Anyone good with SEO? (Search Engine Optimisation)

In summary, the stuff that has annoyed you, Shoseki, annoys me as well, and NONE of the stuff you mentioned is in any way practised by myself or my colleagues, so don't try to pigeon hole me as one of those waste of space SEO "specialist" con-men. You don't know me, or what I do, you simply jumped to a rather large conclusion.

I apologise for posting so frequently in succession, but this has touched a nerve. I take great pride in what I have done for the company I work for, learning SEO from scratch in my time there (having originally been taken on as a copywriter), before taking over the reigns of a nonsense campaign ran by a supposed SEO specialist and turning it around. SEO does work, you just need some knowledge and a decent budget. If anybody is thinking about hiring an SEO specialist - walk away if they promise you positions in Google. A good SEO will get you the most traffic they can, but they cannot guarantee you a Google position.
 
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Hey, I'm sorry that I touched a nerve, it wasn't intentional - I've just seen a lot of people get burned, and as soon as you get involved you realise what a lot of rubbish they are.

And these are BIG companies : classic case (and I *will* name names here) Ufindus.com.

Ufindus.com are a "promotions" company that clear employ a large number of people and are succesful. They are, as far as I can tell, a large paid-for directory of links to people's websites. You could consider them a respository of knowledge, except that there isn't anything necessarily useful you can get from their site other than the fact that they have a very good marketing team that spams a lot of companies and builds up "search profiles" using a large number of techniques.

Now, you didn't actually answer my question. There were really two parts to the "how come there is only one #1 spot". First of all :

1) If you consider that SEO is fairly standard practice for most websites, then having the semantic markup correct is a normal practice. There are plenty of websites out there that offer the theoretical knowledge required to do this - you don't have to stop people, they can find out it for themselves. Whether they have the understanding or experience to be able to apply it, that is what you can say you have - that is perfectly understandable. To say that you aren't prepared to do the work because it is what you do for a living is perfectly acceptable. But be aware that *that* knowledge is out there for those who are resourceful enough to find it.

In addition, if *every* site had SEO (local site based), then it would be an even playing field. Already many CMSs, as I have said, have SEO options build in as long as you follow the guidelines. This sort of SEO is becoming more standard, and as it becomes more standard, there isn't any particular *benefit* in having it, because it simply makes sure that your page is being indexed correctly.

2) Lets discuss the other type - involving backlinking and the utilization of knowledge of how google works, and perhaps you can correct my cynicism.

My theory goes like this. Without any "SEO via promotion" ie artifical/purchased/whatever techniques, it would be a purely semantically/appreciated service linked web. Something you love and want to spread it with your friends? You link it. Something you hate and want to warn others? You link it. Those are uncontrolled by the people who actually own the link, and google processes those links and formulates who important those pages are via pagerank.

Now, assuming your business model works (nothing wrong with that), you use some bonus techniques to get backlinks to your first client. His search engine results go up to #1. You become succesful, and get a second and third client. You get them all to #1. As more people get to number 1, they normalize each other out again. The only people who benefit from this system is you - at a certain point, you will have to stop accepting work (assuming you can keep doing this) because without someone to compete against, your clients won't be ahead. Everyone will be reduced to their original positions, assuming that you apply the same techniques to everyone.

Its like : people used to do degrees because they were interested in the subject and wanted to work in the field - but at some point, dumbasses in business management decided that hell, if they were gonna get a janitor, they might as well pick the janitor with the degree in sociology. So then the "value" of a degree was simply to have one - meaning that everyone has a degree, and the degree itself becomes valueless - instead of its' original meaning which was to actually have value towards a particular subject.

So if I appear cynical it might be because the entire model seems, in my eyes, a waste of money, doesn't create anything for the consumer (which I would say, is far more important than simply link spamming away your opponents) and ends up destroying the fabric of search in an extremely cynical business marketing ploy. Instead of a meritocracy, which is what forces businesses to actually go through the process of producing better products, cheaper, for the customer, you just reduce the options of the customer to choose.

And whilst that might seem good in the short term (read : high street shops, big fancy websites like amazon) it also means that all the old businesses/options fall away (read : specialist shops, novelty shops, specialist import shops, and websites of every sort).

And why?

Because businesses are obsessed with being the top of the google/search rankings, rather than being obsessed with producing the best products/fulfilling the best services, and because algorithms like google are able to be "played".

In so many ways, commercialisation screwed up the internet :( Apologies for the diatribe.
 
Lol - didn't know I would stir this up! :)

I would post the website I'm trying to promote, but I know it wouldn't be allowed (no... it's not pr0n).

I'm trying to use a blog atm to boost it etc.
 
You're absolutely right! However, I think it's possible to have as many clients as you want under one condition - they're all in separate industries. If you have two clients competing for the keyword "games", you can no longer supply them both with a good SEO service. And it's very unlikely that you'd be using the exact techniques as any competitors - it's all about having the advantage. You can always build more backlinks than the opposition, so there shouldn't ever be a point where you have all of the sites normalised and back to the original positions.

Annnd, I completely agree - if nobody did SEO, the web would work exactly the way Google intended - the good sites would naturally rise to the top. Unfortunately, this isn't the case and if you want to compete, you have to build backlinks because all of your competition is doing it.
 
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Ironically, I myself am actually developing a new way to do advertising / linking on websites, but don't have a demo yet :)

Considering my direct competition is google, I doubt it will work but its a fun concept.

More details when I've finished working it all out and coded it (long way yet).
 
I am looking for a real good free piece of software that can allow me to add my site to search engines like google, msn, yahoo etc so i can get on the top 10 search results or near. Something that does keywords, tags, meta tags etc

Is there anything like that for free, or even a free trial that allows you to submit your site at least?

Many thanks in advance
 
I work for a large SEO department who do things the proper way, which isn't always the most effective way (we could be doing dubious things for quick wins). The thing is that our clients are so large, that we can't risk doing any of that cloak and daggers crap.

There are some cowboy companies, that are very large SEO specialist agencies... they do borderline dodgy stuff that we stay away from completely.

Infact, one of our clients has basically pitted us against one agency who uses shady techniques... their methods are working now, but how long until the site gets penalised?


and for personal sites

Just comment on some blogs, planting URLs with your target anchor text, aslong as you add value to the blog post it's prtty much a free link. I just did this, and paid someone a few quid to do some directory submissions for me and I'm ranking number 1 on Google.com for my target terms (outranking the official site). It's a bit of an amateur technique, but it's effective for small personal sites/affiliate sites.

Get some linkable content on your website too, I did a page with some cool videos which got linked to by Cnet... really good link to get.
 
Off the top of my head, but whenever we do SEO at work it really differs on a per-site basis. Be graceful in what you do, don't end up keyword stuffing or generally making the website look retarded & spammy.

Uh... okay so this became quite a long list... and it's late. Remember SEO is all theory, Google don't tell you exactly what they do to rank pages.

- Sign up with google and do their webmaster tool validation stuff, although it proably won't do much, you should do it anyway
- Begin page titles with most important keywords. Think what people will google for, e.g. "Roof Tiler in Worthing - Charles and Son Ltd" is a better title for SEO than "Charles and Son Ltd" if you are a roof tiler in worthing.
- Keep the title <65 characters long
- Have a different title for each page
- Make the title interesting if possible (if someone sees it in Google, why should they click yours, not the next listing down?)
- The above two points again, but for meta description
- No more than 10 meta keywords if possible, you want to keep them specific
- Target a certain phrase throughout all your page content, e.g. Roof Tiler in Worthing/Roof Tiler/Roof Tiling without keyword stuffing. Just be clever about it, not obvious.
- Target each page (titles,meta data,body text) differently - e.g., the home page for "Roof Tiler in Worthing", the contact page for "Free Roof Tiling Quotation Worthing", and so on.
- Change page content reasonably often to keep Googlebot coming back
- Submit a site map to Google
- Have a HTML site map available
- Validate your site to ensure good HTML markup and spider-ability
- Avoid unnecesarrily hiding text with CSS, Google (probably) ignores hidden text unless you do some dodgy text-indent to hide it. But why hide good copy text anyway?
- Use bold tags on important keywords
- Make sure each page has a different H1, and that it isn't exactly the same as the page title (take a pinch of salt there, it may be OK to have it the same as the title, but I always avoid it)
- Put your targetted keyphrase/keyword in the H1
- Make use of H2's and H3's too
- Your Domain name shouldn't be closer than 12 months until renewal (spam sites and unstable sites tend to disappear, decent sites stay around longer and have further expiry dates)
- Submit to directories like DMOZ and Yahoo
- Build links to your website from directories and other relevant sites wherever possible, but don't spam
- Get a blog on your site and post something 2+ times a week
- Submit that blog to Technorati
- Make good use of 404 pages, but broken links should always be fixed, or at least 301'd to keep link juice flowing
- Image tags shuold have useful alt text
- Put title tags on links (<a href="x" title="Roof Tile Quotation">)
- Use meaningful text in links, never say "click here" to link to a quotation page, say "Get a Roof Tiling Quote" instead.
- Link to other (relevant) websites
- Don't become part of a "bad neighbourhood" (don't link to spammy sites or submit your site to dodgy directories)
- Use human-friendly URLS with keywords in (try mod_rewrite on apache for dynamic pages)
- Read SEO blogs very often and keep up with geniune sounding techniques and ideas, but keep a bowl of salt near by ;)
- Keep a good amount of copy (plain text) on each page, not too many images or too much flash
- Don't use too many subdirectories in your site, aim for no more than 3 slashes in the URL
- Spell everything properly
- Don't have unneccessarry HTML code in the page, include CSS and JS externally.

Like I say, there will undoubtedly be much more to be done on your site, but this lists a lot of the generic "must-have" SEO tips. I don't think I've said anything stupid or twice (or stupid and twice), but it's late, so forgive me if I did :p
 
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