So why do so many people do this with their SEO?

It’s an all too common sight in the field of search engine optimisation to see websites, often promoted by SEO agencies, being optimised for the wrong keywords. Businesses can spend a lot of money, often thousands or tens of thousands of pounds, targeting keywords that are of no use to them in any capacity, or ones they have no hope of ever ranking for.

Let’s give you a for instance.

Say your business is in the divorce industry, and you’re a divorce solicitor offering quick online divorces. What words instantly come to mind when you think of divorce?

There’s the obvious, ‘divorce’, for example. But how competitive is that to rank for? You would need a sizable budget to be able to rank for such a generic keyword, or an already very established website, and how many people who were looking for your kind of service would simply use the word ‘divorce’ for their search?

No, that’s not the keyword you should be investing your time, effort and money into optimising for – although you will find that by optimising for the correct keywords, your rankings for ‘divorce’ would improve anyway.

How about other keywords such as ‘marriage breakdown’, ‘break-ups’, ‘split’ and ‘annulment’?

These keywords are all relevant to your business, and they’re the sort of words that should be appearing on your website, yes, but again they’re not the sort of keywords that you should be optimising for as such. Imagine that you’re looking for the services of a divorce solicitor, one that offers online divorce – what are the benefits of that service? What words would you use to find a service such as that?

More relevant keywords would be ‘divorce solicitors’, ‘online divorce’, ‘quickie divorce’, ‘cheap divorce’ and ‘divorce advice’.

Notice how they all contain the word ‘divorce’ anyway, so by optimising for keywords such as these you would be optimising for divorce as well?

Remember, when choosing keywords you need to ensure:

• Keywords are not too competitive
• Keywords are not too generic
• Keywords are relevant to your service
• Keywords will convert

Cheshire

Now, while it’s true that you don’t want to publish your daily gripes and annoyances on your company’s website, by removing any opinionated content from your site you’re merely stripping your content down to the bare bones, being left with nothing more than a ‘vanilla’ flavour. This is arguably worse than adding the most opinionated, close to the wire content that you can, because flavourless, ‘safe’ content isn’t going to entice anyone into reading it – and it certainly isn’t going to attract any links (which is one of the major benefits of using content for SEO in the first place.

Rather than playing it safe and adding the same old dry, humourless, posts to your website every day, you need to inject some fresh blood into it. Make your content stand out from the (very large) crowd and grab people by the ears before rubbing their face in what you write.

This applies to any industry too, as no matter in which industry your business is involved, you can still find areas that people disagree on, areas for discussion, debate and revolution (not the political kind, we don’t need to go that far). By injecting a little of yourself into your website’s content you’re making your website more personable which, in this faceless digital age, will mark you out from your competitors.

Be bold, be opinionated and let your website reap the rewards.

Earlier this week, the website CSAhell.com was represented by our very own Darren Jamieson on a Liverpool and North West based talk show hosted by DJ Pete Price. The talk show aired on Tuesday night on both Radio City (96.7FM) and City Talk (105.9FM) just after 10pm, and centred around the subject of the website, the CSA (Child Support Agency).

During the show, Pete Price requested that people who had experienced problems with the CSA phone in and share their experiences with the listeners. Pete also featured some ‘expert’ callers on the subject, including our CTO speaking about the CSAhell.com website. Darren explained why the website was first created and how it has grown over the few short years it has been live to the extent that it now offers advice to thousands of people each month. He added that, because the website ranks on the first page of Google for keywords such as ‘CSA mistakes’, ‘CSA advice’ and even ‘Child Support Agency’, anyone searching for information or advice online is sure to find the website, benefit from the information it offers and realise that they are not alone in their problems.

What made this example of offsite promotion so effective for the website was the fact that it came about as a result of good old fashioned SEO (as old fashioned as SEO gets) because the researchers for the talk show came to us after finding the website within Google in the first place. An advert on the radio for the website, lasting several minutes such as this interview did, would have cost a lot of money to produce and air. By participating as an expert resource in a dedicated phone in, all because of the original SEO on the website, the site gained exposure to a new audience of extremely relevant, and interested, parties.

If anyone can find out where your links are coming from, and how poor in quality they are, then Google (with all of its power over the Internet) can easily detect the sources of your links also – and Google isn’t very forgiving.

So what do we mean by low quality, and why is it bad for your rankings?

Google started the whole concept of PageRank itself, and worked out that the more websites that link to yours, the more important your website must be, and the better it should rank. Of course in doing so, Google opened up the whole process for dodgy SEO companies to attempt to build links en masse for clients, thus exposing the weaknesses in Google’s ploy.

Good quality, strong links are good for your website because it means that a strong website has cast its ‘vote’ in your favour. Strong links such as these mean that your website must be of a suitable quality in order to get them in the first place, thus your website will be looked upon favourably by Google.

However, when your link profile is made up from ostensibly poor quality websites, with little or no content that exists purely to offer links, then the nature of how those links was obtained becomes obvious.

For example, we looked at the backlinks of a particular website (we won’t mention what website it is, or who the SEO company involved is) but we found the following websites within its link profile:

http://www.linaskvallsbok.se
http://www.drogalivsmedel.se
http://www.ljuvadofter.se

These websites (and many others linking to the site in question) are foreign TLDs (top level domains) – these ones in particular being from Sweden. This in itself should be considered a red flag, because a UK website can expect to naturally attract UK links – not links from foreign websites. If a website has predominantly foreign websites show up in its link profile, there is usually a good reason for this – such as paid links.

Now, when you look at the websites in question, you’ll see that they all follow the same pattern, existing purely to provide links for clients of the SEO company, and they look EXACTLY the same. Don’t think for a moment that Google won’t notice this, as it’s glaring obvious for all concerned. A link profile containing links such as this makes it clear where the links have come from, and the rankings of the websites being linked to will suffer as a consequence.

If you’re interested, you can find the websites that link to your site by using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, here. Just enter your website address and look at the ‘inlinks’ tab. Remember to select ‘except from this domain’ to just show the links from other websites. If the links being shown are from low quality websites, you should probably start to worry.

It may sound strange to look beyond the search engines for SEO, but being aware of other sites on the net is vital if you want your search engine optimisation plan to succeed. Knowing where your target user groups like to ‘hang out’ can help you to plan your off-page SEO and where to fish for links. Knowing what’s popular around the net can also help you to plan your future Internet marketing strategies.

Here are a few key things to look for:

Non-search competitors. Not every business concerns itself with search. Some of your competitors may be comfortable enough that they don’t bother with SEO. This doesn’t mean however that they aren’t still competing for your target market. Look around forums and review sites for hidden competition.

Social media trends: Social media is becoming an important forum on the net, and most SEO experts now include social media sites in their regular search engine optimisation plans. Knowing where and how to look on these sites is likely to become vital in the future.

Movers and shakers: Knowing which sites are influential in your industry can help your off-page SEO. Get to know the blogs in your industry.

A phishing email, in case you didn’t know, is an email that is sent by a fraudster attempting to steal vital information from you by deception. The fraudster will send the email as though it has come from your bank, from eBay, from PayPal or from some lottery agency proclaiming that you’ve won several million Ugandan dollars. You get the idea.

When you click on the link within the email, or reply to it, you will be providing your information to the fraudster. Some of these fraudulent emails are very clever, and look very convincing, and often come with websites that are perfect replicas of the actual websites in question (such as a copy of Lloyds TSB’s website, which the email I received had).

You’re supposed to be fooled into thinking that the website is genuine, and attempt to log in as prompted. In doing so, rather than logging in, your details are being stored by the fraudster so that they can log in to your bank account and do what they wish with it (clear it out usually).

It’s all very straightforward, and all highly illegal. Of course, the success of these phishing emails depends on their authenticity – which is where copywriting services come in. Luckily, most fraudsters who use this form of phishing email don’t use English as a first language, and their grasp of the English language is very poor. They also don’t know the difference between UK English, and US English (note the reference in this email to ATM machines).

Have a read of what I received, and see if it would have fooled you:

FROM: Lloyds TSB [onlinebanking@lloydstsb.co.uk]
Subject: Lloyds TSB Alerts : Irregular Check Card Activity

Dear Customer ,

We have informed that you have received unauthorized access to your Lloyds TSB ATM Card by date of April 08 2009 ,
We already put your account on third party until the verification is finish
We ask you now to Log-In to your internet banking and check your statment .
We asking you to Log in immidiatly to your Internet Banking and and follow this steps

1. Log-In to your internet banking by clicking here
2. Check your recent statment

Please make sure to let us know if there is any authorized withdraw from your Lloyds ATM Card

Lebel Operation :
4670659

Your account is on the third party and is will be untill you finish the steps
Lloyds TSB , United Kingdom
************************************************************************************
This message and any attachments are confidential and intended for the named addressee(s) only. If you have received this message in error, please notify immediately the sender, then delete the message. Any unauthorized modification, edition, use or dissemination is prohibited. The sender does not be liable for this message if it has been modified, altered, falsified, infected by a virus or even edited or disseminated without authorization.
************************************************************************************

While the content of this email is clearly very poorly written, and unlikely to fool anyone, it is indicative of the poor quality content that does exist online. This type of content could even exist on your own website if you do not use the correct content provider, or simply leave your website’s content up to the intern.

Would this reflect well on your company’s image?

Search engines rely on titles

Google’s spiders tend to gobble up the first piece of informative text they come across when they access your website, and this is always the title tag (assuming you even have one of course). This is then used as the link text in the SERPs, so it’s vital to spend some time crafting the right title for every page on your site. Remember that every page needs a different title tag, or else how can Google differentiate between the pages, and how will users know what is what they find your site in the SERPs?

Don’t overlook title tags

There has been a fair amount of debate in search engine optimisation circles about optimising meta tags. Early on, it was thought essential to optimise meta tags, as it was a way of communicating directly with the search engines. As some tags got devalued in the algorithm, some SEO experts decided that tags just weren’t bothering with.

Title tags, however, are an absolute must for your web pages. Too many companies leave their title tags exactly as their web designer left them, namely with the business name and nothing else.

Having ‘Joe Smith solutions’ as the title for every page may present a professional image, but it won’t do you much good in the search engine results pages. It’s far better to optimise each title tag with the keywords for that page.

As mentioned earlier, some businesses do worse and don’t even feature a title tag at all, resulting in their listing in the search engines appear as ‘Untitled Document’ – a cardinal sin in SEO.

Most businesses are opting to seek professional assistance for their site’s content. Most business owners also know how to recognise good writing when they read it. All the same, a significant amount of sloppy writing seems to make it through. Here’s what your site should be featuring as part of your search engine optimisation:

• No machine authors. Lots of sites use writing software to churn out keyword-rich content. The trouble with this is that it reads like machine-written content. This is bad for readers, and bad for SEO. The search engines will pick up on the lack of quality, and your website will suffer in the rankings as a consequence.
• Unique articles. A lot of content on the internet is simply copied from somewhere else. If an article reminds you of something you read yesterday, it’s probably going to bore your site users. Strive for a unique take on the subject when you can.
• Interest. Content isn’t just there for the search engines. Your site’s users can help boost your ranking by returning and remaining on your site, linking to pages on your site and sharing them with their friends. Interesting content tends to draw people back.
• Optimisation. All content on your site should be optimised, with keywords that fit your plan. Don’t forget to hyperlink to other pages on your site as well, increasing your internal link strength.