Tag: seo

SEO Backlinks and Expired Websites

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation which means how to make a website rank highly on search engines so more people can find it easily and hence go to that website.

There are many techniques used in SEO including use of keywords, headings, quality content, meta-data for pictures etc. and lots more.

One old fashioned approach to SEO was to get as many backlinks to your site from other sites as possible.

Google keep their exact algorithms for calculating ranking a secret but links to your website from other quality high ranked sites is going to help.

Recently emails have started to appear offering huge numbers of backlinks. One email offers to get up to 500,000 backlinks from their inventory of websites (many in your niche).

500,000 backlinks from poor sites is not a good idea.

You should always try to have quality content on your site to attract people and that includes only having backlinks from other quality sites.

Another variant on this is the idea of purchasing expired websites that still have an entry on Google. You buy the expired website and create links from there to your website.  There are businesses that specialise in finding and buying such expired websites then selling them on under the guise of SEO.

These are unpleasant practices. Do not be fooled into believing there is a magic answer to endless traffic.

To get visitors – create the best content you can, get links from sites that can appreciate your work, use social media, articles etc. There are lots of worthwhile methods available rather than attempting to cheat.

Do leave a comment on this post – click on the post title then scroll down to leave your comment.

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SEO Pay by Performance

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All businesses get endless emails offering SEO services.

SEO services is Search Engine Optimisation which just means tweaking your website to try to get a higher ranking on Google and other search engines.

At the radio station we get more than a hundred of these emails each month.

But the SEO people have a difficulty in that Google keep changing the rules for how they determine the ranking of a website and hence where it appears in the search engine results. Google do this to try to stop SEO people cheating the system. Google want the best websites to appear top of the list – not the ones that try to cheat the system.

A recent email from an American Online Marketing business says SEO is dead!

But they have a solution to that – you pay for results rather than the work involved.

At first sight, this might sound like a good deal – you only pay if they get your website high up on Google’s rankings.

But the devil is in the detail.

For example, suppose you sell sofas. If you type Buy a sofa in Google you get about 42 million results. To get to the top of that list on Google for the search phrase “buy a sofa” would cost a fortune.

But if you make your search phrase more specific then it gets easier.

Maybe your sofas are handmade and covered with leather. Now if you optimise your website to attract people searching for ‘buy a sofa handmade leather’ then Google only finds 500,000 results and that would still cost a lot to get to the top of that results set but hugely cheaper than the previous one.

And so on – the more detail in the phrases you’re trying to be the top result for – the easier and hence cheaper it becomes.

Ultimately you can find specific phrases where it is practical to get to the top of the list – but the more specific the search query the less people are going to make that search and hence the fewer actual customers you could possibly get from this.

But the point is that although the SEO business could find phrases that get you to the top of the results –  you’re unlikely to get much business from it – hence you pay them for nothing.

The Salesman Who Wants To Do Everything

Too Much

This comes from an an email titled ‘Quality Web Design”.  Most businesses get stack of these kinds of emails – offering web design services, Search engine optimisation and similar.

This one was from a guy named Yuri with a Gmail account which tells you that Yuri is a lone worker, not part of a company otherwise he would use a company email address.

The email starts with “We provide a wide range of services to clients around the globe”

This likely means he is a solo worker and may have done once some work for a client outside his homeland.

Next there’s a badly formed marketing pitch about saving clients time and money.

Then a list of services on offer.

I don’t think this is a scam and maybe Yuri is a hard worker, but the problem is that the list covers too many things – from designing a logo to Enterprise Resource Planning with everything in between including Pay Per Click campaigns and mobile APPS.

The kind of person good at designing logos is different from the person with the technical expertise to build an APP and that’s a very different person to the one with many years experience in corporate IT who can lead a team providing an ERP solution.

This is the equivalent to seeing an ad in the post office window for someone who will fix your leaky tap or rewire your house or build a skyscraper – different skillsets.

If you want a good job then you pick someone with expertise in that area and people claiming expertise in too many disparate areas may know a little about many things but won’t have the in depth experience necessary to be very good at something.

Choose carefully.