SEO Blog

There are a surprising number of people that are willing to shell out thousands on SEO services but then have reservations about copywriting. Of course it is an extra expense and we’re all trying to reduce overheads, but investing in SEO without content is a little logical.

Search Engine Optimisation is, at its very essence, all about content and links. You need content for context and links for strength. Therefore if you’re optimising a site that doesn’t have decent content, then you’re already fighting a losing battle.

Link building is a skill of course. It takes a long time and to succeed you really need to be able to find ways of sourcing the strongest links from the best sites. But all of these exertions can be helped by having good content for those new links to point to.
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If your pages aren’t loading quick enough, people will get bored and leave. It doesn’t matter how exciting your content is, how great your products are, if they can’t see them, they won’t know – or care.

Therefore your site has to be functional as well as optimised. The fact that Google and most other search engines have integrated site speed into their ranking factors is something of a blessing. Now sites that aren’t serving their visitors’ needs aren’t seeing any benefit.

This has put the focus on the usability and functionality of a site and brought it into the context of SEO.
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No ethically sourced link should damage your site. However, there are those that are significantly more effective than others.

The best links are often those that are provided naturally. So for example, if you post a piece of research on your website, media sources might well pick this up and send a link through to you. Because they have done so out of choice, there will be no reciprocal issues, it will appear to be natural and will pass on huge strength to that page.

But these kinds of links don’t come along every day and so, particularly if you are just starting out in optimising a site, sometimes it is important to simply get the numbers up.

More often than not you’ll end up having to turn to directories.
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Occasionally there will be pages on your site that are surplus to requirement. Whether this is caused by a product no longer being stocked in your store or a duplicate content issue, it is important that you deal with it properly.

Obviously you can just go into your CMS and delete the offending page and forget about it. The problem though is that this won’t necessarily remove the problem entirely. If it has been listed in your XML Sitemap, has been cached or could have been bookmarked by visitors in the past, then it is important that the page is redirected.
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Succeeding online always seems so simple. You read a few blogs, they inspire you to build a site, you start optimising a little and hey presto you are…exactly where you started still.

If you have started a site as something of a hobby, rather than a business, then it is easy to get distracted and simply dump it when it appears to be failing. You’ve got only a handful of inbound links (mostly from social profiles and directories), no PageRank and no rankings within Google. What was all that nonsense about making millions by ranking getting to the top of the search engines then?

Don’t abandon your dreams of online super-stardom. However, you might want to temper them a little.
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This might just be one of the oldest tricks in the SEO book. When search engines were ranking pages based on their keyword density it was a great way for site owners to give their pages a little artificial boost.

Unfortunately this mentality should have died out with AltaVista.

Sadly though people are still confusing the notion of creating keyword optimised content with blatant spamming and stuffing. But of course there are mixed signals coming from industry professionals like myself.
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When you first start optimising a website you could be forgiven for thinking that your efforts were entirely in vain. More often than not you won’t see any noticeable changes in your online visibility for days, maybe even weeks.

However, the stronger your site becomes, the quicker this process will become.

Take an objective look at it for a moment. Google is good at tracking down new content, however it is already dealing with millions of other new pages on other sites each day. If your site is relatively fresh you might not even have slipped onto their radar yet. You might, for all intents and purposes, be invisible.
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As with any SEO advice, it is easy to get carried away when you hear about the potential benefits of internal links. By embedding a link within keyword you can direct visitors to the appropriate page and help to improve its relevance to that term. That’s got to be good, right?

Internal linking is essential for effective optimisation [see: How to Get More out of Internal Linking]. It helps pass around the link strength and offers fresh pathways to your pages. But it has to be kept within reason.

Let’s take an obvious example. You’re writing a category page and choose to mention a couple of popular products. In this instance it is logical that you would link to those product pages and use the name as the vehicle.
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If you’ve used Google recently to find local services you will probably have noticed quite a significant change in the appearance of the results page. Rather than having local listings at the top beside a map of the area, the results are now integrated with organic listings.

This of course is great news if you already had a decent position within Google’s local business map and were nowhere to be found for organic listings. However, if the opposite is true, you could be about to love some valuable traffic.

So what’s the solution?
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