9 February, 2015

SEO: Is it worth spending money on SEO?
By: Matthew Jackson

Should I spend money on SEO?

To be fair, we do sell SEO services here in Toronto, Canada, & abroad. Suprisingly SEO is worth it and not worth it! Surprised?

What NOT to do

It depends on the following: how are you boosting your seo? Is it by using SEO Secrets!? That is really bad! Why? It is simple... Google wants to connect users to websites. If you are cheating your way to google searchers, well that undermines google since searchers might be unhappy. Google might even penalize you; or rather, blindly penalize anyone abusing SEO tricks.

Also, SEO tricks might go out of style. If you know about them, chances are that Google will and likely work around them.

What TO do

How can you improve your SEO without tricks? The rule is that Content is King when it comes to SEO. If you have good content that searchers want, then google wants to connect searchers to you, NOT someone else....

That IS oversimplifying SEO.... Why? Well, there are a lot of ways to give content to users and google. For instance, what is the title of your page. Is it simply the word "Blog"? Or is it the title of your blog: "SEO Is it worth spending money on it?". The former doesn't really identify your purpose, but a full title does. It clearly states what your content is.

Similarly, do you have:

  1. Header Text <h1> or <h2>
  2. Bold Text
  3. Italics Text
  4. Alt (Alternate) information for images (if images don't display, alt puts text so people know what they are missing).

All these elements helps clarify importance and content. Does it do much? Maybe it will and maybe not, SEO ratings and algorithms google uses changes. But it is logical that content that is bolded is more important for searchers and therefore google.

Finally, there are new ways to add content, they identify what content is. For example instead of just adding a Person's name, you can identify it with https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html. Why? Well google might not know it is a person's name, phone number etc... so helping them know helps you too. You can also display ratings properly, and they might show up in the google results better. This trick is pretty simple: If you want good SEO, follow good HTML practices. Everyone agrees on them so if you don't use them, you are likely providing a poor user experience, and google might not want to lead a searcher to a bad user experience.

So is there a trick? Not really, but you can help google, bing, yahoo, or whoever, which will help you by helping them.

Page Links: Do they matter?

Some links matter some don't. Same rule of thumb as before, if a valuable page links to you, that is GREAT. If it is just a directory that links to lots of people, probably not so valuable. How do you know if the page is valuable? Simple: the rules above help.

The best SEO trick?

Like we said at the beginning: CONTENT. If it is great content, then pages will link to you, and users will go to you! Keep in mind Google watches and collects website traffic data, I can't imagine they don't factor all of that in as well. But like I said, don't abuse it, having a computer constantly clicking links might not be a good idea to generate fake traffic.

 

Conclusion:

Yes, spend money to develop SEO. How? Make sure your Website Designer uses good practices. Make sure you have good content. Do some hard work and spread the word on real websites. If you have a restaurant get a review online. It helps not just people reading the review, but also google searches too. Don't use SEO tricks. How do you know the difference, well if you think you are abusing something it is probably a trick.

Tags: SEO, Business