Three Little SEOs
Once there were three little SEOs. They went out to seek their fortunes on the Internet.
The first SEO had not gone far when he met a man who said he knew the secrets of the Google, King of Search. The little SEO said to him, "Please, man, give me those secrets so I can build a website."
This the man did, and soon the little SEO had a built a website with the secrets. The days passed, and the little SEO was profiting nicely with visitors from Google's Kingdom of Search.
Soon, along came the Google. He seen that the little SEO was ignoring his rules and was very angry.
He knocked at the door of the little SEO's house and called, "Little SEO, little SEO, stop exploiting my Search!"
But the little SEO answered, "No, no! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!"
Then the wolf said, "I'll huff and I'll puff, and I change my algorithm!"
So he huffed and he puffed until he changed his algorithm, and no more visitors went to the little SEOs website.
The second little SEO had not gone far when he met a man who was selling an assortment of links and cheap content.
The little SEO said to him, "Please, man, give me those links and cheap content to build me a website."
This the man did, and soon the little SEO had built a website with them.
Just after the website was built, along came the Google. He knocked at the door of the little SEO's house and said, "Little SEO, little SEO, remove these spammy links!"
But the little SEO answered, "No, no! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!"
The the Google said, "I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll flag your site as spam!"
So he huffed and he puffed and he flagged the site as spam, and no more visitors went to the little SEO's website.
The third little SEO went to visit the Google.
The little SEO said to him, "Please, Google, give me your guidelines so I can build my website."
This the Google did, and soon the little SEO had built a website. Nicely structured with original content and quality links, helped by his friend Plug in SEO.
Some time passed. The little SEO was getting more visitors every day, and the visitors were buying his product.
After a while the other two other SEOs were jealous because this little SEO was profiting well from his website. They had no businesses of their own left.
Along they went to this little SEO. The other SEOs knocked at the door of the little SEO's house and said, "Little SEO, little SEO, let us spam your comments to send visitors to our websites!"
But the little SEO answered, "No, no! Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!"
Then the other SEOs said, "We'll huff and we'll puff, and we'll report you to the Google!"
So they huffed and they puffed and they puffed and they huffed, and they huffed and they puffed, but the Google wasn't interested because this little SEO had followed his guidelines.
This made the other SEOs very angry indeed. They vowed that they would build more websites to take away visitors from the little SEO's website.
When the little SEO seen what the other SEOs were doing, he created more original content and built links from reputable websites.
The other SEOs just couldn't compete. They were so frustrated they left the SEO business and started a 419 scam instead.
And that is how it came about that this little SEO lived happily, profiting from his successful website with visitors from Google ever after.
Thanks to Three Little Pigs: The colorful story book
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Why does luxury albums company Noble Macmillan use Plug in SEO?
Noble Macmillan sell luxury photo and wedding albums, notebooks and accessories both from their store in Chelsea and through their web site. Marketing manager Sophie Pitt leads their efforts to optimise online sales, and we spoke with Sophie about why she uses Plug in SEO.
Boosting traffic through search engine traffic is critical for their online store's success. "As a small business, we can't afford to plough an unlimited amount of money into Adwords, so the more traffic we can get through search, the better," says Sophie. "We knew we needed to focus on driving natural search traffic, and when we heard about Plug in SEO it seemed the ideal solution to help us get to grips with SEO for our web site."
"We've learnt so much from the Paint by numbers SEO guides," says Sophie. "For example, we've followed the advice on how to go about approaching other sites to successfully build inbound links. And I like the way that Plug in SEO gives us suggestions, even ideas for what to write in our blog."
Like all small businesses with a careful eye on their budget, Noble Macmillan need to see results for any marketing investment. A key reason for choosing Plug in SEO is the price guarantee. "It's brilliant that we won't get charged anything if our traffic doesn't increase."
Old-skool SEO survival guide
Many businesses can't afford an SEO expert in house, and look to agencies and freelancers for help. While there are some great professionals and companies you can hire, there are unfortunately a lot of cowboys. Here are some of the discredited "old-skool" techniques to watch out for if you don't want to waste your money on SEO with hit-and-miss benefit.
1. Second-guessing the search algorithm
Search engine algorithms are constantly being modified, so if your SEO outsourcer talks about knowing how to outsmart the algorithms, any insight they might have could be gone tomorrow. Here's Google's Matt Cutts talking about how they change their algorithms at least once a day.
Even if you somehow strike it lucky and come up with a great ranking through "gaming" or cheating the algorithm, your success will probably be short-lived - and worse, you might later be penalized. A classic example of this was "keyword-stuffing" in the early days of SEO - these days, as most people know, lots of repeated and hidden keywords is going to be detrimental to your search rankings.
2. Link-building factories
You can easily hire any number of link-building companies offering to build 1000 links for $5. Some create hundreds of new websites, each with a handful of links to your site. If you're lucky they might use relevant keywords on these new websites and in the links to your site. Others spam blog comments with your URL.
However, none of these sites or comments offer any value to a human visitor that visits the site, and few will be linked to by really authoritative sites. The search engines detect this and assess the value of those inbound links, and your website, accordingly.
You'll have got what you paid for - there really will be 1000 inbound links to your site - but the boost to your search engine credibility will be negligible. Worse, irregular linking patterns mean your site can be put into the search engine sin-bin, leading to months of under-performance or not appearing in search results at all.
3. Directory submissions
There are some really helpful Internet directories that people actually use to find content. There are thousands more that barely have a handful of visitors and are purely there for SEO companies to create links in. Here's Google's Matt Cutts again talking about how they assess the quality of directories.
By all means submit your web site to authoritative, relevant directories, especially if they are manually curated. But like link-building farms, submitting your site to an arbitrary number of directories without any consideration of their quality is a pointless exercise.
4. PageRank sculpting (as a headline)
PageRank sculpting was all the rage in SEO. Essentially it's all about choosing where to place links on your website, and where to use the "nofollow" attribute on those links, in order to maximise the likelihood of certain pages on your site being ranked more highly. If your SEO talks about this, they'll talk about "PageRank flow", "Google juice" and other such jargon.
PageRank exists, but it is just one factor among many that affects a site's rankings, and Google have been advising for some time that it's not something to obsess over. They even removed PageRank from their Webmaster tools last year because people were focusing on it too much. Here's Matt Cutts again, telling us that PageRank sculpting can be useful, but as a second-or-third order issue.
Now, he does say that you might want to link to a more profitable product from your home page so that the PageRank flows to that product page. But a better way to look at this is to forget the PageRank, and think of it from a user journey perspective when you're designing your website: if you want to sell more of a given product, you might want to promote it on your home page so that users find it easily. The primary goal here is getting more users who are already on your site to visit that product's page - and that might well have a beneficial side-effect of boosting that product page's search rankings.
Whatever you do, don't let an SEO browbeat you into making PageRank-related changes that are detrimental to the user journey on your website.
5. Meaningless money-back guarantees
Plenty of SEO companies offer money-back guarantees, but be careful what they are really guaranteeing. It's not hard to achieve a top-ten ranking for a keyword within a few months if you're allowed to pick any keyword at all. For example, you might want rankings for "organic haggis", but find you're not entitled to your money back because your SEO expert has "achieved" a top-ten ranking for "HaggisLand Abercrombie Road Edinburgh".
One golden rule
Yes, there are many black holes in SEO ready to suck away your cash. But if you focus on natural, transparent techniques you'll be getting the most benefit without risk of penality. Any effort that is just for search engines and not humans should be closely interrogated.
Build natural links from relevant sites, join related communities, create content by hand, link to yourself to improve user journey and fix website usability issues. These are all investments in your website rather than a short term, high risk, uneducated gamble.
