3 November 2015

SEO Search Engine Optimisation

Common SEO Misconceptions

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can sometimes be seen as a dark art, there are lots of techniques that can be seen as bad practices. There is a large amount of misinformation about SEO and how it should work. You may have come across people in the past talking about SEO and how it should be done, normally the case is they aren’t professionals and they won't know how to point out how a website is actually failing due to it’s SEO.

The SEO industry has changed a lot over the years, with updates such as Google Panda, Pigeon, Hummingbird and Penguin, staying on the right tracks can be a tricky task. It’s important that you know what is out of date, what is harmful and what is a waste of time and effort.

Think of SEO like going to the gym… You have to work hard and build fitness, then after a few months, people start to take notice.

We can unmask the common SEO misconceptions so you can begin to look out for things that will help improve your website’s search engine rankings and organic traffic.

1 - Submitting your site to Google

For some people, it is hard to get their head around how Google indexes your website so it appears in search results.

If you are trying to submit your URL to Google’s Search Console, you are wasting your time. Search engines have ‘bots’ that crawl the web to collect info, they then report back to Google what they have found then Google will start to index based on that information. If your website is optimised, they will find you and rank you.

 

2 - Don’t fill your content with keywords

There is a term for this,‘Keyword stuffing’. It is the process of overloading your webpage’s content with keywords in an attempt to control how well your site ranks. Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest tricks in the SEO book, and Google are well on top of it - As you can see in this video

 

3 - Do my Keywords have to be the exact match?

Whenever you are writing content, the main focus should be on pleasing the reader, rather than trying to over-optimise your pages for when the bots to crawl them.

Search engines use synonyms and related search terms to work out what a page is about. There is a system called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) that means a page can rank for search queries that don’t match the exact term of keywords.

For example, if you search for “Metallic paint” on Google, you will likely see pages that include the keyphrase “Shiny paint” in the results, hence the LSI system finding searches that are similar.

 

4 - More links doesn’t always mean better

Having more inbound links will not help with your site rankings, unless the links are a high quality.

A high quality link that is coming from a trusted website is a lot more likely to have an advantage over multiple poor links. For example, having just one link from a website like the BBC you are likely to get more traffic as opposed to having hundreds of poor quality links on various spammy sites/directories.

You can also be penalised for having spammy links to your website. In this case, quality over quantity is the way to go.

 

5 - SEO is a one time show

SEO is not something that can just be done once and then be left to gather traffic. Search engines are always being updated to improve the user experience.

Google also loves fresh content so if you do your one-time SEO work and just leave it, the chances are Google won’t rank it as well as they would if you were updating it.

 

6 - SEO is dead

If you believe that SEO is the technique of trying to manipulate search engines into ranking your site higher than it deserves to be, then yes, SEO is dead… But wait, because that isn’t SEO.

SEO means working on your website to make it more accessible to search engines. It is the art of making a website better, so it deserves it’s place in the higher rankings.

Over time SEO may change, but if you are doing it properly it is far from dead. And it will continue to be far from it as long as people are using search engines.

 

What can we do for you?

We can provide you a full SEO Audit report on how well your website is optimised. What our report contains:

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Google Analytics setup + Integration (If you don’t already have it)

Google Webmaster Tools setup + Integration (If you don’t already have it)

Common health check

• Is page content OK?

• Keyword density

• Text/HTML ratio

• URL length check

• H1 - H5 check

Keyword research

Site visibility

• Pages blocked by robots.txt

• Pages blocked by noindex

• Page status e.g. 404

• Redirects

Meta content

• Title description length check + Recommended length

• Duplicate title descriptions

• Meta description length check + Recommended length

• Duplicate meta descriptions

• Google Universal Analytics tracking code check

Content check

• Canonical URL check

• Link checks -. Internal, External, Total

• Attributes - Word count & Duplicate content

Links

• Link type

• Link text

• Broken link

• Nofollow link

• Broken pages

Image optimisation

• ALT text (Alternative text)

• Title text

• Pages e.g. how many pages image appears on

• Attributes - Broken & Size

Semantics

• Headings on page (H1 to H3)

• Schema data check - Items + Types

 

If you think your business can benefit from an SEO Audit, call 01164 244 244 and speak to one of the FDC team!