SEO Do’s

Create High Quality Original Content for Your Site

By original, we’re referring to unique. In other words, you don’t have to be the first person to say something online, just make sure you put it in your own words. For example, this is probably not the first time someone has compiled a list of do’s & don’t relating to SEO, but it is the first time it has been written in our own words.

And because of this, the search engines such as Google will credit us for writing the original version and it will all help towards our search rankings.

So, if you’re a little unsure as to whether the content you’ve had written is original or you just want to double check that your content doesn’t sound too much like someone else’s, we recommend you run it by a free plagiarism tool such as Plagium.com for good measure.

Simply copy & paste your article into the box on the home screen and hit the “Track Plagiarism” button and it will do a search online for content that seems very similar if not exact.

After all, if you’re going to go through all the effort of creating content in the first place, it might as well be unique.

Get Backlinks from Reputable Sites

For instance, if you have a news blog, one of the best sites you could probably get a backlink from would be a high authority, related news site, such as The BBC (The British Broadcasting Corporation). And whilst these types of links would be a lot more difficult to acquire, if you can get them, you will get a lot more benefit in terms of search engine rankings.

See, search engines like to look at backlinks from other sites, like votes. So whoever is willing to vote for you is basically approving of your site. This means, the search engines will be more likely to trust your site and more likely to put you in the top search results!

So that’s our simple guide to avoiding some of the major pitfalls of SEO and how you should consider doing things.

If you’re looking for a more indepth SEO guide then we recommend you download our small business SEO guide, whic has lots of useful tips and techniques to help get your website to the top of the search engine results!

In our past experience of speaking to fellow Welsh business owners, from Cardiff to Llandudno, we found that before approaching an SEO company such as Search Engine Optimisation Wales, often times they had attempted to do their own SEO.

And whilst we take our hat off to anyone who attempts to optimise their own website, unfortunately in most cases, usually due to inexperience, it’s performed incorrectly and often leads to all sorts of problems and spam complaints.

Worse still, they’ve asked their buddy down the local who fixes PC’s on the weekend to have a pop at their SEO and are then shocked to find that their website has been un-indexed from the search engines altogether!

In simple terms, their websites got banned! Imagine having a business that relies heavily on sales from website visitors and next thing your site is nowhere to be found. Suddenly you have no online customers, but you’ve still got all the daily business overheads! Scary thought eh?

So on a lighter note, at Search Engine Optimisation Wales (SEO Wales), we’ve decided to put together a few helpful do’s & don’ts of SEO.

So should you decide to venture out on your own, or even shop around for “bargain” SEO companies, at least you’ll have a reasonable idea as to where to start and what to avoid, so you don’t end up in the same situation as some of the poor businesses outlined above.

SEO Don’ts

The Dangers of Link farms

Link farms are basically websites that contain thousands of paid links, whereby the idea is that you simply pay a few bucks to have your site listed and in return get plenty of backlinks to your site. And as tempting as it sounds, the search engines hate these kinds of sites and will more often than not penalise your SEO efforts simply for “hanging around a bad neighbourhood”. Think of it as guilty by association.

Although these types of sites are being pushed further and further out of the search engines, they still do exist, and usually the only way you’ll find out about them is when one day you open your spam folder in your email account to see an anonymous company offering you 1000 backlinks for only 10 Euros per month! Don’t fall for them.

Because even if you were lucky not to get your credit card details stolen by such unethical companies, the best you could expect to get is a hand full of sub standard quality backlinks to your site, from a network of sites containing thousands of other links, which would more often than not just harm your site. Avoid them at all costs!

Reciprocal Linking is a Dying Trend

Sure, in the old days it might have been a good idea to swap links with other sites, and you would often see examples like Mary’s flower store website swapping links with John’s brick laying company on the other side of the city, but these days the search engines are too smart for that type of thing.

After all, the 2 sites are not likely to have much in common in terms of content and such reciprocal linking looks very unnatural, so the search engines don’t really reward these types of practises any more.

You’re far better off getting someone to link to your site, simply because they think your site compliments theirs.

Avoid “SEO” Companies That Promise No1 Positions

We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again for good measure, avoid any company like the plague, which promises you a number 1 spot in Google. Simply because nobody can make promises about something they don’t control. In this case, unless they own Google, they should never make such ridiculous promises.

And even whilst a good SEO company will do their best to help you rank in the search engines, inevitably, Google decides who gets to number one, not the SEO company. Period!

Those are some of the main SEO pitfalls to avoid, and in next weeks series we are going to be finishing off by showing you some of the Do’s of SEO, so keep your eyes peeled or subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified when it’s released.

They fail to see the importance of backlinks, even though they make up almost half of the SEO equation.

Let us use a little analogy to illustrate this point. Think of the top of Google as a vacancy, that you and many other candidates are competing for, and now let us image that your CV is your website and finally imagine that your character references are your backlinks.

Now whilst it does matter to some extent what you say on your CV (e.g. onsite optimisation), it’s just as important what your character references have to say about you too (your backlinks).

So unless your character references agree with what you have to say, and they are of reputable character themselves, you’re going to have a harder time competing for the single vacancy (the number one spot in Google) over the next person who has not only got a great CV (a well optimised site), but also has several outstanding references (lots of high quality backlinks).

But notice we said “Lots of HIGH QUALITY backlinks”. See quantity is one thing, but just like character references, they don’t mean anything if they’ve come from some of the lads down the pub who haven’t got a job themselves.

Basically that’s how the search engines decide who gets to be at the top. We hope the above example helps illustrate the importance of high quality backlinks. So if you find your website is not performing very well in the search engines, and you’ve done all you can with your onsite SEO, maybe it’s time for a proper SEO link building strategy to get your website to rank highly in the search engines.

So be sure download our free small business SEO report for lots of great techniques on how to build quality backlinks.

So in case you are a little new to the fabulous world of SEO, we have decided to give you a brief breakdown as to why we think it’s is probably one of the best forms of small business advertising… next to good old word of mouth advertising of course ;)

So here are just 5 of our favourite reasons:

1. SEO Traffic is Measurable

SEO has many distinct advantages over conventional forms of advertising.

You might have already heard the famous saying by John Wanamker, a US department store merchant, that goes “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Sadly this is still very true for many of the conventional forms of offline advertising such as billboard and radio advertising, but thankfully, search engine marketing isn’t. Thanks to tracking software such as Google Analytics we can measure every single visitor that comes to our site, what pages they visited and even how long they stayed on each page.

The best part is that we can even see the exact keywords that they used to find our site, giving us an even better idea of the keywords we should be going after in our SEO campaign!

2. Results are Long Lasting

Whilst SEO will produce many short term traffic results, such as traffic that comes from referring sites on which you post content with backlinks to your own sites, the real benefit of search engine optimisation can be seen when your website makes its way to the first page in the search engines.

This is where it’s all happening and where all your customers are. As you climb up the first page you will begin to see a noticeable increase in your website traffic and if you get to be the lucky one who sits in the first position you could, on average, be getting almost half of the traffic of the entire first page! That’s a nice thought eh!

3. It Levels the Playing Field

In the old days prior to the internet, if you wanted to drive thousands of visitors to your business, you would have to be prepared to potentially spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in advertising, with no guarantee of anyone buying anything, or your phone even ringing.

And the only ones who were privileged enough to be able to afford such high advertising costs, were usually the large corporations with huge budgets.

Luckily we live in an era where even the small guy with a little budget can slowly make their way to the first page of the search engines and get a piece of the pie that was previously only reserved for the big boys!

4. The Results are Automated

Sure, it may take some work to get your website to where you want it to be in the search results, but we all know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But all that hard work will be rewarded when you suddenly begin to reap a steady stream of traffic to your website. And best of all, they come to you on complete auto pilot!

5. The Traffic Can Be Highly Commercial

Unlike many other forms of advertising, where you have to interrupt audiences with the hope that one of them is actually looking to buy your product, by far the best thing about SEO traffic is that people who visit your site are already looking for your products and services.

So there isn’t the usual need to pressure sell and you can instead slowly guide your visitors through the buying process instead. Great!