Beware SEO experts selling Snake oil
Periodically our customers are approached by SEO (search engine optimization) specialists who promise no.1 slots on Google for $100 or similar. Caveat emptor. Assuming the said company does any work at all for your money, you should check their credentials very carefully.
If the SEO company practices black hat SEO, you may find yourself blacklisted permanently from Google. Wikipedia defines black hat SEO as:
“…attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method redirects users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. A method that sends a user to a page that was different from the page the search engined ranked is black hat as a rule. The black hat practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders and another version to human visitors is called cloaking.”
How low can you go (lo-go, get it?)?
Frank Walker must be delighted with the London Olympic logo debacle. The flying banana at £240k now looks like a complete bargain. At £400k, you’d really expect the logo to be finished properly. Here’s how it should look:
Fishing for link love
I’ve blogged and spoken many times under the heading content is king. It’s good old-fashioned white hat seo. If you produce good content, then it will be useful to your prospects, and Google will like you.
The added advantage of writing juicy content is that you produce link bait. Link bait is content that baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists will often charge you for producing content which achieves this goal.
Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “…interesting enough to catch people’s attention”; which sounds like a reasonable criterion for all copy.
When you’re writing copy for your site, you should be thinking about about the following target audiences:
- Your prospects
- Your clients
- The Googlebot - how does the content look to Google? Use the site:yoursite.com command in the Google toolbar to get a quick view.
- Other site owners (link bait targets).
Remember inbound links are a key metric for search engine ranking, and quantity and quality count.
Here are some common examples of link bait:
Informational Hooks : These provide information a reader may find useful. Bloggers who have specific expertise in an area of common interest often yield great links. David Warr’s blog on tea and coffee is a good example of this.
News Hooks: provide fresh information
Humour hooks: stories, anecdotes, images, or video footage, which do the rounds on Friday afternoon email.
Evil hooks: the Simon Cowell of link-baiting. Speak the unspeakable, criticise, lambast - standard PR noise really.
Tool hooks: create a tool, e.g. SEO ranker, carbon emmission calculator, that people will link to.