SEO FAQ. Questions answered

What is SEO?

At its most basic SEO is about getting your product or service in front of your customer when they look for it on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

What are the short term gains of SEO?

If by short term you mean within weeks, there aren’t any. You can expect to see some immediate improvement in rankings, but generally SEO is a long term marketing campaign that delivers results from month 3 onwards and in very competitive industries it may take a lot longer. If your business is a flash in the pan, then PPC is probably the best short term route.

My web designers optimized my site. Do I still need SEO?

Your web designers may have done a great job at designing your website to be readable by search engines, but this will not get you ranking. You need to do ongoing SEO to make your website relevant and important to the search engines. Some industries by their very nature create a lot of great SEO material and therefore get great rankings naturally (e.g. news, encyclopedias, social networks) but for the rest of us we need to make a particular effort if our normal business activity does not naturally create the back links or content needed.

Derek Powazek says SEO companies are evil. Is he right (click here to read his blog)?

There are bound to be some bad apples, but generally SEO is a complex and labour intensive service carried out by professionals who provide a much needed service to companies. Some companies have SEO skills in house, and some outsource just like any other business critical function. If content generation is part of your business then chances are you may not need an SEO company. If you make pencils it will be much more cost effective to hire a SEO company than to have an SEO team in house.

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

PPC is pay per click such as Adwords. You pay to have your advert on the right hand side of the search engine pages and every time a customer clicks on your ad your are charged. SEO is concerned with the ‘natural’ listings on the left and you are not charged when these are clicked on (but you may have to pay an SEO company an ongoing monthly fee to get you on the first pages).

Why does SEO cost money?

SEO costs money because it takes expertise and a team of SEO workers to get a site on the top pages of the search engines. Building links and creating content are labour intensive activities.

How long does it take to get results?

It can take up to a year in very competitive industries, but generally you will see increased traffic and/or sales between 3 and 6 months

Can I just stuff my meta tags with lots of keywords and wait for the sales/traffic etc to come rolling in?

Meta tags are no longer used by Google to determine ranking. Bing and Yahoo may still give them some weight, but generally meta tags are not relevant to SEO any longer.

Can I rank for any number of keywords?

Unless you are very big shopping site, you will need to concentrate on a small sub-group of your keywords to begin with in order to concentrate resources on these.

What is content and what has it got to do with SEO?

Content is just the stuff that fills your website such as words, images, videos etc. The search engines use this to determine your relevance to a search query. If someone searches on ‘digital cameras’ and you have no mention of digital cameras in your content then it will deem your site not relevant to this particular query.

What are links and why do I need to build them?

Links are just that - links from other webpages to yours. Search engines believe that a page with lots of links pointing to it is therefore popular, and even more so if the sites pointing to it are popular too. Think of links like citations in books.

Can I just buy a bunch of links and get ranking that way?

You can. But generally the links will be off little value and you may find your self in trouble with search engines if they deem your links to be spammy i.e. created for the sole purpose of improving ranking.

Aren’t all SEO companies Indian based spammers?

A lot of SEO companies are based in India . And unfortunately they do send out a lot of spam which has cause some negative reactions to SEO. However, when choosing an SEO company the usual rules apply - if they are offering deals that are too good to be true, then they generally are. Use SEO companies who are realistic about short term gains, who are committed to your long term business goals and who are based in your local area, as you will need to build a relationship with them and this can be difficult on Skype.

Can you stop sending me Spam emails, I’m not interested?

We do not use email marketing to sell our services. We like human interaction.

Isn’t SEO something for the IT department to sort out?

SEO is a marketing campaign, and needs to be understood as such. The IT department will need to be involved (or the IT guy for smaller companies) but it is the marketing manager who needs to run the show for SEO.

My web designer says he knows someone who does SEO, and he says he can make me number 1 in a few weeks. How come it takes you so long?

If he is driving round in a brand new porsche then maybe he has discovered a new way of doing SEO, or he has the keys to the Google head office. If not then he is either not telling the truth, or he is talking about getting your company name on page 1 when some one searches for it (this can be done easily by submitting your website URL to the search engines. Click here to submit your URL to Google).

If I build it good, they will come. No need to spend money on SEO, surely?

Unfortunately the search engines do not rank on goodness or beauty (they cannot see such aesthetics), they rank on content and links. So if you can create great original content daily, and convince other great websites to link to you, then you will do well and have no need of us. Otherwise, give us a call and let’s get you found.

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