SEO Blog

It’s easy to start off fired up and eager to make your site succeed. First you’re looking for a visitor, then a number one ranking on Google and finally a conversion. However, as time goes by and results don’t immediately improve, frustration can set in.

What have you done wrong? Why aren’t you getting thousands of visitors a month? Why are you still not top of Google?

Big aspirations can occasionally lead to major disappointments. However, the important thing is to not be disheartened. SEO isn’t an instant process. You can’t just create a fully optimised site overnight and have it sitting in the top spot on all search engines forevermore. Sadly that just isn’t a reality, certainly not for the vast majority anyway.
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SEO is a great way to promote your brand, website and company. By working your way up through the rankings for keywords relating to your business, you can make sure that you are seen before your competitors.

But if you are a long way behind, what can you do to close that gap? Well, you might want to see where your rivals are gaining an advantage by doing a little competitor analysis. Whilst you don’t want to copy them verbatim, that won’t work, sometimes looking into their site strength and the linking profile it has, you can get some good hints where to go next.

There are some things in particular that will give them a significant advantage, which, unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about. The foremost of these is domain age. If your competitor bought their domain back in 1999 and you only secured yours last year, they will automatically have greater authority with the search engines.
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There have been murmurings for some time that Google are planning to enter the world of SEO. These murmurings have recently turned into shouts, with many seeing the move as imminent.

So what threat does this pose to your rankings and to SEO professionals like myself? Well, initially not a great deal. For a start the service is likely to cost thousands of dollars each month (initial claims suggest $25,000), so it will be well out of reach for most websites.

This is a service set up for the super rich. It is supposed to help the big brands achieve the rankings they ‘deserve’ and keep them out of the clutches of companies who leach off of them. For Google, the major advantage is that they can have a better control over their rankings and ensure that they aren’t getting gamed.
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It can make all the difference. Sometimes you will have a page that is fundamentally fine, it just needs some tweaks to bring it right up to pace. On other occasions it is so badly flawed that you’re better off just ripping it up and starting again.

Unfortunately there is no exacting standard for each. Knowing when to fine tune your website’s page and when to start afresh is a personal call, one that needs to be made correctly too.

So let’s start with the most obvious issue, content. If your page has old, tired content that just isn’t doing anything for your rankings or your visitors, rip it down. Don’t look twice at it, get a fresh sheet, know what you want to say and make sure you do so.
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In short, because Google says so. But to say it doesn’t matter at all is a bit of an overstatement. Essentially, PageRank was always a guide of how strong a website’s linking structure was. Over the years though, as the Google algorithm developed, this guide slowly lost importance; unfortunately people still continued to give it their full attention.

PageRank has been a metric by which SEO professionals and webmasters measure the strength of a site. The higher on the 0-10 scale a site would appear, the more successful their efforts had been. But as new ranking factors were introduced, it slowly lost prominence.
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Glengarry Glen Ross has plenty to teach the world about motivational management, salesmanship and coarse language; but what can website owners get from it? The one key mantra that runs through any marketer or salesperson: ABC – always be closing.

Yes you want to get the best possible rankings, if only for your ego and you want to be getting traffic through the door; but what is the value of all those visitors if none are converting? A big fat zero.

As in Glengarry Glen Ross, there are those who succeed and those who don’t. Albeit some are given a hefty advantage, getting quality leads – in Internet marketing, this comes in the form of links -whilst others have to work with what they’ve got and build from the bottom up.
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Whether you’ve spent weeks or years developing your website, it is a valuable part of your identity and your business. Therefore you want to be sure that you are in safe hands, particularly when it comes to outsourcing your SEO.

There are so many horror stories and online scaremongers to sow seeds of doubt in your mind. This isn’t an entirely bad thing. Vigilance is a useful ally to have. SEO does have its fair share of sharks, so you have to be sure that you aren’t going to be their next victim.

So what should you be asking to avoid falling prey to these circling predators?
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I won’t need to tell you how important content is to search engine rankings. As one of the two major factors, alongside links, content gives your site focus and it also provides vital contextualisation.

Whilst having content on every page of a site is ideal, it can become tired and worn over time. This is noticed not only by frequent visitors but by the search engines too. If there is nothing new on a site to index, the search engine spiders won’t visit. If you don’t get the search engine spiders crawling your pages, then what hope for improved rankings?

Of course you don’t want to be chopping and changing your content constantly. This would be impractical and wouldn’t necessarily have the desired result. But the occasional spruce up can always pay dividends.
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There’s sometimes an assumption that Black Hat SEO is dead and buried. The techniques have been ousted by the search engines and rendered useless. However, that doesn’t mean that people don’t keep trying.

Unscrupulous types will use Black Hat SEO to get quick gains. For example, if you have signed up to a dodgy SEO service that promises top Google rankings within a month, they might well deliver. But they will do so by damaging your site.

One technique is to build a link farm inter-connecting hundreds of unsuspecting sites. This will give you hundreds of new links, some of which might be reasonably strong, helping you leap up the rankings. Unfortunately this is against Google’s rules.
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Occasionally we all get stuck in a rut. In the world of SEO that might mean a need to continually hunt new links or produce fresh off-site content. While that is well and good, you need to make sure that all aspects of your site’s optimisation are being covered.

There’s always a danger of spreading yourself too thinly. When you’ve got limited resources and plenty to do, you can’t always prioritise to the best of your abilities. There are occasions where one job will come to dominate and the rest are swept to one side. This is when you start to lose focus.

So first things first, what are you objectives? If you are on a tight schedule, you don’t want to waste any time doing work that will have little or no effect. From an SEO point of view, content and link building are the two most important areas to focus on. However, they aren’t the only ones.
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