I find it interesting that SEO consists of more than link-building. It provides various useful services for website owners, for example – review of site content or structure, technical advice on website development, content development, keyword research, expertise in specific markets and geographies and SEO training.
Website + promotion of website = content marketing = SEO
The article pointed out several tips to make SEO successful, which echoes what we learnt in class.
- Clear titles and descriptions
- Anchor text (the clickable text in a hyperlink) should be properly optimized with keywords
- Clean inbound and outbound links and understand your link profiles
- Ensure that sites do not crosslink to other sites
- Page speed tool should be above 90% – page speed is an important factor
- Prevent user-generated content spam
- Redirects – check site pages for redirects
- Over-optimization on non-content items – navigation, header or footer
- Alt-attributes: treat alt text as actual text
- Ad Issues – avoids ads which are above the fold for your screen size
- Crawl issues – avoid crawl errors
- Malware or rogue sites – check if you trigger malware warnings
In class, we learnt that it is important for marketers to be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you random emails. No one can guarantee a high ranking on Google. You should be sure to understand where the marketing money goes -toward permanent inclusion or temporary advertising.
If the SEO owns shadow domains, puts links to other clients on doorway pages, offers to sell keywords in the address bar or gets traffic from “fake” search engines, businesses should feel free to walk away.
In my opinion, there are many techniques that could be adopted to combat these dangers. It is important to monitor my own site on a regular basis or request our SEO to do this for us. Audits need to be conducted at regular intervals. Furthermore, another suggestion would be to analyze the most popular articles, and try to understand what makes them popular or high quality. Following that, it would be good to imitate the writing style and content ideas and INNOVATE, to increase visibility.
Other sources: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2291162/SEO-Audit-Findings-4-Hidden-Technical-Problems-That-Can-Send-Dangerous-Signals-to-Search-Engines