Unlocking top Google results for your website…FREE
There are two roads (and trains of thought) to getting your website found in the search engines.
The Long Road (Free Listings) is a process of Onpage and Offpage optimisation (explained below) to ensure that your site is returned in the top FREE results (i.e. you pay NOTHING) in Google. It is also estimated that four times as many people click on the first free listing as they do on the first PayPerClick listing on the same page.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) SCAMS
The topic of Google optimisation is massive and there is a LOT of conflicting advice out there (mostly from people trying to charge you for SEO – Search Engine Optimisation).
Be very wary of any company offering to carry out Search Engine Optimisation for your site for less than £200 per month (and even more so the £50 per year type deal!). To genuinely optimise your site to get good quality inbound traffic (visitors) will require TIME and EFFORT (hence calling it the LONG ROAD). Companies offering to “get your site in the top ten results…” and charging a relatively low fee cannot possibly be dedicating the resources required to achieve what they claim. The most common scam is for them to say they GUARANTEE to get you in at least 6 out of the top ten search engines. When you push them to list the search engines the first four you will have heard of, but there will be 6 that you haven’t. These search engines are owned by the company and will be used to ensure they don’t have to give you a refund. NOBODY but YOU can get your site to the top of Google’s free listings unless they are charging serious money and dedicating a lot of time and effort. There ARE genuine SEO companies out there, most would be quoting hundreds or even up to a thousand pounds per month for good quality Google optimisation depending on your search terms.
OK, so how do I do it?
The first misconception is that you can magically alter the text on your website to make it attractive to Google and make them push you closer to the top of the list. Many years ago search engines relied 100% on ONPAGE optimisation (the changing of text on your web page). This lead to people repeating terms over and over again (sometimes thousands of times) in an effort to be at the top. That hasn’t worked for years, but it IS still important that the search term you want to be found for DOES exist within your webpage and preferably in the TITLE tag and an H1 tag as well as in the body text (these are HTML elements. You should be able to edit these items via your websites CMS or Content Management System. If your website doesn’t have a CMS then contact your web designer to make the required changes).
Effectively this means that if you want to be found for “Swindon plumbers” you can’t expect Google to return YOUR site if you can’t find the term “Swindon Plumbers” anywhere on your page!
Onpage optimisation however, is NOWHERE near as powerful as Offpage optimisation. Offpage optimisation is what takes the time, what stopped the repeating phrases technique working, AND what makes Google return such great results that you want to use it again and again.
Offpage optimisation is quite simple in concept, but takes TIME and EFFORT to achieve. You need to convince people to LINK to your site, and the LINK TEXT that they use (the highlighted bit that you click on) is VITALLY important.
If you manage to get 10 other website owners to link to you and you used the link text “Swindon Plumbers” then Google sees that this phrase is really relevant to your site. Google looks at your site and sees the title “Swindon Plumbers” it READS your page and sees at least one bold heading (H1) set to “Swindon Plumbers” and it sees “Swindon Plumbers” in the body text. Google will also know that 10 other people are linking to you using the link text “Swindon Plumbers”. “My goodness” Google Thinks, this site must be incredibly relevant to people searching for “Swindon plumbers” and pushes your site closer to the top of the results. Over time you’ll get 100 people linking to your site – and Google will know that YOUR site is the very best site to give out when someone types in “Swindon Plumbers”. You will have reached the golden No.1 position in Google. All for free.
This summary is simplified because you cannot simply get anyone to link to you. Google look for “link farms” – websites set up specifically for sharing links, and “reciprocal linking” (where ‘I’ll have a link to you if you have a link to me’ hasnt worked in a while because Google spots that as well). However if you are in the car selling business and another website that is car related links to you then that is a great start. However some sites, even if they aren’t link farms, can have quite a low weighting from Google, either because of the volume of links on the site, or, because they themselves are not that well known to Google. We did say it was a long road !
