Is SEO Easy?

SEO is tough. No, it’s easy… You have to read through a pile of stuff to get some idea of the complexity involved. All companies out there want to be on page one of google when a punter keys in a search that relates to them.

To get there involves money and time – lots of time.. unless you have something to offer that is totally unique. Anyone who tells you it’s easy is not an expert in SEO and not telling the truth.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. In search results Google (or Bing) displays links to pages it considers relevant and authoritative. Authority is mostly measured by analysing the number and quality of links from other web pages. In simple terms your web pages have the potential to rank in Google so long as other web pages link to them.

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering. In many respects it's simply quality control for websites. But, if there was ever an industry that was little understood by outsiders it's SEO. Ask some SEO companies about SEO and they will try and blind you with science and confuse you into thinking it's a black art. Say to some companies ‘what is SEO?’ and two hours later you'll be none the wiser. SEO is a black art.

Perhaps a good way of doing well with SEO is to avoid google penalties.

It’s a big list and involves the following.

On-page guideline violations & related notifications.

  • Major and pure spam problems - When site owners receive the manual action notification highlighting major spam problems, Google has identified the page content as entirely spammy, with no value to users.
  • Spam problems – similar to the one above - This manual action suggests that, while the website isn’t entirely bad, bits and pieces are not good enough.
  • User-generated spam - f this penalty is applied, that generally indicates that the affected site is being exploited by spammers and black hats.
  • Hacked content spam - a compromised website which is being abused by spammers to inject malicious and/or irrelevant content without the site owner’s consent.
  • Incorrect structured data - Sites with poorly implemented or deceptive structured data are likely to lose their additional SERP real estate.
  • Unnatural outbound links - Selling links for the purpose of manipulating PageRank is yet another Google Webmaster Guidelines violation

Off-page guideline violations & related notifications

Unnatural inbound links - Affected sites are deemed to be engaging in link schemes (link building intended to manipulate Google rankings), which Google considers a major violation. The penalty’s impact can be partial or affect the entire domain.

See https://searchengineland.com/guide/google-penalties which has all the details.

 

So what can you do next?

SEO Basics

Do these

    1. On-Site - You might be tempted to shove a lot of keywords onto your pages, but that is not the goal. In fact, Google has unleashed an over-optimization penalty that targets websites that have too many keywords stuffed onto one page. So when it comes to keyword optimization, keep it simple – think of up to five keywords or keyword phrases for each page on your website and optimize for those.
    2. Why you need Content – Quality content consists of.
      • Blog Posts
      • Industry Articles
      • Tutorials & How To Guides
      • Infographics
      • Videos
      • Podcasts
    3. Off-Site Optimization (aka Link Building) - The basic goal of link building is to get other websites to link to yours. If you think about ranking at the top of search results as a popularity contest, then links are like votes saying your website deserves to be ranked highly.
    4. Google+ Can Help with Rankings - Google’s own social network can help you rank better in search results for people you are connected with.
    5. Monitoring Your Results – The two most important tools you can use to monitor these results are the following.
      • Authority Labs – Create a free account which you can get after using the 30 day trial of the pro account. Use this tool to track keyword rankings for your website so you can see if they are moving up in search results.
      • Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to learn more about the visitors to your website. In particular, monitor your organic search traffic sources to see what keywords people are using to find your website in search results. By setting up goals, you can see which keywords lead to visits where visitors do what you want them to do on your website such as sign up for a mailing list or purchase a product. This will help you learn what keywords you should be targeting with your SEO campaign.

Read more at - https://blog.kissmetrics.com/simple-guide-to-seo/

You could just..

      • Get on Google My Business & Other Local Websites like Yelp/Foursquare
      • Do extensive research on the keywords that aren't too competitive. Anything from Low - Medium Competition.
      • Combine multiple keywords into long tailed keywords for the SEO Meta Title, sprinkle in some of those Keywords you researched onto the page, add the keywords into ALT tags.
      • Continue to get on more Local websites like Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon, etc use Moz local.
      • Create Videos for #Youtube and add the Keywords your researched in the title, description and tags. Also, input a clickable link into each video description.

What should you do next?

Talk to Alchemy https://www.alchemyinteractive.co.uk/what-we-do/digital-strategy#

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