DIY SEO? Leave it to the Experts

Google is mad. At whom you may ask? Well, the bottom line is.. SEO Spammers. These secretive webtrepeneurs spend hours “sloptimizing” their sites after reading a couple of DIY articles written by SEO experts who know the tips they’re giving out will be successful in the short run, but soon enough will leave your page vanishing in a puff of smoke. Then you’ll end up hiring them to rectify the issue and pay three times more than if you asked them to do it in the first place.

So what do SEO experts do that lazy spammers don’t?

Well, they look at the big picture.

Blogger Rand Fish created a great list of everything a professional SEO needs to consider:

• The business’ overall product, marketing and sales strategy and where SEO makes the most sense.
• Keyword research + targeting
• Funnel optimization (CRO has both direct and indirect SEO impacts these days)
• Testing + optimizing content for users
• Content strategy
• On-page optimization
• Making the site search-engine friendly (Taking into account faceted navigation, AJAX crawling, different treatment of Javascript/Flash etc.)
• Analytics
• Alternative search listings
• Usability + user experience issues
• Reputation tracking + management
• Competitive research
• Social media marketing
• Syndication, scraping, copyright and duplicate content issues

Many CEOs don’t take the time to understand how important SEO really is to a company. SEO departments end up banging their heads on their desks when questions pop up such as;

“Rather than change the text copy or content, Can’t You Just Change the Meta Tags?”

Sure, if you don’t care about the quality of your hits or how your brand looks to online consumers.

Getting a company to agree to change its copy is one of the hardest things to do.  To some, it looks much easier to just litter the bottom of your website with thousands of different keywords in order to get visits. What they don’t seem to realise is that someone searching for  “Cheap Running  Shoes” is not going to enjoy ending up on a site selling Hair Loss Products. However,  this is how some companies operate. Keyword-stuffing addicts can sometimes create hundreds of random keywords that they view as “high profile” on their sites regardless of whether or not they have anything to do with the company itself.

A Website selling magnetic rings that “heal you” – Some sort of natural medicine- has the following keywords:

Matt Cutts from Google has warned webmasters about keyword stuffing, saying

“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over-optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter and make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

A lot of people don’t realise just how creative the SEO industry has to be. While there is a lot of analysis and keyword research, creating interesting and engaging content is also a major priority.  You need to implement the keywords in a well-read way, not just throw them in there for SEO’s sake. Let’s take the cheap running shoes again, some DIY SEOs could consider writing the first paragraph of the site as:

Do you like cheap running shoes? We love cheap running shoes. If you need to buy cheap running shoes we have the best prices on cheap running shoes. Buy your cheap running shoes today.

Cringe right?

But this is where creativity comes into play, and a good SEO Expert knows exactly how to implement your keywords without being too obvious or annoying.  A site should be SEO optimised but not appear to be so.

Using SEO incorrectly can ultimately leave you banned from Google. We have helped companies in the past let go of their previous SEO styles and optimise them in such a way that soon enough they were listed again and getting more hits than ever before. The spamming style is easy, but letting an expert help ensures your long-term success.

Whether or not you use appropriate or underhanded techniques, the bottom line is if you don’t know enough about something, get an expert to do it.  It’s like using Google to diagnose that runny nose you have… you know the answer is always cancer and you spend the next two weeks worried about it until your doctor explains it’s just a common cold and hands you some paracetamol and a disapproving look.

Enough with the DIY.