WHAT IS SEO?

What do you do when you want to find something online? You go to one of the search engines and type in a few keywords.

You've most likely heard of Search Engine Optimisation -- or SEO. And you probably have a good idea of what it means: it's about getting your site to rank highly among the results when people search for things to do with you.

So if you're a care organisation based in London, you'd expect people to type in something like "London care company" and you'd hope to feature on the first page.

And that's what matters -- the first page. You may as well not exist if you find yourself down on page seven, because potential clients simply won't trawl down the results far enough to find you.

How do search engines decide which websites to reward with high positions? It's all about content and links. Relevant, good-quality content and lots of links from reputable websites.

SEO HAS CHANGED

There used to be all sorts of tricks you could use to game the system and get high rankings for not much effort. Here are just a few:

  • Keyword stuffing: absolutely packing your copy with the keywords you hope to be found with
  • Reciprocal linking: you link to me, I link to you, and the search engines will love us!
  • Link wheels: a more sophisticated form of reciprocal linking, in which you have a link to site A. Site A then has a link to site B, and site B links to you
  • Paid links: actually spending money to get sites to link to you
  • Articles written solely for search engines: Pumping out any old content, no matter how poorly written, irrelevant or ungrammatical, so long as it was jammed with keywords; often done using content generation software
  • Comment spam: leaving worthless comments as well as links back to your site on blogs; often done using automated software
  • Article submissions: writing pieces to submit to article directories (or getting software to write them for you) and getting links back in return (I used to do this occasionally, before Panda and Penguin)

SEARCH ENGINES ARE CLEVER

The thing about the people who design the search engine algorithms, however, is that (a) they're really clever, (b) they're a thousand times more tech-savvy than you and me and (c) they hate to see their results manipulated.

So over the years we've seen many changes to the algorithms in an attempt to weed out the websites that have gained their rankings through "black hat" skulduggery.

You may even have heard of one or two of them: the "Panda" and "Penguin" updates, for example, which removed low quality sites with poor or duplicate content from Google’s index.

Let's say you have a rival with a better search engine results page ("SERP") than you. You've gone through their site, seen where their dodgy links have come from and looked at their thin, frankly unhelpful content. But they're still higher up than you. How can that be fair?

Don't worry. All the hard work you put into your site, all the great quality content and relevant links you're able to acquire will pay off eventually. Google, Yahoo and Bing will catch up with your rival in the end, they'll find themselves having to send begging letters to be re-indexed and look where you'll be then! Keep the faith.

SEO THAT WORKS

The bad news: it's not easy. The search engines are really good at working out the tricks and short cuts, so there's no alternative but to put the time and money in.
The good news: it's completely democratic and you can do it. The search engines don't care how big your organisation is and how much money you have to spend. SEO isn't like pay-per-click advertising; you won't get first-page positions by spending more money than your rivals.

You'll get there by having content that is truly relevant to the keywords you're optimising the site for. And I can help you create that content. Here are some of the things we could do together:

  • High-quality, informative articles for your site and blog
  • Using social media in a relevant and helpful way
  • E-newsletters
  • Case studies
  • Whitepapers
  • News releases that actually contain news
  • Scripted videos
  • Scripted webinars
  • Scripted podcasts

Anything that adds real value to the person searching is what you should be aiming to provide. Drop me a line and let's begin working out how to add that amazing content to your site.
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