Quick links
With so much competition on the net these days, everyone needs some level of SEO on their website to achieve any decent rankings within Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO can be tricky to get right if you don’t know what you’re doing; many people target the wrong keywords, for example, and others who may be getting good rankings initially soon find that their website has been thrown out and is no longer ranking at all.
If this has happened to you then it is time to review the SEO techniques that you have been using. It may be something simple that can be easily fixed like a minor technical detail, or it could be that Google consider your SEO to be ‘black hat’ which will get you thrown out straight away. These techniques may have worked in the past, but with all the algorithm changes Google have been making over the past 6 months, many of them may now have a detrimental effect on your rankings.
Here are our top tips for ensuring that your SEO is relevant and, above all, completely ethical:
Avoid ‘Black Hat’ Techniques at all costs – examples of ‘black hat’ methods are automatic blogging (i.e. the comments that you get which make no sense as they are clearly just variations of the same phrase), hidden scripts such as concealed keywords in the footer of your site, buying backlinks, and mass article distribution (i.e. sending the same article out to hundred of sources).
Back Linking from any old site – with back links, it is really quality over quantity that Google look for. Don’t just get a link from any site just for the sake of having it; sites must be seen to ‘naturally’ link to yours in that they should be relevant to your site (if your site is about pets then you will need to look for sites that have some relevance to the topic of pets), not have too much advertising and have a decent page rank. In the same way that authority flows through from good sites, back links from ‘bad’ sites will have a detrimental effect on yours.
Keyword Stuffing – When you have found your chosen keywords (I would recommend the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for keyword suggestions) you’re probably going to want to include them on every page as much as possible. However, your keywords should be varied and only make up about 2-5% of the copy on each page to avoid keyword stuffing and possible duplicate content (which Google will penalise you for). With regards to the Meta tags; the same applies. Limit the Meta title and description to one keyword and ensure that it is the most relevant to that page.
