“Cautionary tales - SEO for beginners”

Search engines are one of the principal ways for new customers to find out about your products and services. Unfortunately, many websites have poor search engine results or may not be listed at all because they fail to take into account how search engines work.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of preparing your website so the pages are accessible to the search engines and the content is focused and relevant to what your target audience is actually searching for. If you want help understanding the lingo involved in "SEO", check out our Glossary.

SEO is about achieving the desired results in search engine ranking. Done well, this can reap huge benefits for your website and your business. Done badly your website traffic may fall and in some cases, could even lead to your website being banned from the search engines.

SEO is a series of fairly obvious best practices. A SEO service that helps you with those things can be good, a SEO service that promises it can get you top ranking may be shady. There are plenty of examples where seemingly doing everything right doesn’t seem to work. Then there are websites with high results that look like pure garbage.

This is where our in-depth knowledge can deliver tangible results.
Our holistic approach to SEO is built in as we design your website, to achieve consistent rankings that reach a well-targeted audience. In most cases, we focus on building long-term traffic growth through organic - or natural - searches. We will also advise where paid placements or pay-per-click listings are a worthwhile addition to your overall SEO strategy.

As more businesses begin to use search engine optimization as part of their marketing strategy, competition for space in the search engine results is becoming increasingly fierce. Staking your claim in this powerful on-line arena could seriously enhance your business performance. We'll show you exactly how.

Beware of the SEO con artist

As SEO grows in popularity, and businesses battle it out to get to the top of the search engine rankings, unethical SEO practices are becoming increasingly common.

SEO cheap tricks
The SEO industry is fairly new and many marketers and businesses still don’t fully understand how SEO works or how it’s done. They just want a website that ranks well in the search engines.

Sadly though, this urgent desire - combined with a lack of SEO knowledge - means many businesses are targeted by unscrupulous SEO consultants who use unethical techniques to achieve high rankings quickly. But the truth is that these ‘rogue traders’ may inevitably do long-lasting damage to your website’s ranking or even cause you to be unlisted.

This is because unethical SEO techniques go against search engine rules and regulations, meaning websites which have been ‘illegally’ optimized are likely to eventually be removed from the search engine listings. This will have a massive detrimental effect on your company, especially if it relies heavily on having a strong web presence.  And once a site is removed, the process of being re-listed and gaining a robust search engine ranking has to begin all over again.

This is bad enough, but it can be even worse. If the use of underhanded tactics is really prolific, websites may actually be blacklisted altogether by search engines and banned from being listed again.

And where does that leave the you? Like it or not, if you hire an SEO specialist that uses ‘illegal’ SEO techniques to optimize your website, the search engines will hold you personally responsible. Google actually states: “If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or 'throwaway' domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to 'help' you.”
How do you ensure you don’t end up hiring a rogue SEO expert who will optimize your site while simultaneously putting it at risk of being removed or blacklisted by the search engines?

Luckily, there are steps you can take to ensure you don’t end up hiring unscrupulous SEO firms and practitioners. And that’s a good thing for the SEO industry too, because the quicker people realize the damaging effects that illegal SEO techniques can have on their websites, the quicker SEO companies using these underhanded tactics will have to clean up their act. This will stop them from destroying the reputation of genuine SEO experts who produce highly effective and long-lasting results using above board SEO techniques.

How to avoid SEO rip-offs
Check out Google’s online tutorials about SEO, which give a simple overview on how to avoid being ripped off by unscrupulous SEO firms. It’s a good place to start and because it’s short and easy to understand even the most busy marketers looking to employ an SEO professional to optimize their website should have time to check it out. Be aware of what SEO can and can’t achieve.

SEO is a highly effective technique, but it does take time to see results. It also creates very high search engine rankings for websites when done well, but any genuine SEO specialist knows that no one who’s genuine can guarantee the top spot – that’s just not how SEO works.

So, if an SEO specialist comes along promising that they’ll get you to the top of the search engines within a short time, be on your guard. They are likely to do so using ‘illegal’ SEO practices that may work in a very short time, but will actually be detrimental to your website and company’s reputation in the longer term.

You can make sure you don’t end up hiring an unscrupulous SEO expert to optimize your company’s website by being aware of the most common ‘illegal’ SEO techniques currently being used. If you hear any of the following phrases when speaking to potential SEO professionals alarm bells should be ringing:

Hidden text
This technique involves adding lots of keyword rich text to your pages that is invisible to users, but readable by the search engines and therefore helps to increase a websites search engine ranking. There are many hidden text techniques, but search engines are becoming increasing capable of detecting such methods and will heavily penalize websites using them.

Keyword stuffing
This technique increases the appearance of keywords by inserting them anywhere possible. Normal keyword density should be from three to seven per cent, so anything above this looks like keyword stuffing and is likely to attract special attention from the search engine spam filters.

Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. It’s used to trick search engines, but they really hate this technique and have developed sophisticated ways of finding and penalizing sites using it.  

Duplicate Content
Content is becoming increasingly more important to all search engines, which has led some people to create duplicate copies of keyword rich pages to try and manipulate the search engines and increase their website’s ranking. However, search engines are cracking down on duplicate content and have developed highly intelligent duplicate content filters, meaning it’s now harder than ever to do and much easier to get caught out.

Doorway pages
Doorway pages are web pages built specifically to increase traffic to a website and are created to do well for particular phrases. In essence, a doorway page is no more than a one-page click-through advertisement for a website, which you have to click through before landing on the actual website. Although doorway pages may attract visitors, many will be put off by what is effectively a blank page and hit the back button rather than progress through to the site.

There are plenty more other ‘deceiving’ SEO techniques being used out there too, such as shadow domains, link farms and spam indexing. Like the other tactics mentioned, these also work by manipulating the search engines and in the process degrade the search experience for everyone.

The future
The search engines are working harder than ever to catch SEO con artists but, new tricks will pop up as old ones are forced out. Because of this, SEO is, and may always be, quite mysterious.

Make it easy on yourself and let us show you how to optimize your website. Call A Designing Woman today for more information.

Call us at 602-840-1117 today to learn more.