand how to make a website SEO friendly.
The very fact that there are websites out there in the big wide world web that have basic errors that the website owners don’t know about means that there is a very real need for search engine optimisers – legitimate ones anyway!
If you’ve only just started thinking about setting up your website, you may have heard the term ‘seo’ bandied about.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is what can help catapult your to the top of Google if done correctly.
The SEO industry seems to have got itself a bad name because the world and his wife thinks they know what SEO entails, and the problem is that there is no one way to get to the top of Google.
Many companies come unstuck because they don’t understand what SEO entails and so they don’t want to pay a lot for it. But consider this. You may have the best looking, best working website in the whole world, but unless it gets visitors, it is a waste of money.
It is also important to remember what SEO is supposed to achieve. Asking your SEO to get you to position 1, 2 or 3 on Google is not the most important thing – targeted traffic is. The aim to generate sales or leads from your website and not massage your ego over your Google positions.
In addition, rankings tend to bounce around a bit – Google has thousands of servers and you won’t always get the same results as those servers get updated at different times.
The upshot is that you should consider how important your website will be to generate leads or sales for you, and so you should give your website a budget to match that importance.
It is also important to find an SEO you trust. I always try to make sure my clients understand why I am doing what I am doing, but it is important to remember that SEO can be a timeconsuming practice, so don’t expect miracles if you are not prepared to pay for ethical search engine optimisation.