Paying a search engine optimization company or SEO consultancy has long divided the internet world with many believing that SEO can easily be done by an individual and others believing that sometimes it is best left to the seo-optimierung experts. It's a bit like trying to fix your broken car yourself instead of paying a mechanic at a garage to do it, even if you have no experience of what's going on under the hood.
If you understand SEO, the techniques, and the issues that all go into the whole process, or are willing to spend months learning how to do things, then you can probably do a great job doing your own SEO -Run campaign.
A good SEO company
A good SEO company can come into play when you don't know what to do, don't have the time, or just don't want to be involved in the process. A bit like the mechanic example: if you don't have the experience or skills to run a well-planned SEO campaign, then everything could go very wrong when you start the car for the first time or the website!
The main mistakes that many newcomers to the SEO world make are repeated every day,
Usually included with these
- Keyword stuffing / spamming in the title tag
- buy links
- Gain thousands of links in the first month
- Writing content just for search engines
- Incorrect description text
A decent SEO company will encourage you to learn the entire process even if they do it for you as in many cases they rely on well-written and expert content, often provided by the website owner rather than the SEO company come. But hiring the services of people who know what they're doing and who have the resources and people to get the job done properly and efficiently can sometimes be the only way forward for many small businesses.
The problem with SEO on an established website is that if you get it wrong or make a mistake that the search engines really don't like, it can have devastating effects in the short term. Examples of webmasters tinkering with well-ranking title keywords and then slipping 20 pages are common; You just have to search the internet to see these. Also, the number of people who are still buying links, which is totally against the engine's policy, keeps increasing. Many of these people are often SEO beginners who are panicking for the first time in order to get the website higher in the search engines.
There are many good books, websites, articles, and blogs that can show you how to run a successful SEO campaign, but if you're going to do it yourself, you need to make sure you're willing to continually learn and evolve as SEO changes almost like the way we design websites, with new techniques and algorithms changing the way many campaigns need to be run.
Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO web optimization and web design company serving Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales.
He has been in the SEO and internet marketing world for many years and by collaborating with another company he launched the new SEO business.
Top 40 SEO Myths Everyone Should Know
Myth #1: Only first place counts
Many e - books and other resources that business owners use place a heavy emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results, whether that's on Google Search, other search engines, or even places like social media. However, surveys have shown that people often look at other results and scroll down the page. For example, being at the top of a second page can be very beneficial for traffic. Also, search ranking is only one piece of the puzzle. Now Google is also placing other results like social recommendations and local results on the page, which means you have a lot more options open to you and first place isn't as important as it used to be.
Myth #2: You can do SEO unaided
Doing SEO simply means following a series of techniques and procedures to increase the likelihood of web users visiting your website. It is true that anyone can learn these techniques and if you are a website owner and want to do your own SEO then you can take the time to learn and apply these techniques. But SEO can be complex and touches on many areas such as online marketing, programming, technical aspects as well as PR skills. Most business owners just don't have what it takes to do a good job at SEO and that's why there are so many agencies offering help. A simple IT staff or online marker is often not enough if you want to achieve really good results.
Myth #3: META tags are very important
In the past, every page on your website needed meta tags to rank well. These are small pieces of code that would give Google a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would rely on these to figure out what your site is about. Now, however, these don't affect your ranking at all. Both Google and Bing have stopped caring about META tags to index websites. However, they are not useless. For example, your description tag is the text that often appears next to the link that appears in search results, so it's still a useful part of the action.
Myth #4: Keyword-rich domain names rank higher
In the dot-com days, the URL used was very important. Google placed great importance on the domain name and if you could get a name that included your keyword you would gain a great advantage over other websites. For this reason, many companies bought domain names for a lot of money in the late 90s. But now the indexing process only looks at the actual content of your pages and not the domain name. This name still matters because people can still see it, but it won't rank you higher.
Myth #5: You must submit your website to Google or other search engines
All search engines used to have URL submission forms that you could use to submit your website to Google and others. In fact, they still do, but this process is unnecessary. The crawlers these search engines now use are so sophisticated that any new website is found within days, if not hours. The only time you need to worry about submitting your website is if for some reason it hasn't been automatically indexed after a few days.
Myth #6: Submitting a sitemap will improve your ranking
Google provides a webmaster interface and from there you can submit a sitemap, which is an XML file containing links to every page on your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file with every change, but it's not necessary. Submitting a sitemap doesn't change your rankings, it just adds pages that may not have been indexed yet. If your site is typical and has links to all pages, then it is not needed.
Myth #7: SEO has nothing to do with social media
Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the only technique to get traffic organically. But now social media is ubiquitous and the line between the two is quickly blurring. While some marketers still view SEO and social media as separate beasts, the truth is that they are very closely related. For example, Google now includes its own social network, Google Plus, in its search results. If you can get enough influential people talking about your product and linking to your site, their recommendations will show up in all the Google search results their friends do. This clearly affects SEO. On the other hand, Facebook has started to embrace search as well, recently rolling out its Open Graph engine that searches based on friends and interests. The two areas are therefore closely linked and are becoming ever closer.
