SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

How to Learn SEO

Learning SEO can be a minefield of myths, misleading information and techniques that may actually harm your SEO rather than help it.

So where can you go for advice or help whilst learning SEO? The first port of call we recommend is a simple book on the subject!  Some people say it’s impossible to write a book on SEO as when the book’s published it’s out of date as search engines are ever-changing their algorithms.  This is false, the main ranking factors from 3 years ago in Google for instance are still the same today, the principles behind ranking factors are the same and it’s getting harder and harder to bypass them with sneaky “black hat” techniques.  Make sure to buy a book published recently though as social media has come into play quite a lot recently and some great free resources for SEO have popped up in the last few years that you may miss with an old book.

The most important things to ask yourself when learning and performing SEO are:

1) Is what I’m doing useful to people online?
2) Am I trying to cheat my way to the top of the rankings?
3) Is all the content on my website easy to find by search engine spiders?

Stealing content seems to be the most common newbie mistake, this adds nothing new to the ‘wealth’ of information online and in a way tries to cheat the search engines by adding related content onto your site.  Google can spot this technique a mile off; a new blog post for example will get crawled within seconds because it automatically pings Google saying it’s been published.

Learning old SEO methods that used to work is still common-place too. Techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text and multiple internal links with keyword anchors can be seen left, right and center on new sites (non of which rank highly for any keywords).  If you surfed online 15 years ago with Yahoo then some awful results came up with site using these techniques, it DID work but now search engines are far, far smarter luckily.

When you start learning about SEO it becomes apparent that Google, the most used search engine, ranks websites higher if they have more backlinks (links from other websites).  Gaining these links on other people’s sites can be a hard task and many people end up trying to cut corners on all the work needed.  Paying for links is frowned upon by Google unless it’s from a reputable search directory such as Yahoo.  Some people out-source the SEO work which can either be a good option or a disaster depending on the SEO company’s techniques implemented.  Some companies just add your links on to large “link farms”, sites that interlink in a network which are purely created to promote sites up Google’s rankings.  These links have little value and possibly even a negative effect if done on a mass scale so do your research on any company if you outsource.

Once you have learned the basics of SEO it’s time to move on to more advanced techniques, learn from the experts such as SEOMoz but beware that many people will call themselves an “SEO Expert” when they don’t know much at all.  You can find some gems in forums such as ‘DigitalPoint’ or the ‘Warrior Forum’.

Why not create a dummy website and try out techniques whilst you learn, if something goes wrong then you can just move on to another domain.  Aim low to begin with, perhaps a 3 word keyword such as “kitchen knife set”, something that will receive a decent amount of traffic.  You have to be very persistent with performing SEO, the content writing can take many hours and the link building can take months to take effect but trust me the reward at the end is worth it!

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