What to Know About Search Engine Optimization SEO
Many companies promise to make your business’s website show up on the first page of Google searches. When done correctly, using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great tool that can lead your website to improved organic search rankings—resulting in more traffic and more potential leads. However, there can be some negative outcomes if not done properly. Before beginning your search for an SEO company, it’s important to become an educated consumer and understand how search engines work, along with what could go wrong if SEO is done incorrectly. Let’s review how SEO works, the best practices when it comes to SEO, and what backend practices could get your site into trouble.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid, organic traffic rather than pay-per click (PPC) traffic.
Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.
Another way that Google determines which sites get to page one is when SEO specialists use frequently searched, short-tail keywords and long-tail key questions in a blog post article or within your website. If an article aims to answer the questions a searcher has, it’s more valued. How your website and articles are formatted matters as well. For example, correctly formatted headers, including H1s for main titles and H2s and H3s for subheaders are important for Google to understand how your website is organized. In good SEO articles, the first sentence under every header should speak directly to that topic.
Things to look for when hiring someone to do SEO
Deciding to hire a SEO company is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time. Many SEO specialists or companies provide useful services for website owners, including:
Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development
Management of online business development campaigns
Keyword research
SEO training
Expertise in specific markets and geographies
If you're thinking about hiring an SEO specialist, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your specialist can ensure that your site is designed to be search-engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, an expert can also help improve an existing site.
Bad ways to do SEO
As we mentioned above, apart from the many good things an SEO specialist can provide, there are a few things to stay away from as well. If the company you're hiring does shady backend things while trying to improve your SEO results, your site could end up in trouble with Google over the long term. Here are a few poor SEO tactics that can lead your website in the wrong direction and are violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
Cloaking: This is when a website presents different content or URLS to users and search engines that are not the results they expected.
Paid Links or Link Schemes: Paid links is the act of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. This act disregards the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Paid links are one form of link scheme that are intended to manipulate PageRank.
Hidden texts and links: This is the act of hiding text or links in your content. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including using white text on a white background, locating text behind an image, or setting the font size to 0.
Irrelevant keywords and keyword stuffing: This is the act of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context, not as natural prose.
Although there are many things to be aware of when hiring an SEO company, a good specialist is knowledgeable and can improve your rankings without cheating the system.
When educating yourself on SEO, we recommend viewing these resources:
Don’t get taken by unscrupulous SEO companies
Many clients and partners come to Moser asking about SEO rankings and keyword concerns. Moser is providing this information about smart Search Engine Optimization for the benefit of all of our clients and partners. We do not offer direct SEO services, but we do build Smart SEO practices into every application we build. The best way to not need an SEO company after your app is done is by building it in the correct way from the start. Contact us to learn more about our Application Services practice.
