SEO Archives - Page 5 of 8

Farhan Fawzer

June 15, 2014

SEO Snake Oil Sales

If you work in SEO you are familiar with the jerks that have given you a bad name. Con-men with laptops have already given many of your clients SEO complexes that you now have to work through.

Photo Courtesy of Moz.com

Companies that market online are going to be targets for these slimy sales men. For every real SEO webslinger you are likely to find a baker’s dozen selling snake oil, promising they can make the crippled walk and the blind see.

Unfortunately it is impossible to punch every single one of them in the face. This being so, my goal in this blog is to give a couple of hints as to how to tell the difference between a qualified technician and a quality conman.

One of the easiest indicators that someone selling SEO is in fact selling snake oil is how you get approached.

An SEO cold call is often a good indication that something’s up. Be more worried if they promise instant results. They might just tell you that they can get you a spot on Google’s first page right away. Often this means they set up a pay per click program. Pay Per Click is a sponsored listing. You get on the first page because you pay to be there. Once the money dries up your ranking disappears as well.

Also beware if your so-called SEO expert talks about a secret method that only they know and then refuse to divulge details. Guess what….people know how they get the caramel into Caramilk bars. In the world of the web there are no secrets, there are just people who do their research and keep up to date on the newest techniques. If they won’t tell you what they do, it probably isn’t worth hearing in the first place.

Another good indication that things are not on the up and up is when you are guaranteed results. The only way anyone can guarantee anything in this business is if they are investing in useless keywords or they are making promises they do not intend to keep.

Another easy way to find the slimy salesman is if they focus exclusively on your Google ranking. This is a tricky one because the actual SEO experts will also talk about rankings, because getting on that first page of results is in fact quite important, but how you get there influences how long you stay there.

Another good indication that you’re dealing with a grifter is if they sell themselves as practicing only offsite or onsite optimisation. You need both. If they approach you and tell you they can make you rich and only talk about content optimisation, keyword research and visibility analysis, take a second look. You should be equally suspicious if they tell you that their process is entirely based on links. Once more, repeat after me… SEO involves both offsite and onsite optimisation or it won’t provide long lasting results.

Farhan Fawzer

June 8, 2014

SEO Rankings by Tomorrow

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the most tricky and difficult businesses around when it comes to satisfying the client. Most SEO companies do not give much information nor educate their clients of how their website is being optimised. This is one of the most crucial factor and will determine whether the client is going to continue or just pull out.

Most SEOs and Agency’s face this situation mainly because most clients are not interested to listen about the optimisation work done on their website (How many times have you heard a client say I do not know those technical stuff you do), so what do they expect? Rankings, More visits, better Bounce rate etc. This has become the situation where business owners try to get a guarantee from the SEO or the agency, that their website should rank first page on Google for a set of keywords.

Clients should be educated and informed of what will be done and what can be expected.

How many of you had been in a scenario where you just commenced SEO work, then the client said “I want to be ranked by tomorrow”.

Farhan Fawzer

March 16, 2014

Terms used in Search Engine Optimisation

It is highly advisable, for any business organisation with a web site, to opt for Search Engine Optimisation, also referred to as SEO, in order to get the web site or web page as high up as achievable on search result pages. This also forms an important part of any company’s growth strategy. SEO possibly will aim at different types of searches, which include an image search, local search, video search and more.

However, prior to opting for Search Engine Optimisation, it is important for one to understand and be aware of the terms or terminology used in the field of SEO. Following are some of the terms used therein:

1) Algorithm: The theory used by search engines to assess the ranking of different websites.

2) Anchor Text: This means hyper linking of keywords or keyword phrases which have to be highlighted in search engines. In simple language, text that can be clicked in a hyperlink is anchor text.

3) Back links: These are links that begin from one website and point out to another website. These can also be termed as inbound links, which mean incoming links to one’s website. The more the back links, the higher the ranking of that particular website.

4) Click Through Rate (CTR): Usually referred to as CTR or Impression, this term means the number of times an individual responds to a commercial by clicking on it. It’s a method of assessing the success of an online ad campaign.

5) Cloaking: Cloaking is whereby; a different web page is displayed to a search engine crawler than what a visitor actually views.

6) Crawler/Spider: Also, known as a bot, it is a program that scans the web automatically and travels to different websites and reads their pages, for several reasons such as to create entries for indexing web pages, spamming etc.

7) Keyword / keyword phrase: It is a particular word / combination of words respectively, which is used for search in search engines. The purpose of SEO is to optimize websites for particular keywords that are relevant to the intended audience of the site.

8) Meta Tags: Also, known as Description Tags, this provides a small description for a web page, an also explains its different features. It may also include keyword listing. This description is usually shown together with a link to a particular page on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

9) Page Rank (PR): This is a highly essential aspect associated with Search Engine Optimisation. It is Google’s approach of measuring the comparative value of a particular web page in comparison to all the other web pages on the internet.

10) Pay Per Click (PPC): Commonly abbreviated as PPC, this term means the payment made by a particular website to search engines for every visitor it sends to that website.

There are a large number of terms associated with SEO, and the aforesaid are a just a few basic of the many terms. Experience has proven that search engine traffic is crucial to an organisation’s success. A higher number of visitors to a website or web page can give it unparalleled publicity, income, as well as exposure. It can be rightly said that, investing time and money in SEO, can result in an excellent rate of return.

Farhan Fawzer

March 9, 2014

Improving Hits To Your Website

The number of people who use the Internet on a daily basis is well over a billion and this figure keeps rising everyday which is probably why you have never quite understood why your website goes for days on end without as much as a single person visiting. Using the system of probabilities, with that many users on the Internet and each browsing multiple pages every single day then your website should be able to garner at least a decent number of visitors in at least a week but the truth is, that is just not how things work on the net. Majority of Internet users have very similar web browsing habits and chief among this is the use of search engines. To help you understand just how great an impact search engines have heard, recall that Google was once worth close to nothing but is now worth Billions.

This means that for you to have any success in getting any attention in the direction of your website, you have to know how to work the system of search engines. First of all you have to understand that it is not enough to get your website listed on the search engines database. When a user searches a particular keyword, chances are that he will get anything between a thousand and millions of results but why would they care to check the website that is a thousand pages away when the first two results have all that he needs. This means that to get any hits on your website, you have to find a way of ensuring your website is somewhere on the first page and this is where SEO comes in.

SEO stands for one of two things; it could either mean search engine optimisation which is the process by which the accessibility of a website on a search engine is improved through search results. SEO could also stand for search engine optimizers which is the name of given to those who do the job of optimisation. SEO takes into consideration the kind of things people search for and the specific keywords that they use. Using this, they can redesign or remodel their websites HTML and content to make it more relevant to the keywords.

If you have never tried out SEO then you also need to take a lot of caution in how you use this skill. Filling your websites content with all the right keywords will get you quite a lot of visibility on search engines but only for as long as the search engines will let you operate since these methods of SEO along with use of link farms and article spinning are usually classified into what is now known as black hat SEO which basically work by spamming the search engines index much like the way someone may spam millions of email addresses knowing he is likely to get a few hits purely by luck. The easiest, safest and most convenient way of going about SEO is to acquire the services of a search engine optimizer as they already know what to do and how to do it.

Farhan Fawzer

March 3, 2014

DOS and DON’TS of Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is a process by which you improve a website’s visibility and ranking on a search engine which simply means that whenever a user searches for a particular type or group of keywords that are associated with your site, the chances of your website being on the first few pages that the user will access are higher. This especially good if you are running a business through a website as sales are highly dependent on the number of visitors your website gets and the number of visitors your website gets is highly dependent on the position of your website in the search engine’s index. Search engines basically try to display the result that is most relevant first so one could say that search engine Optimisation is the process by which your website is made more relevant to the keywords that are frequently searched by users.

The process of Search engine Optimisation is quite simple if you what you are doing. You could either do this alone or hire somebody else to do it. Most people pick the latter choice as there are certain skills involved which not everyone has such as writing of articles but should you choose to go about this on your own, the first thing you should know is that when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it is commonly known, there are the right ways of doing it and there are the wrong ways. The right ways include:

Content and HTML editing: This is where the content or HTML of the website is edited to make it more relevant to the search of certain keywords.
Use of Backlinks: These are links leading to a website from other sites. The presence of these in many sites is an indication of importance and relevance of your site thus the search engine will consider it worthy of a higher ranking in the search engine.

The wrong ways of Search engine optimisation are those that use means that are considered dishonest in a bid to attain higher ranking in search engines. These methods are also known as spamdexing which is a reference to the fact that these Search engine optimisation methods actually work by spamming the index of the search engines. This spamming makes the seem more prevalent on the web or even relevant which might not always be the case. Some of the bad methods of search engine optimisation include:

1. Deception: These come in different forms and may include text that is usually given the same color as the background or at times positioned off-screen but in a position that will affect the search engine’s index.

2. Cloaking: This is a method where a website gives a different page according to whether it is a human user or the search engine that is requesting the page.

3. Keyword stuffing: There is nothing wrong with applying certain keywords in the website’s content but using keywords in excess and in a manner that adds little or no value to the content is considered another form of spamdexing.

Remember, applying search engine optimisation in the right ways could get you a lot of valuable net traffic but doing it in the wrong way will get you thrown of the search engine’s index faster than you can imagine.