Is it Time to Fire Your SEO Company?
SEO malpractice is rampant these days. It’s everywhere you look. I see blatant examples of SEO malpractice everyday, but fortunately, the majority of it is the result of ignorance, rather than intentional harm. So what are some of the most common issues?
I don’t see a lot of the old-school mistakes any more, like white text on a white back ground. But that used to work pretty well, until Google caught on to it. If anyone’s still trying that trick, they’re either a fool or are just trying to ruin your search ranking forever.
While I’m not seeing a lot of those types of tricks any more, I am still seeing a lot sites that just seem to miss the point of SEO.
It’s not just about filling your pages with keywords.
It’s not just about using keywords in your headlines or titles or even in the meta tags.
It’s not just about using your keywords in the right location on the page.
It’s about doing it in a strategic, calculated way.
It’s not just about getting lots of sites to link to your site.
It’s not just about creating lots of hyper links within your site.
It’s not just about bolding your text or using footer links.
It’s about doing it in a strategic, calculated way.
It’s not just about building a huge set of thousands of keywords.
It’s not just about finding words that get lots of traffic.
It’s not just about writing compelling headlines.
It’s about doing it in a strategic, calculated way.
It’s about aligning all of your efforts at the same time. If you get 50% of the things right, that’s not going to get you top rankings. You have to fire on all cylinders.
So how do you do that?
Align everything. If you’re focusing on a particular phrase, optimize a page for that phrase. Then point hyperlinks on other pages of your site to that optimized page using the keyword as link text. Re-read that last sentence until you get it. Inexperienced SEO companies neglect that simple point all the time. They create silly links that say things like “click here” as the link text. All that does is help your page rank better for the phrase “click here.”
Then build links from other sites into your site, using the keyword as the link text, pointing to the optimized page.
Don’t optimize a page for something like “New York City Vacations” and then point links to the page that say “Things to do in New York.” That’s not aligned. An aligned site would use links that say “New York City Vacations.” That reinforces the content on the optimized page and let’s Google know that an outside source have confirmed the content on the page.
Hope that helps.
Chadd Bryant
