It's also because there are so many factors at play that people can get obsessed about one or other tactic hoping it will be the "secret ingredient". SEO can get very complex at the technical end, but people forget to take into account the competitive environment they are in. Sometimes obsessing over duplicate content issues and "page sculpting" simply isn't worth the benefit you get out of it.
And, some people are just regurgitating what they have read or heard – not what they have found out through experience.
Lots of people will say SEO is a waste of time, money and effort. It's true that your could be throwing money away on 'snake oil salesmen' who use dodgy, short-term practices.
It is most likely to be wasted if you don't have your keyword strategy in place. But healthy organic rankings are (once you get them) more effective and sustainable than paid promotional methods.
No - they can't. Not unless they are talking about paid listings such as Adwords. Results vary depending on the competitiveness (which they can only guess at before starting), your budget, how good your products and services are, the size of your market and many other factors some of which are outside any one companies control.
And if your website is new, it will typically take 3-6 months of consistent, focused effort. And it is hard work.
Unlikely – especially following from Google's updates in the first few months of 2012. These specifically targeted practices that built links between sites in a 'group' of sites linking to each other. Links from directories containing thousands of links to other, unrelated businesses not even in the same country are also essentially worthless.
While a site may rank highly purely on the strength of it's back links, it's quite hard to do this if you aren't offering something on your website worth linking back to.
On site SEO is still an important foundation. And we see site's ranking well with almost no back-links, because their on-site SEO is good and their competitors aren't.
Every site works in it's own competitive niche.
It has it's own marketing and content strategy that will affect SEO strategy. The secret is that people looking for a silver bullet can still be fooled into paying thousands of dollars instead of doing the work that everyone knows is necessary.
Google can only determine bounce rate if a website has Google analytics loaded on it – and there are thousands of sites that use other reporting packages. You don't see those sites being penalised do you?.
Also, a single blog article that has amazing insight and thousands of links back to it may well have a 100% bounce rate. But that page will still rank highly.
Find out more about bounce rates and to reduce them
If your site has been built without SEO in mind, it's too late. The structure may not be oriented around search terms, and the technical elements disregarded.
A lot of confused business owners will say their site was optimised by their web developer. And maybe it was, but SEO takes consistent ongoing effort, particularly to build links and target long tail keywords with targeted pages. SEO is as much (if not more) about building roads to your business than about building the destination in the first place.
This one has been around a long time. You don't need to pay to submit your site to any of the search engines. If your site has been built properly they will find it. You can submit a site map to Google which can speed the process up and help make sure it is being indexed properly.
Nope. This one was so well and truly abused that the search engines have been ignoring the keyword tag for a long time.
All it does it make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting.
But you need to know these techniques because to be honest there is a lot of rubbish content published by people who know how to get their site high up in the search results.
One of our favourite sites, The Social Media Guide, posted their list of 10 Simple Google Search Tricks. We thought there were a couple missing, so have added ours here.
First I'll summarise Social Media Guides list. Check out the entire post if you want to read them in more detail:
Type in "100 pounds in NZ dollars" and you will get a list of currency converters. Since more than one country uses the same currency name (eg dollars) you might need to specify the country as well. Thanks to Simon Mackie of Gigaom for this one.
When you get your initial set of results there is a list of search tools on the left hand side with a drop down called 'More search Tools' that has some handy extras.
One of the tools we use most often is to filter by time - usually Past Year.
This means you don't get results from three or four years ago that are no longer relevant or are out of date
If you only want to find images or news, you can select your desired option. Particularly useful is the Places option.
If you are looking for something with a presence in the real world like a retail business, restaurant or the like then filter by Places and you'll get those businesses that have a Places listing with a place holder on a map to show you where it is.
The small magnifying glass next to the title will show you a preview of a site.
This is handy when there are a lot of results that look similar but you don't want to go through to each site.
You get a small snapshot of the site from which you can see if it has the kind of information or quality you're after.
If you add a * (known as a wild card) into your search term Google treats it as 'any unknown term'. For example, you may want recipes that have apples mixed with some other ingredient, but you don't know what.
Put apple and * recipes into Google search and you'll get results for apple and cranberry, apple and carrot, apple and rhubarb etc etc.
Got any more you'd like to share? - Let us know!
Preferably at the top, if not in the top five.
Problem is - a lot of other people know these techniques too. Some will have more resource to throw at it than you could hope to.
So how do you beat the leaders?
We are talking about organic search, not paid Ad Words listings (the sponsored links at the top and right hand side of search results pages). You can be at the top of these if you are prepared to pay for it.
Organic search are the results in the 'main' list (under sponsored links). You don't pay Google or Bing for these.
The advice you'll find all over the net is generally good.
So, with that in mind....
This series is not intended to go into these accepted techniques in depth as lots of people do it in other places, but let's recap:
Google loves content that is new and fresh. Update your site as often as you can that is practical for your business. That's why a lot of people recommend blogs - it's something that can be legitimately updated every day easily (if you have the time!).
Volume matters. The more good, relevant content you have the more keyword density you can achieve without stuffing, but (probably more importantly) the more people will link to it from their own site or blog (see point 6). It also helps with conversion rates and user satisfaction although that doesn't relate to search optimisation specifically. And by content, we mean text. Not flash (intro's or otherwise). Not video - although this is useful in another way to do with driving visitors. And no frames.
Do the right thing with your tags- specifically your title tags and description tags. Make sure they include keywords and benefit statements. Description tags don't count for SEO, but they do encourage people to click on your search result.
Include keywords everywhere else - particularly headers, image alts, anchor text, file names etc. This is on the basis that those keywords are ones your audience uses. Do your research first!
Use search friendly page names. Ones that make sense to the user and the search engines. Ones that have keywords in them in a way that makes sense!
Very important, but success can take a while and it is an on-going activity. But vital and a topic of many articles and blog posts!
Have custom error pages, directory structures with keywords, ensure your navigation is textual (not graphical), have flat file structures and site maps. Have 'clean' code. Use permanent (301) vs temp (302) redirects. Have internal links.