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Why a fixed fee to SEO your website spells danger

charlatanIf you were approached by someone offering you financial advice, business advice, legal advice or even medical advice, you would expect them to be qualified. You would expect them to have studied to get where they are today, and you would probably expect to see evidence of these qualifications.

Equally, if they gave you inaccurate advice, you would expect to have some form of comeback. You should be able to appeal to a governing body, take them to court and receive some form of financial compensation if their incorrect advice has cost you dearly – which in the case of medical advice could be very dear indeed.

However, in the case of search engine optimisation this is never the case. You don’t need to have taken any courses, passed any exams or indeed have any real experience of SEO before you can dispense advice as though you were in expert. All you need to be able to do is to (more…)

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Filed under: SEO Mistakes — Written by Matt posted on August 25, 2010 at 8:00 am

Don’t get Sherlocked out of an SEO fee

Anyone who has been watching the new BBC series ‘Sherlock’, from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, will know that everything’s all too easy for Sherlock Holmes. He comes in, glances around a room and swiftly deduces everything from the solution for the crime to the embarrassing experiences the butler had in his youth. He then swans out again; smugly confident in the effect he’s had.

At least he’s a terrible violin player.

Sherlock and Watson

Sherlock and Watson, all too easy!

Some SEO companies are the same. They swan in to a site, declare that five different elements are what are holding it back, offer to fix the problems for a set fee, take the fee, mangle the site, and (more…)

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Filed under: SEO Advice,SEO Mistakes — Written by Matt posted on August 14, 2010 at 7:00 am

How to tell when someone knows nothing about SEO

SEO is something of an enigma; there are no formal qualifications in it, you can’t learn it in a school and you don’t need any training, or even prior knowledge of it before offering it as a service. This means, rather sadly, that there are many charlatans out there offering SEO as part of their services without even the first clue about how to do it. Even sadder is the fact that clients are often unwittingly taken in by their blarney, blissfully unaware that they’re paying money for nothing – and clicks to their website, rather than being free, will never materialise at all.

So how do you tell when someone’s spinning you a line and they, in fact, know absolutely nothing about SEO? Here are a few things that SEO charlatans will say, and a few ways you can spot their distinct lack of knowledge.

We’ll submit your site to Google

While this comment isn’t perhaps as stupid as we’re about to make it out to be, as you can still physically ‘submit’ your website to Google, there really is no need. Submitting your site to Google is sort of like the Pope telling everyone he’s Catholic – that’s kind of a done deal already. Submitting your site to Google isn’t part of any SEO strategy, and it won’t aid your rankings within Google.

We’ll make sure your Meta keywords are correct

I used to work for a design agency in Cardiff where the sales director insisted on telling clients that we would add keywords to their Meta keywords tags so they would appear in Google. No matter how many times (more…)

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Filed under: SEO Advice,SEO Mistakes — Written by Darren posted on August 11, 2010 at 7:24 am

Pride and prejudice… and web designers

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy

It is a universally acknowledged truth that a web designer in possession of some HTML skills and a rough idea of SEO is in want of whatever SEO jobs are going. Take the experience of the web gained through years of web design, combine it with a touch of search engine optimisation, and you have as perfect a match as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.

Unfortunately, just like Jane Austen‘s entertaining lovers, web designers tackling SEO jobs get off to a rocky start. Web design and SEO might seem like a perfect match on the outside, but it takes a little time and adjustment for things to run smoothly.

The problem, just as with the characters of Pride and Prejudice, is a slight lack of (more…)

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Filed under: Design,SEO Advice,SEO Mistakes — Written by Matt posted on August 9, 2010 at 7:43 am

How to know when your keywords are wrong

When you start a new business, it’s important to first conduct market research into the potential business to see whether it is a viable enterprise. You need to look at the size of the market, the strength of the competition and whether you can make enough profit to warrant the time and effort. You wouldn’t just have an idea and begin the business without any research, as you could be wasting your time flogging a dead horse in what proves to be a very costly mistake.

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 (more…)

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Filed under: Analytics,Content,SEO Advice,SEO Mistakes — Written by Cheryl posted on July 31, 2010 at 7:49 am

Always optimise title tags for SEO

Titles have an important place in search engine optimisation. The titles on your page tend to attract a lot of attention, both from Internet users and from search engine spiders. The same goes for your title tags, which are usually featured as the hyperlink in search engine results pages. Both of these need to be optimised as part of your standard on-page SEO plan.

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.

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Filed under: Content,SEO Advice,SEO Mistakes — Written by Matt posted on July 25, 2010 at 7:47 am

Don’t sacrifice quality for speed

The internet is a fast-paced world. Regardless of whether you run an award-winning blog, an online retail site or just advertise your business through your website, you’re going to have to move at a fairly fast pace to keep up with competitors. This is particularly true of your SEO.

Site owners often have trouble getting into the higher gear of updating that is required for search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation experts generally recommend that their clients maintain a schedule of content updates that is at least once a week, often more regularly than that – depending on the competitive nature of your industry. For many sites, this represents a significant gearing up of their update schedule. The panic that ensues can lead to a lot of bad content being published, which doesn’t do the website any good at all.

When site owners try to dramatically increase their content publication, the first thing to go (more…)

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Filed under: Content,SEO Mistakes — Written by Matt posted on July 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

Impatience kills good SEO

Impatience is one of the biggest things to conquer in terms of search engine optimisation. It can be hard for site owners who are new to SEO to understand the long-term nature of the game. It’s doubly hard for business owners who are used to the other forms of internet marketing, which present predictable returns within a predictable timescale. Impatience can be the ruin of a good SEO campaign.

It is natural and understandable for any site owner to want results from their SEO. This is why most optimisation experts spend a bit of time explaining the nature of the search engine optimisation process, to guard against the expectation of quick results. A lot of site owners still make mistakes, though, and it’s important to be aware of what (more…)

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Filed under: Content,SEO Mistakes — Written by Cheryl posted on July 7, 2010 at 7:36 am
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