What you need to know about SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the way a websites content and navigation is structured (optimised) so search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc...) can find and list it in the search results when people look for what might be on it, goods, services, information etc...
This is done by following rules about the way a websites content is written, what is included on the pages and how easily vistors can navigate around the site.
SEO is vital to get your website listed so it can be found by people looking for what you are offering.
Without good SEO your website is not working effectively, see our article on Why You Really Need SEO written in jargon-free English.
The rules for SEO are set by the worlds biggest search engine, Google. Because they handle about 89% of the worlds search engine traffic, websites need to meet their SEO requirements.
Follow Googles rules and they will list you, don't and your website will be so far down the rankings the only way to find it will be to type in your web address (URL)
This Google article How Google search works shows how SEO affects your website from the search engines point of view.
Good SEO keeps your website discoverable to your target market, it is not difficult to do but needs constant checking
Bad SEO using disapproved techniques (Black Hat SEO) will get your website penalized and can effectively kill your website.
If you don't have the budget for a decent SEO service, don't go for a cheap fast solution and risk killing your website with bad SEO.
Use our 10 tips for DIY SEO to get the basics right and boost your rankings without using paid methods (organically).
For more info about SEO techniques and practices see our article on Managing your own SEO.
Free SEO Vs Paid SEO
Basic SEO is something anyone building a website can and should do. Take a look at our article Doing Your Own SEO For Free to see how to do this.
This type of SEO is called organic and does not involve paid advertising, all the tools you need do this are free.
Paid SEO services offer to make your website compliant with Googles Webmaster guidelines ensuring the best listings for your pages in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
Unless you do not have the time to DIY then you do not need paid services for a small business website or blog. Why pay for what you can easily do yourself in a few hours a week?
If you read and follow Googles Webmaster guidelines you will get the same results, not as quickly as the professionals, but you will get there and it won't cost you a penny!
If you need help then use our add-on SEO tool @ £4.99 per month to keep your SEO up to date
When to pay for SEO
For large websites in highly competitive industries advanced SEO is necessary to ensure the website is compliant, on a day to day level, with the techniques (search algorithms*) search engines use to measure and rank websites.
These huge websites have to be constantly checked to make sure the user experience (UX) is consistently good, everything works and fresh content is updated regularly.
Keeping large websites SEO in good order is time demanding. There are over 200 ranking factors and the ways they are interpreted are constantly changing. Google changes its search algorithm 500 to 600 times a year.
SEO packages for big businesses involve complex paid for campaigns alongside organic SEO and maintenance.
Agencies can charge £1000s a month for advanced SEO and many large companies have SEO professionals on the payroll. John Lewis pays its head of SEO about £95,000 a year.
When not to pay for SEO
Unless you are a large business in a highly competitive industry you do not need advanced SEO.
The DIY techniques we explain in our SEO guides are free, simple, effective and will push your own website on to the first page of Google for certain search queries, you will see results within a few months.
If you can build your own website, you can do your own SEO.
Despite all the ads promising to do otherwise, the only way to get instantly on the first page of Google is to use a paid campaign (advertising), which means spending big money.
Ready to do your own free SEO?
Visit our article Do your own SEO for free to see how to get started.
Is your SEO Working?
To discover how well your current SEO is working you need an audit to find anything that might be stopping the search engines from properly crawling, understanding and indexing the pages and content of your website.
You can do this using one of the free audit tools in our Free Website Tools Page.
Once you have your report you can get your SEO in line with Google Webmaster Guidelines, making it better equipped to grow traffic, be more user-friendly and get better listings in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
To make it easier you can use our add-on SEO tool which will help you do this and keep your SEO up to date.
Is Your Website Penalised?
By penalised we mean suddenly your websites ranking plunges, it can nosedive from page 1 to page 300 overnight because Google will penalize websites that it discovers using disapproved tactics to boost rankings, such as buying links to your site, copying content from other websites, and stuffing pages with keywords. See this Wikipedia article on Google Penalties.
You may have been the victim of black hat SEO or purchased a domain that was already penalised. The most annoying thing is when Google updates its search algorithms it can affect your website by penalizing previously acceptable SEO.
Google has even penalised its own website at least 5 times
You can find out if your website is penalised by using this quick free tool at Is My Website Penalized. Try it now, if you get an adverse result contact us about our security plans and let us see if we can help you.
This is not a free or quick service. Often the best, cheapest and quickest method is to ditch the domain and get a new one, making sure it is clean.
You may find this article by Neil Patel 50 Reasons Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google a useful guide to prevent you doing something that may get your website penalised.
Ready to do your own SEO?
Visit our article Do your own SEO for free to see how to get started.
*A search algorithm is the step-by-step procedure used to locate specific data among a collection of data. It is considered a fundamental procedure in computing.