DW Tips

SEO is one of those cyber abbreviations that floats around everywhere in web chatter and digital marketing. SEO, or search engine optimisation,  is about keywords -- words, phrases or strings of words and phrases -- to attract the attention of search engines that seek, index and rank literally billions of web pages.

Navigating the "white noise"

In the “white noise” of the web with the equivalent of millions of web sites shouting “Me! Me! Read me!” the most efficient use of SEO is attracting search engines that manoeuvre through the chaff to find those little kernels of relevant web sites meeting a particular search query. It’s all somewhat untouched by human hands in the end, but the beginning – including good SEO content in a web site – takes finesse and experience.

SEO “spamming”

Just finding popular SEO terms and keywords and putting them everywhere in the site in hopes of gaining a competitive advantage won’t work. Google, for example, uses a “GoogleBot” and they are continually working to make it smarter. Google has been working diligently on a way to “level the playing field” and inflicting an “over-optimisation” penalty on sites that have lots of keywords, but inferior structure and content. The penalty will actually be the opposite of SEO -- shutting the site out from search engine ranking.

Beware of disreputable SEO vendors and consultants.

According to Google, there are scams out there, for example, that “place ‘doorway’ pages with keywords on the client’s site somewhere.” That “bait-and-switch” practice is not only ineffective, but has potentially insidious effects because “doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.”

If you'd like to know more about SEO and social media optimisation, then contact us.