SEO Blog

As I’ve mentioned in the past, Google generally have a soft spot for the big brands in their listings. Whether it is for product searches or terms related to the businesses themselves, more often than not a corporate big hitter will be at the top.

Now we can’t discredit SEO work entirely on these sites. If they’re a multi-national corporation then there’s a fair chance that they’ve got the marketing budget to employ a pretty decent team of search engine optimisation services. But what happens if they start buying up paid links, are involved in huge link farms, what then?
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The phrase ‘content is king’ often gets bandied around in SEO circles. Not without good reason either. It is pivotal in ensuring that search engines understand what you’re all about, it is a unique identifier and is a link enabler.

However, not all that far away from content is its close neighbour context.

Whilst content provides the bulk, context delivers the value. It is what will get search engines to take your site seriously and help deliver the rankings you deserve for the terms you are going after.
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You’re probably tired about reading how evil paid links are by now. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they continue to work; however, criticisms against them rarely come with any explicit examples of the negative impact they can have.

Well, how about this one? Econsultancy yesterday highlighted the case of gourmetgiftbaskets.com, who offer exactly what their name suggests [see: The $4m Google penalty]. They were making huge profits and sitting comfortably in the top couple of places on Google for all of their primary terms. Unfortunately though one day all the rankings disappeared. No word of warning, no apparent reason why, the site just wasn’t visible any more.

The culprit? Paid links of course.
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In the old days you’d expect that the obvious answer to this was to continually submit your site to the search engines and you’d be away. Sadly not only was this not very time effective, it just wasn’t very effective full-stop.

Once Google got around to processing your request you were probably about ready to send another one. Now you can save yourself the bother.

Whilst you might still choose to submit your site at the outset, that is probably enough. There are far more effective way for you to get the attention of search engines today, the most effective being strong links and your Webmaster Tools Account. Let’s see how both work.
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It’s often said that the rich get richer whilst the poor, well you know the rest. The same though can be true online. Not necessarily in terms of finances, but the SEO work required to succeed.

When you’re down at the bottom you need to work hard to try and get to the top. However, if you have developed a strong brand identity, are sat at the top of search engines for your primary keywords, others might do the work for you.

You see, when you’re at the top you have instant visibility. People know who you are and are more likely to discuss your brand on their blogs and social media profiles, thus helping to promote your brand further. In amongst all of these mentions you may even find the occasional link too.
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Whenever you include an image to your website it adds a certain aesthetic quality to the page. It helps users navigate through and quickly evaluate what you are offering. Unfortunately not everybody can see them, including the search engines.

To a search engine spider, an image is simply a bit of coding to be looked at and largely ignored. That is, unless you have an ALT text attribute attached.

One of the simplest bits of coding you can hope, but still largely underused, the ALT text within any image or non-HTML element will add vital context. It provides you with an opportunity to describe the element and include additional keywords on a page.
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A criticism levelled at SEO is that it is largely a simple activity that anybody can do. People don’t see the value in hiring a professional to do a job that can easily be done by any site owner. Of course, that isn’t entirely untrue.

Anybody can do SEO, I’ve certainly never knowingly suggested otherwise. Theoretically though most of us could, if we put our mind to it, play football, master nuclear physics or build a home from scratch. Unfortunately we wouldn’t be much good, certainly not at first.

Getting to grips with the basics might be easy. Learning to control a football, you might be able to work out what an atomic nuclei is and understand how to mix cement, but that won’t make an expert at any of these pursuits. The information to become an expert is out there, but you’re not going to learn it over night.
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In the SEO business we often go on about the importance of building your inbound links. Not without good reason admittedly. This is where you’ll get your PageRank, your site strength and help your website get ranked. But what’s the point in linking to a half-cocked website?

It is a difficult one though. There’s always a temptation to get your site on Google’s radar and get those first links set up; nothing wrong with that at all. But before you embark on a full blown link building odyssey, you need to get your house in order.
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So often you hear people saying that they’ve got some content, links and a reasonable site structure but still aren’t getting any decent rankings. You look a little deeper into their site and often you’ll find that their content comprises of a couple of sentences, they have a few generic links and the site is barely optimised.

Now that’s fine if you have no aspirations to get a ranking on Google. If you are happy to promote your site elsewhere and get dribs and drabs through search, then the bare minimum is probably alright. However, if you want to get to the first page of any search engine, you’re going to have to be a little more concerted in your efforts.
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When you’re doing Search Engine Optimisation, regardless of your experience in the field, there’s always a certain amount of trial and error involved. You can’t expect to get everything right first time. Changes that have worked in the past might have no influence at all on another site. Basically you can’t afford to simply follow a generic blueprint.

If trial and error wasn’t a part of SEO, there’d be no need for analytics software or landing page testing. They would be rendered redundant. You’d get it right (or wrong) first time around, and that would be it. You wouldn’t need to tweak Meta, update content or review internal linking; everything would be complete.

Without testing though we wouldn’t get anywhere. Obviously as a SEO professional I’ve done my fair share of experimentation, because this is how I can offer better services to clients. If everything I had ever done worked first time, I’d be a bona fide SEO guru and top of Google for any term I wanted. But in reality it doesn’t work like that.
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