According to many SEO companies and SEO consultants the steps to an ethical SEO campaign is divided in to four steps generally. The first would be keyword research, second, content development, third web development and fourth link building. These are considered by many search engine optimisation companies and consultants to be the general template for developing the website as well as its promotion. These steps are under the category of white hat SEO and that they might seem to be very easy to do but are in fact very difficult to accomplish. It is therefore important for every SEO company and SEO consultants to understand what are the different steps included in these general categories in order to implement the details of the search engine optimisation campaign correctly.
The first category or step is keyword research, it is a known fact that the keywords which will be utilised on your website will form the corner stone of your entire SEO campaign. It is therefore just right for an SEO campaign to start by researching which keywords would be useful. At this stage SEO companies and SEO consultants will conduct some computation and statistics in order to determine which keywords would help generate a large volume of traffic with less competition. Keyword research also entails researching for the keywords being utilised by your competitors, especially your competitors who are already on the top spot of the search engine.
The second category is content development, at this stage you will already draft your websites’ design and content. The development of the website and its content should incorporate your suggestions and ideas in order to deliver your desired output without of course compromising the marketing plans or designs for your website. Content development includes the incorporation or choosing images for the website as well as developing content for the website and further the design of your navigation structure for the website which is a very important element.
Following the conventional way of SEO and using only White hat techniques you can expect that your websites’ ranking will skyrocket to page one.
Black hat SEO is considered to be one of the “dishonest” way of acquiring links, content and ultimately a high ranking. Although high ranking may be achieved through black hat SEO such ranking is not stable that is there is a huge possibility that the target website that was implemented with Black hat techniques would have its ranking go down in short period of time. This is the reason why it is imperative or important that white hat techniques be implemented in order to have the search engine recognise the target website to be an honest site and a reputable website. There are times however that any SEO company and SEO consultant would accidentally dwell or utilise black hat techniques which can be attributed with the fact that they are misinformed or uninformed on the nature of such SEO technique that they are using this can further be attributed with the fact that the nature of an SEO technique could vary or change depending on whether or not such technique is being abused to give undue advantage. This is why it is important for an SEO company or SEO consultant to be informed of the different techniques that may be considered as black hat SEO in order to avoid, prevent or even remedy a website that was suspended because of the implementation of such. The following are some Black hat SEO techniques:
1. Use of Automation Tool in Link Building – search the internet for any SEO automation tool especially those that would automatically submit information to different sites in order to gain backlinks and you will find out that there are lots of such tools. These tools would enable one to thousand of links in just one click, building link at that rate is considered as unnatural therefore search engines consider such as spams.
2. Disguising your website – another black hat SEO is disguising the link of your site to be going to a specific page while in fact showing a different page. Wherein one page is fully optimised but not designed properly and such page is only for search engine crawlers while the other one is a page that is not fully optimised but it is developed aesthetically and thus well presented worthy for a user to look at, this process of deceiving the search engine is called cloaking.
These two black hat techniques should always be avoided however tempting they may be.
As what is already known by those in the field of search engine optimisation, one of the easiest and the riskiest as well as the most unstable way of achieving the desired page ranking is the use of black hat seo techniques. Black hat seo may have its benefits but the negative effects are lasting and that it has the potential of having your website be banned from any search engines thus preventing it to be indexed and ranked in the search engine results page ranking. It is important however for any SEO company or SEO consultant to know the different black hat SEO technique not for them to utilise it but rather to have an informed mind and avoid using such technique unknowingly. There are several black hat SEO techniques that were enumerated or identified so far and these SEO techniques when discovered by the search engine would eventually cause the banning or suspension of your website.
The following are the different Black hat SEO techniques:
1. Using Duplicate Content – Copyright should always be respected therefore before using any content that are taken from the internet it is imperative to acquire the permission of the original owner of the image or the text. Using duplicate content will not only cause your site to be banned by the search engines but might also become a legal action against you.
2. Using Excessive Keywords Across the Content – it is a known fact that content should contain keywords in order for the search engine bots to properly index your website, however the use of keyword or the excessive use of it could prove to be detrimental to any SEO efforts because of the fact that it could be interpreted as keyword stuffing which is again a black hat SEO technique.
3. Purchasing links – link building should always be done organically, it is imperative that the quality of links be taken into consideration, however some SEO company and SEO consultants are resorting to purchased links to be one of the black hat solution to the tedious process of link building. Purchasing links does not assure integrity or permanency as well as relevance of the link which would then make the building the links to be unnatural hence are considered as spam.
When conducting or implementing an SEO campaign it is very important that the SEO company or the SEO consultant implementing it should understand the two major factors that would determine the outcome of an SEO campaign. Understanding these two Key Factors for a successful search engine optimisation campaign is imperative for every SEO company and SEO consultant as it would help define their SEO campaign against their competitors. Further, these key factors in SEO would help SEO companies and SEO consultants in planning their SEO campaign, where such key factors would become the basis of the different strategies that such SEO Company or SEO consultant would implement.
These two main factors are the Links and the Content, simple as it may seem focusing efforts or strategies to achieve these two factors however will not be so simple. Let us take these two key factors in focus and hopefully understand how search engine view these two key factors and implement a proper or correct SEO strategy or SEO implementation. First let us focus on the links, links in SEO can be categorised into external, or internal where external can further be subdivided into two these are inbound and outbound. For SEO companies and SEO consultants their focus mostly is acquiring inbound links, this is because of the fact that inbound links are considered by search engines as a vote to the website it is linking to thus adding to the reputation of the said website. However, any SEO company and SEO consultant cannot just get any link from any website because along with link one main criterion would be the relevance of the website linking to your website as well as relevance of such link to the content of your website or the target website.
Second is content, content does not only pertain on the text of the website, again relevance will play a very important role. Every website must still contain relevant keywords that would pertain to the search query of search engine users. The incorporation of keywords in the content therefore is imperative however again SEO companies and SEO Consultants should not overdo the incorporation of keywords since it might cause the site to be considered to be a spam site due to keyword stuffing.
These two major factors should be taken in consideration as well as the accompanying conditions in order to make your websites’ SEO campaign competitive if not successful.
Most often than not there are elements in a website that is or that are being ignored when implementing as search engine optimisation campaign. This may be because of the fact that the effect of optimising such element is way less than what is gained from other SEO techniques. However, for Google and other search engines there should be no reason to divert from the basic elements of search engine optimisation. One of the elements that is constantly ignored by many SEO companies and SEO consultants is the meta description tag. This tag or element does not deliver a direct effect on to the web page or website nor does it greatly affect the search engine results page ranking of a target website. The Meta Description element however is very useful because of the fact that this tag contains the summary on what the website is all about, unlike for a title tag the meta description tag can accommodate longer descriptions of about one to two sentences. The contents of the meta tag description is that Google may utilised snippets of the description when displaying your website URL in the search engine results page.
When writing the description or when using the meta description tag since it is also a factor being considered by search engines one must exercise caution so as not to be flagged as a spam website. The following are some guidelines that SEO companies and SEO consultants use when writing the content of the meta description element.
First write a meta description content that will accurately summarise the web pages’ content. This means that an SEO company should avoid writing irrelevant and unrelated description, avoid generic descriptions, avoid using only the keywords as the meta tag content, avoid copying the and placing the entire content of the web page and placing it on your own. Finally you should write unique descriptions for every page in order to accurately describe the contents of a specific webpage.
Search engine optimisation is always said to be a very tedious process because of the fact that there are a lot of processes and strategies involved in order to attain a single goal. It is like making every part in your system work efficiently to make the whole machine to work, SEO is made up of different processes that should be performed or implement properly in order to realise positive outcome. With the numerous types of processes or techniques and strategies involved in search engine optimisation, not to mention the huge number of competition many SEO companies and SEO consultants sometimes would get discouraged and thus forcing them to resort into black hat techniques in order to get results fast but risking the target website to possibilities of suspension or ban from the different search engines when such black hat techniques are discovered. One very important element when tackling an SEO campaign is without resorting to black hat techniques is to organise your SEO campaign properly.
Organising your SEO campaign can start by outlining the general processes or strategies that you will be implementing in your SEO campaign this is in order to give SEO companies and SEO consultants like you a definite direction which you could of course modify depending on the circumstances like algorithm changes among other factors. The following are the basic steps or processes that are done in implementing an SEO campaign:
1. Keyword Research – this step is considered a cornerstone of an SEO campaign as this would determine one of your end goal and that is what search term would you like to have a good rank at.
2. Organise the search terms and build your website pages revolving around the research related search terms.
3. Integrate Relevant and Fresh Content as much as possible dedicate a page in your website where you can continuously update the content.
4. Build links – This involves validating internal and external links as well as building inbound links from related websites.
5. SEO Maintenance – This involves the interpretation of SEO analytics data and doing something about it especially if the analytics shows that parts of your website are decreasing in traffic or keyword authority.
Search engine optimisation entails a lot of strategies which are generally categorised in to two, links and content. Links and Content are the main factors that helps increase both traffic and reputation of a website. Traffic and Reputation are the two main purpose why an SEO campaign is being implemented and this is to achieve the ultimate goal of gaining conversions and revenue. One of the strategy that may combine content and link building into one is the integration or use of blogs for this purpose. Many companies online have made or spent a considerable amount of money in order to increase their traffic and conversions but to no avail because of the fact that they have not focused their efforts on increasing both links and content. As what was stated above the links and content can be generated for the target website through the use of blogs or blog sites. This is why one of the main considerations for a website entering into this type of strategy is to incorporate a blog page or a blog within the target website, this way the blog could serve as the overall sites’ fresh source of content.
In order to maintain the blog and to increase link efficiency as well as content for such blog it is important that the blog site be provided with daily blog posts, expect an increase in links when you post engaging and as much as possible daily blog posts. Links can be acquired through relentless posts because of the fact that there are blog search engines that would crawl and index your blogs or blog posts.
Once you have incorporated blog and blog posts into your site make sure that you regularly ping your posts. The purpose of which is to broadcast that your blog site has new blog posts.
With this strategy expect that you will gain a good amount of backlinks and indexed pages as brought about by the blog contents or posts.
For many search engines the two main factor or characteristics that a website should have are backlinks and content. One this article we will focus on the first characteristics and that is backlinks. Backlinks are defined as those links that would come from outside web pages or websites other than yours. Backlink building is considered to be a very important part of search engine optimisation because of the fact that it is the criteria being utilised by many search engines in terms of establishing the reputation of the website. Sometimes known as inbound links, a website linking to your website is considered as a vote to your website. Building backlinks however is not an easy task, because of the fact that every link must have met certain criteria before being fully considered as a contributory link to the website.
First thing that should be considered is the quality of the link, more than quantity, quality could contribute more to the establishing of your websites reputation. Quality links are determined by the reputation and relevance of the website that is linking to the target website, SEO companies and SEO consultants would focus mainly on the websites’ page rank and the relevance of the content to the content of the target website. Few websites with a high page rank and with related content that would link to your website would give more chances of your website gaining reputation and page rank rather that thousands of websites with unrelated content and no page rank linking to your website.
Second is to distribute your gained page rank and reputation all over your websites’ pages. Sharing the page rank gained with other pages would not necessarily diminish your sites’ reputation but rather it would circulate the page ranking around your webpages. Thus it is important to practice crosslinking within your website’s pages.
Third, when you already have built your site and content SEO companies and SEO consultants encourage the submission of the website URL to reputable search engines and directories the most popular directory being DMOZ.
Search engine optimisation is a very complex process and a tedious one at that, this is brought about by the fact that there is a lot of strategies and techniques involved in the implementation of a single SEO campaign without any guarantee of achieving the desired results. It must always be remembered that there is no single solution or SEO strategy for every website that needs to be optimised and sometimes the effect of such SEO strategy may take a while or sometimes such SEO strategy may not have any effect at all. This sometimes force many SEO companies and SEO consultants to experimenting on other strategies which sometimes may result to the strategy being considered as a spam technique which would later on cause the search engine to ban the target website. Gaining traffic through search engines is very important that is why as much as possible an SEO company and SEO consultant should avoid getting banned or suspended by the search engine, although the strategies and techniques that are used in search engine optimisation are varying one can follow standard strategies which up to today proves to be effective in search engine optimisation.
The following are some of the basic guidelines that are considered to be basic and standard which are effective in the optimisation of a website.
First is to utilise links in your website appropriately, that is means that your links must be properly in place and that are used primarily to facilitate navigation of your website. When gathering incoming links or inbound links as well as outbound links it is important to take into consideration relevance, meaning your site should only link to or from relevant websites.
Second is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Content is used to inform visitors about the website or the particular web page, further content also is used to inform the search engine crawlers on the keywords of the website so therefore it is imperative to keep the content fresh and updated on a regular basis.
With these two guidelines the basic of search engine optimisation is already outlined highlighting the most important elements in search engine optimisation that is link building and content creation.
Non-indexing of a website or a web page may be against all rules in search engine optimisation basically because of the fact that the goal of search engine optimisation is to have your website or web page be indexed by the search engine and to rank high in the search engine results page. However, there will be instances that an SEO client would request to have some web pages or a website not be indexed by the search engines. It is important to understand these instances on when not to allow search engine crawlers index such web pages in order to have not only a smooth relationship between an SEO client and an SEO company or SEO consultant but also to efficiently implement the entire SEO campaign.
First reason or instance on why a web page should not be indexed is when the website or the web page is currently under construction. You would not want your website to be indexed under the keyword “page under construction” nor have prospective clients see your website during the construction or development phase, a prudent SEO company or SEO consultant should therefore exclude the website from being indexed and just allow indexing when the site is ready.
Second instance that will not require web page indexing from search engines is when the web pages has old contents and are already placed in the archives, this instance is similar to a blog archive. This is especially applicable with blog sites where indexing of old contents or archived contents may cause your website to appear in a multiple number of times which can or might be later on considered as spam.
Third instance is when the website contains private information, where such information is or should only be accessible to registered clients. It is therefore important to disable indexing of the site in order to avoid internet users from stumbling upon the web page without prior registration.
These three instances would help guide SEO clients, SEO companies and SEO consultants on efficiently implementing their SEO campaign and although indexing webpages may be important it is also equally important to select which ones should only be indexed.
