SEO Blog

Over the course of the last few years, the big brands have been getting a sizeable helping hand from the search engines. This has seen organic rankings erode for some smaller online companies, particularly when it comes to generic, short-tail searches. So does that mean that it is harder to compete for SMEs today?

As with most things, the answer is a little complicated. Nobody can argue that ranking for certain terms has become almost impossible, with authoritative domains dominating the top spots. However, that shouldn’t mean a smaller business can’t still achieve excellent results on search engines and other marketing platforms.

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In the old days, people spent hours spinning content endlessly in order to produce hundreds of versions of the same original document. This worked well, or at least it did until Google clamped down on poor quality content and handed down penalties to its hosts (most article sites). Consequently the idea of spinning copy for the sake of links was put to bed in many people’s eyes. But is there still a need for it in any other capacity?

One of the classic signs of a poorly spun article was the fact that none of the sentences matched up and synonyms were employed that clearly had a very different meaning to the original intention. This would make anything read like a poorly translated article or something that a 10 year-old child would be ashamed of. Essentially, it wasn’t great copy.

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Nobody is perfect, we’re all prone to the occasional aberration. Whether you’ve followed some poor advice or done a little optimisation based on a hunch, if things go wrong, this shouldn’t prove to be fatal.

Therefore, whenever you are testing something new that you’re not entirely sure about, it is often better to do so on a site that you own, but isn’t directly linked to your primary domain. Most  SEOs will use test sites, setting up cheap domains, building them up a little (at least so they’re indexed) and then trying out a few different things on them – closely monitoring the effects.
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Social bookmarking is essentially a way of making content easy to find for Internet users by bookmarking, storing and managing it online. By doing this you can categorise content, allowing users to easily find what they are looking for. However they don’t just help users, they’re also a great way of building links. There are a number of social bookmarking sites from Delicious and Digg, to Flickr and Reddit. Even some of the more common sites such as Twitter and YouTube can act as bookmarking sites. The whole idea is to make your information readily available for other people, so that you have more places and communities to share the information that you wish to promote.

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Mobile communication has increased over the last ten years and the ability to target specific SEO campaigns can now be applied to mobile search via the Internet. Therefore, any business should be taking advantage of this latest development. It’s the perfect time to capitalise on this form of SEO and failing to do so will only leave you with a harder, more time consuming task, further down the line.

Like many people you probably carry your mobile phone with you most, if not all of the time. They have become an important part of people’s lives because they keep us connected with friends, family, colleagues and the rest of the world. It’s because of this that people are more inclined to use their mobile device to search via the Internet when they are out and about. For example, if you’re visiting an unknown town in England, you might decide to search for ‘restaurants’ in that specific area. In addition, the mobile isn’t just being used for search either, as YouTube is predicting that mobile devices will be the most popular form of viewing videos in the UK by 2013.

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If you create an advert and can afford to get it published in a few national newspapers or shown on television, this can present a good one-off opportunity to market your offers or promote the business a little. However, the same certainly isn’t true of SEO.

Whilst you might want to get everything done in a hurry and move on to your next project, this isn’t going to have immediate, let alone long-term benefits for your business. As I always mention, Search Engine Optimisation is a gradual building process. You build the foundations when setting up the domain, designing a site and creating the navigation; but from there you need to keep developing; adding the various levels needed to be successful.
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Hitting the top spot in Google has become even harder in recent years, particularly after the Panda update. The algorithm update was brought in to punish the sites that Google deemed to be using poor quality or duplicated content. Some sites that have been punished still haven’t reached the heights they once were since their punishment as they look to rebuild.

The way Google index and even search for information is constantly changing; becoming more complex as a result. In addition to this, because search results bring up blogs, videos and images, it can be harder for websites to take up the space of the first page. During times like this, you have to adapt and go with the changes, finding new ways of getting to the top.

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The ultimate goal in SEO is to greatly improve the rankings of your site and it’s visibility in the SERPs, even taking the top spot for specific terms related to your industry. However, some people might think that once they have reached a comfortable position, they can stop implementing SEO techniques as their goal has been achieved.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that in the world of SEO. If your site is in a good position, you need to work on this so that you can maintain a decent ranking. You shouldn’t believe that just because you are in first, third or fifth place that your work is finished, as there are always new methods to put in place that will benefit your brand online. (more…)

It’s easy to get frustrated with SEO efforts. You can spend hours writing decent content and a few days to build inbound links for your key pages, only to see minor fluctuations in the rankings. But this isn’t restricted to your site, it happens to almost everybody. So why doesn’t SEO deliver excellent short-term results?

Whilst results are delivered in an instant, the search engines have to continuously crawl the billions of pages on the Internet in order to index them effectively. This means that most sites have to wait a few days until their time comes around. As such, any improvements that you make will often take a while to get spotted. However, this isn’t restricted to your own site.
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There will be people that claim you can’t rank without regular usage of keywords within the body copy and Meta. Others though rubbish the notion that keyword density has anything to do with rankings anymore; as long as they are included, the frequency shouldn’t matter. So who is right?

Well, if you think that you need to use your keywords dozens of times on every page, then you’re certainly barking up the wrong tree. When search engines were using very basic ranking factors (i.e. before Google and PageRank), the number of terms used and their frequency was vital. This is why you’d have issues like hidden text, where site owners would just repeat terms hundreds of times using white words on a white background, so nobody could see.
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