Getting your onsite SEO right

The recent Google algorithm updates (Panda, Penguin) are clearly showing that despite all the SEO efforts businesses display, any website is at the mercy of a change of rules by the search engines, and particularly Google.
This does not mean that you should give up on SEO, but it simply emphasises the fact that clean/ethical/white hat SEO is now even more important than ever. Do not over optimise, do not buy links, think quality more than quantity.
With this in mind, now is the perfect time to get your onsite optimisation right (or review it)

The onsite/offsite optimisation debate

 

In the past 5 years, link building has taken more importance in the search algorithms, so much so that some figures suggest that it now accounts for 60 to 70% of a website's rankings. The incorporation of social signals and development of new social networks has accelerated this trend further in the past 2-3 years.
While no one can argue with these numbers, I have observed a worrying trend with a lot of my clients recently: they seem to completely neglect onsite optimisation at the benefit of link building.

Ideally for a natural organic growth, both activities need to be undertaken at the same time, and without good onsite SEO, it is very likely that your website will not rank well in search engines, especially if you're a new/growing business without a lot of brand recognition/awareness.

So my advice has always been the following: get your onsite SEO right or it will cost you. And from a resource standpoint, it is much easier and often quicker to get your site optimised than it is to acquire good quality backlinks.

Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing

Back to SEO basics once again with this great article from Search Engine Land...today, all you need to know about title tags. As many people still seem to be confused by this core element of any SEO strategy, it is great to see a list of do's and dont's when writing title tags.

Think users AND search engines

Once thing to always remember is that while meta tags are great to improve your search engine rankings, they should also be useful for your website visitors. After all, visitors bring revenue, and without revenue there is no business.

Keep it simple

Although the temptation to over optimise your title tags is great, keep them simple, to the point and relevant to the page. Keyword stuffing doesn't work and will only confuse your visitors (and damage your rankings)

Keep it unique

Each page title should be unique and contain the same keywords as the page content itself. Keep things consistent, coherent and it'll all be fine

Stability is key

Meta tags including title tags do not need to be changed often, and frequent changes will potentially confuse search engine spiders. As long as you get your keyword research right there shouldn't be any need for you to revise your tags for a while. Of course you can tweak and refine as you go along, but refrain from updating your tags every month.

Feel free to share you title tags stories as I'm sure your experience will help others and until next time, have a great xmas!

Whatever happened to good old SEO?

I've been in the search marketing / SEO industry for quite a few years now (7 to be exact!) and as such I've seen things move from fairly straightforward onsite optimisation to complex link building and social media strategies.

When reflecting on this the other day, I started to feel nostalgic about the days when SEO was all about keyword research and making sure that your site was as optimised as possible avoiding black hat techniques. Call me old school, but to me, this was real SEO where you were rewarded for your hard work by good rankings.

The rise of link building

Now that link building has taken prominence in search engine algorithms (60 to 70% of rankings are based on this) the SEO game has completely changed, and agencies with a network of blog/forums/websites can guarantee you improved links and rankings in a very short space of time. While there's no denying that this strategy works, I've got to say that as an experienced SEO I find this slightly disappointing and very close to a grey hat technique.

I've got nothing against link building if it's done cleverly with good anchor text, relevant keywords and page rank analysis, but I think that by not assessing relevance of links Google is skewing its own results therefore providing searchers with inaccurate results.

So basically, a business with clever agencies (and big budgets) can reach top rankings for specific keywords and get more traffic than a potentially better company with less understanding of search marketing. And to me, that goes against the basic principles of SEO which are providing searchers with relevant results.

What about relevance?

Despite a lot of talk about relevance, LSI (latent semantic indexing) and contextual searches in the past few years, the major search engines still have to implement a lot of these theories into their algorithms. To Google and co, a link to your site with targeted anchor text from a website with a high page rank still matters, even if the site is not relevant to your activity. And until the engines start looking at the relevance of the link, keyword and website content in relation to your website, then there will be ways to fool them by creating thousands of irrelevant links.

Onsite SEO still matters

Despite all of this, onsite optimisation with good keyword research, internal links, metadata optimisation, alt tags, title tags and all the rest still matters. These elements should remain a priority for all SEOs out there, so keep flying the flag!

A the industry evolves, so must I, but I'll never forget my SEO roots as they are what I enjoy the most in my job.

What's your experience with SEO? are you frustrated with link building? How do you feel about the industry changes?