There is so much hype in the SEO industry probably because it is a techno field plus is very competitive so everyone is trying to eyebrow everyone else and get the upper edge.
Being in my antiquated 40′s – hippy 1965 baby to be exact – I have been around the IT industry well before most of the current players were out of diapers. I was there in our computer room when they unveiled the latest hard drive – it looked like a modern day top-loader washer and was the same size! All up it held a ‘breath-taking’ 40 Meg of data. Yes that is right 40 Meg! When we saw the new micro PC’s come out we felt they would never take off (we must have had IBM blood in us!) and the IT journey went on from there.
Today my ‘long teeth’ dip in my beer and my eyeballs roll back in their sockets when I hear some of the hype plastered around the SEO playing field.
Yes SEO can be technical but only usually when you got it wrong at the beginning – your website that is. If you did not hire an SEO consultant to give you the run down BEFORE you started building then you probably ended up with a website punctured with a million SEO holes. These websites can take some fixing for sure. Most web designers know nothing about SEO and what they do know they rarely implement because they are not requested to by you! Not hiring an SEO consultant is like building a three storey house without using an architect and engineer and expecting the builder to get it right – no way.
I come across a good SEO site once in every 100 sites. This is a poor track record for web-developers. Almost every other single site is a ship full of holes sinking in the lower regions of page 196 of Google!
So apart from adding some colorful pros to this piece I suppose I should add some substance. Well here it is – short and simple (well maybe not that short!)
Content is King for SEO
Google uses back links a lot right now to judge a sites popularity. However, it is now very easy to create back links of high quality in large volumes to unbalance the ranking game. Google knows it has to find a way to balance this out. When it does, most people’s ranking will come crashing to the ground overnight.
On the other hand, Google always wants QUALITY content – the best it can display. If you have this, then because content is the only reason why we have search engines in the first place, your site will always do well no matter what twists and turns Google puts its search engine algorithms through.
Never ever forget that content is King in the SEO jungle. Forget at your peril.
We struggled to get content on clients sites for so long until we built it into our SEO ranking packages. We now offer a content and back-linking service (SEO.SIMPLE.) that solves this inherent problem. Now our clients get fresh unique content on their sites weekly and gain ranking results from it seeing it is SEO optimised as well.
Your content delivery engine needs to be well tuned
Don’t think that you can just add content to a site and miss out on the platform you are adding it to. Google wants to make sure that the content is not only the best for the keyword requested, but it also delivers the best user experience. So make sure you cross you T’s and dot your SEO eyes when it comes to ensuring your website delivers the best experience such as doing these :
- Ensure your server is fast – Google recently added this one – upgrade today if it takes too long to load your pages
- Make sure ALL images have ALT tags WITH meaningful content
- Make sure every page has a UNIQUE page title relevant to the content of the page
- Fix Canonical issues (were http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com/index.php etc all resolve to the same page but have different addresses. Instead they should all redirect to a single page and that page should be used throughout the site in all links. If you are on a UNIX based server this can be fixed quickly usually through the htaccess file)
- Make sure there are at least 300 words of meaningful text on any page – the more the better for Google
- Make sure that if you are using a CMS that the URL’s are fixed so only words appear (and preferably keywords) and not funny programming expressions and numbers
- Whenever you create a link use a keyword(s) and not the notorious ‘click here’ as the anchor text
- If you cannot add content to your site (maybe you have a flash site), then at least add a blog attached to your site – this helps a lot
- When you next renew your domain, renew for at least 3 years – after all longevity shows maturity and increases trust
Back links and more back links for SEO
And of course do not stop back-linking. Right now it is the powerhouse for SEO but don’t rely on this for the future.
So I hope this has helped ‘de-hype’ some of the SEO materials out there and helped you along the SEO road a bit further.
Tags: SEO
