Or "You get what you pay for".
Yet hundreds of business owners are being duped by offers of cheap Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
I hesitate to use the word 'lazy' but it has to be because they don't want to, or don't know how to, ask some simple questions and do some digging before handing over the keys to their business reputation.
Please, run a mile if you're offered:
At best it will relieve you of some hard earned revenue. At worst it could mean completely rebuilding your website, your traffic numbers and your reputation from scratch. Sounds like I'm getting a bit hysterical, but I have heard of businesses that end up in exactly this pickle.
I can sympathise with a business that wants to save money, but why take the cheap option and hand over responsibility for something so vital to someone who could do so much damage, without being very sure they could be trusted? Do you hire full time employees the same way? Sorry to sound so grumpy, but it's just not good business.
Professional SEO's are NOT cheap. If you can't stump up the budget, you'd be better off with a modest PPC campaign like Adwords – at least you will get results. Or learn how to do it yourself (Here's a DIY Checklist)
What you get with cheap or shoddy SEO is:
No matter what they tell you. If you want to be on the front page of Google you have to EARN it. And the word 'earn' doesn't exist in the same sentence as 'shortcut'.
Good SEO professionals should talk to you about :
They should also properly manage your expectations and warn you it will take from three to six months to START seeing results.
Anyone willing to share any horror stories or hard earned lessons? Or even challenge the premise?!
]]>What is needed to leverage social media activity for SEO benefit?
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!
In a nutshell, it means you only pay a company if you get the result which is typically, a number 1 (or close to it) ranking in Google.
And a lot of SEO companies will give you a guarantee to entice thousands of dollars out of your pocket.
Sounds fair - if they can't produce the goods, why should you pay for it?
In short, it is because there are a lot of factors involved in good (meaning high) organic search results. And because not all of those factors are within a persons control, a guarantee is likely to lead to some bad behaviour on the part of the SEO provider. It will usually involve what is known as Black Hat SEO. You might get immediate results but they won't last and what's worse you might get banned from being listed in the search engines for some time.
The only way you should part with your hard earned cash for performance-based SEO is if you are going to give the service provider COMPLETE control over the strategy and implementation - including the design of your website and its contents. And you've got to be willing to pay them if your website needs a complete redesign as part of that strategy.
The provider would have to be confident that your expectations and commitment are going to allow them to do the job properly. And you'll pay a premium for the privilege.
There is no silver bullet any more.
SEO is complicated, and to guarantee good results takes time, effort and expertise. Anyone that tells you otherwise has never tried to optimise a website in any crowded, highly competitive, web savvy industry.
The search engines don't share their formulas with anyone. Google has reportedly some 200 factors that determine your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking.
These include:
The more competition there is for your keywords, the harder it will be and the longer it will take to get to Google's front page - and stay there.
Many companies offering these service make it sound so good:
But it would be almost impossible for a SEO provider to guarantee a top listing in Google, Bing or Yahoo without either a conversation with you about your business, budget and expectations - unless they are resorting to Black Hat SEO techniques.
If you are approached by any SEO provider that guarantees you a result - run to the hills.
]]>People got tired of searching for Pizza Delivery and getting results from the other side of the world. Imagine ringing Tokyo from Auckland and asking 'Do you deliver?'
So, more and more people started to enter location information to refine the search results. And Google includes location signals when it works out what to show people.
Location is particularly relevant if your business is geographically dependant, eg lawnmowing, dentists, childcare centres, restaurants etc. If you don't narrow your focus there is going to be a lot of other similar business across the globe you'll be competing with.
Up until recently, a post about local SEO wouldn't be complete without a recommendation to add a Google Places page because it was quick and easy. But then Google went and merged Google Places into Google+ Local. And it got a lot more complicated. Verification issues, duplicate accounts are some of the issues.
If you want to go ahead and do this, here is a step by step guide and a FAQ posted on the forum
Footnote:
There is a lot of buzz lately around something called 'location wars'. This sometimes refers to competition between Foursquare and Gowalla which are mobile social applications, or it can mean the general rush to grab a piece of the location based services action. These use the GPS capabilities of smart phones to help you shop or socialise (for example).
In NZ these don't seem to be as popular - it migh be because they didn't live up to the hype, the number of users didn't reach a critical mass, or our mobile data prices are still too prohibitive.
]]>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.
How do you take advantage of the 'long tail' to get more traffic?
And no, wagging like a dog doesn't come into it.
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