I happen to know that their SEO company have a very professional looking website and seem, at first glance, to be a reputable company; that is until you search for “<company name> complaints”. In fact, I didn’t actually search for that term – it simply came up as a suggestion in Google so clearly plenty of other people are searching for it even though the company is working hard to suppress the complaints with positive press.

But all of this got me thinking more about how many large companies there are who actually don’t know what their link profile looks like and, worse, maybe don’t undestand what their SEO’s are doing to improve their rankings. I always provide my clients with a list of places where links are being generated on a monthly basis and if this had happened for the banned website they would probably have seen a suspicious pattern emerging.

I was discussing the banned website with a marketing exec from a different industry but from a company comparable in size and reputation to the company banned/penalised by Google and she “felt sure” their SEO company were not engaging in any un-ethical SEO tactics because they are a reputable company. But so, apparently, were the SEOs for the banned site and she had no evidence to back up her assumptions.

At the other end of the scale from a mega 31,000 links campaign, I have also this week been looking at a much smaller company Tetbury Garden Services who only had their brand new website go live a couple of weeks ago but already they are on page one for their most preferred search term “tetbury garden services” – and, guess what? They only have 3 links! I know that the search term is not very competitive and that the website is extremely well optimised so got off to a better start than many large expensive websites that focus purely on design and only consider SEO when they realise they have very few visitors, but this is still a success story for a small local company.

Just take a look at the leap in rankings over a fews days below…

If you remember the days when the number of links were all that mattered for high Google rankings this is a perfect example of what white hat SEOs have been saying for several years – it is not the quantity of links that is important but the quality. I will issue the proviso that quantity does also matter if, for instance, competitors have lots of good quality links but small website owners everywhere take heart that just a few good links can get you to Page 1 of Google for certain keywords.

We all know how important it is to obtain good quality inbound links (backlinks) for our websites that show the search engines that we are both a reputable business and have a reputable website (both, sadly, do not always go hand in hand). But what if you link out to what you know is a reputable business but their website turns out to have employed black hat SEO techniques and is later penalised by Google?

It is not always obvious what is and isn’t a good quality website unless you have access to link profiles. It seems that some reputable businesses are engaging in unethical SEO tactics – I would like to think that many of them are not aware of this but are just using disreputable SEO agencies, but who knows?

I recently had a client who received a very threatening email from a (supposedly) reputable company – a big business in the same field – stating that it would “disavow” my client’s site with Google and this could potentially harm his site.

Here’s what the email said:

We have sent you a request on 9th May, 2014 regarding some links pointing to xxxxxxxx.com from your website. We have not received any replies / updates from your side. No replies to this second request would automatically place your domain in our Disavow list to Google which would affect your domain badly. Kindly reply back soon to avoid this action.

In fact my client’s site is a very reputable site that only uses ethical SEO techniques (I should know, as I manage it for him) but the other site that is now penalised had over 31,000 spammy links mostly from fake forums – I have, of course, now checked their link profile.

But let’s just clarify what would have happened if the other website had disavowed my client’s site. It might have resulted in a manual review by Google if lots of other disavow reports had been submitted, but a manual review would have revealed that it was a genuine website. In fact, John Mueller from Google said

Having URLs from your website submitted in a disavow file will not cause any problems for your website. One might assume that they are just trying to pressure you.

So the moral of this story is that you never know what other businesses are up to so be careful who you link to. Reputable businesses can have disreputable websites if they don’t take the time to understand what SEO techniques are being employed to improve their rankings.

Well, today was one of those days for me – one when I know why I’m in this business and what I enjoy about it.
I have a client who has struggled to achieve SEO success with past agencies and consultants for whom I have been working for a few months and now we’re seeing good, if not fantastic, results – bear with me, that’s obviously not the interesting part…

This particular client happened to have a whole range of satellite sites for various niche offshoots to their main business that were sitting around unchanged since the day they were created and with links from those sites to the main business site with no value at all because the satellite sites had no page authority/rank.

So, naturally I saw the satellite sites as a great opportunity to add value to the main site by building up their content and hence gaining some page authority. So the home page is now changed regularly and I have started blogs for those sites. Sadly I’m not Superwoman so I only targeted 3 of the sites. Because the aim of this process was to increase the value of existing links and hence the organic ranking of the main site I was only cursorily monitoring what was happening to the satellite sites but now one of them, having never ranked before in the organic listings, is appearing half way down page 2.

I was reading a good article about how small companies can compete with big brands this morning on BusinessHub and it suggested that……

Now I also know from experience that sites often seem to appear from nowhere to quite reasonable rankings and then can spend some time behaving erratically until the rankings settle down but, remember, this particular site is not even being specifically targeted with SEO – it has less than 10 links – none particularly high quality and poor on-site SEO. What it does have is good site structure, a keyword-based domain name and has been established for well over a year. Even so, it didn’t rank at all until, most importantly of all, lots of good, fresh content was added regularly.

This particular site is a great example of the power of fresh, regular content alone and rarely have I had the opportunity to monitor a site’s ranking without some active SEO taking place. This sites is offering users exactly what Google wants a site to offer –a good experience with plenty of useful, new content – and is being rewarded for it. Now I want to see what a few links will do for this non-SEO’d site.

Has anyone else had a similar experience of a site ranking well with no optimisation? By the way, since I expect someone will ask, it is ranking for a moderately competitive two-word keyword.

There are plenty of factors that contribute to a site being high-quality – some of them are:

• Google Page Rank (even though this can be out of date)
• Page Authority / Domain Authority (from Moz)
• Number of incoming links
• Number of outgoing links
• Total number of links
• Alexa Traffic Rank
• Domain Age

And these are all well-worth checking – this can be done manually (if you are a masochist) but is quicker and easier to do with one of the many useful SEO tools out there such as SEO Spyglass. But even checking these will not tell you the whole story.

Statistics are no substitute for actually taking a good look at the site and making a human assessment of it. SEO is, after all, simply a form of marketing and if you were involved in traditional marketing or advertising wouldn’t you want to check out any magazine or other publication that you were thinking of advertising in. Even if you could have an ad, review, recommendation or content included for free you would still want to know that the publication was reputable and would not damage a client’s reputation. For paid ads it would be even more important to know exactly what type of magazine the advert was appearing in. So it shouldn’t be any different on the internet, but somehow internet marketing has evolved so far using a very different approach.

Maybe because SEO is still a relatively new field, some clients (and many of these are large companies) only seem interested in their results and not in the long term effect on their reputation. Maybe, because not all clients understand SEO, they are not interested in the details. But if a website has links from predominantly low-quality directories then this will eventually lead to down-valuing of those links and a consequent fall in rankings. A website may not be actually penalised by the search engines as such but the effect of the down-grading of a majority of links will have an equivalent effect.

So, whether you are doing SEO for your own company or for a client, always check out any site from which you plan to obtain a link and make sure it is high-quality. Don’t rely only on the statistics you can obtain from an SEO tool and definitely don’t use only Page Rank as the deciding factor. Instead review potential sites for the quality of the writing, design, frequency of updates, inter-action with others on social media etc.

Another very quick way of determining site quality is to search for a standard term and then check the validity of the results:

• In business directories check whether the results of your search are accurate, relevant and don’t contain duplicates

• In article directories read a few articles in different categories and check whether they are well-written and actually tell you something of value

• On blogs check out the quality of the writing and also how frequently the blog is updated.

And remember that the harder it is to get a directory listing, article inclusion, or a guest blog posted, the more likely it is that the quality of the site is high and any link obtained will be worth the effort.

By Michelle Symonds

So for those small businesses that don’t have a massive budget to spend on SEO here are some ways that you can help yourself or enhance the SEO efforts that you are already making.

1. Get Blogging – I really can’t stress how important it is to start and maintain a blog. The first post is always the hardest and takes the longest but once you get used to writing it will become much easier – just get started. The style of a blog post is informal so you don’t have to worry about it being a great literary work, just make sure the grammar and spelling are accurate. Tip 1: most website hosts will set up a WordPress blog on your site – usually for free. Tip 2: Write a post at least once a week.
2. Wherever you blog is hosted make sure some new content from it is shown on your home page – this is easily achieved using an RSS feed. Google will love the fresh new content and your potential customers will love the advice, tips, news or other information you provide relevant to your business.
3. Social Bookmark all the blog posts that you write from sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc. These social signals have a direct impact on your rankings.
4. Make sure you have a listing in all the reputable online business directories such as Yelp, TouchLocal, ThomsonLocal, HotFrog, 192, Scoot, Yell etc. and that it is up-to-date.
5. Setup and maintain a business Facebook Page and LinkedIn account – these will be used to build up followers, drive traffic to your main site and naturally increase the links to your main site which will, in turn, improve your rankings.

Of course, there is more to SEO than these factors, particularly in a very competitive business sector, but these are easy to implement ways in which you can help yourself to help your search engine rankings.

By Michelle Symonds

I would agree that until relatively recently poor quality content was produced in abundance just to get a backlink but in the past year or two the emphasis has been shifting to high-quality content that will, by virtue of it’s quality, be reproduced naturally across the internet and organically increase the number of links to a particular website.

My argument was that there was no reason why content written with the main purpose of gaining a link could not also be interesting and engage your potential online visitors. Naturally this was my perspective as a lot of what I do is write good content for SEO purposes, but whilst I recognise that none of what I write would gain a prize for great writing, it is informative and tends to be written to invite comments and provoke discussion. What I have found over the years that I have been writing articles and blogs with the underlying purpose of increasing rankings is that sooner or later people do start to interact with your writing – commenting, criticising and offering further insights.

So my content tends to be the seed from which a wider discussion will follow and the best articles and posts lead to republication of my content on more and more websites and blogs and often opportunities to invite guest content or, even better, lead to offers of guest content by external contributors.

In this way, well-written content does lead to organic growth of the links in the original content by building generating interaction with other online users who spread their opinions about your pieces and naturally promote your content. And if that is not organic growth, I don’t know what is…

Why not let me know your success stories of a simple piece of content that caused a stir?

By Michelle Symonds

In this particular case it was table items that were being displayed – see below – but it can also be bullet points. The items in this example are the dates and places for upcoming training courses. Being a project management training company this is, obviously, a big bonus for them and it is likely to encourage more click-throughs (we’ll be monitoring the effect over time).

On the actual web page the table shows 8 upcoming courses, in date order with the nearest first –  the description in the search listings shows just the first 2 out of that list of 8 (presumably for space reasons) but does give an indication of how many items there will be on the page with the “5+ items” indicator above the list. Better still this list is not at the expense of any descriptive text of which there is still one line of text which is the first half of the Description Meta Tag.

I can see the benefits of this relatively new feature in the search engine ranking positions in encouraging a user to click on your site rather than a competitor – particularly where a business’s main competitive edge comes through pricing.

In the case of the Parallel Project Training example, their reputation for high-quality training is well known in the project management field and price is less of a deciding factor for their customers so it is less of an issue that the price of the courses is not showing in the listings. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that Google has chosen to omit the price from the list it displayed because the prices do exist in the table on the web page. The prices are bold and preceded by the £ sign but also happen to appear in a table column after the data that are shown – I wonder which of these factors is the deciding one in not displaying the price – an opportunity for more testing, I think.

As Google constantly strive to improve what is shown in the search engine listings for a better user experience, small changes such as adding some table content are worth monitoring and taking action on as they could just be the edge you need over the competition. And it would make sense to have your key products at the top of any list on a page – obviously, from both an SEO and marketing perspective. And if price is a key element of your marketing strategy then it will be important to get that data displayed if the snippet is to have the greatest impact on click-through rates.

According to Google, table items or bullet lists will be shown where the results page consists mainly of the structured list and they aim to show 3 lines from that list – I have yet to see an example with bullet points and in the example I have given here only 2 table items are show plus some of the meta description but then you never get the whole story from Google.

Something else I like about this example is the domination of the top positions of the organics search results by one site. This is not the best example for this client – with other search terms they dominate 4 of the top 5 organic positions with their main domain.

More about organic search listing domination another time…

By Michelle Symonds

But neither do you want to target keyword terms that are too general and might bring plenty of new visitors but they are not likely to be visitors interested in the product or service that you offer. This is why keyword research and analysis is so important at the start of an SEO campaign and also at critical points in the growth of your online business as products and trends change over time.

But once you have established a core set of keywords and have incorporated them into your SEO strategy, and are achieving good rankings how can you maximise the optimisation of your site to improve your rankings even more?

This is where synonyms come into play – as an SEO consultant writing SEO-friendly content, titles and descriptions etc. I find that I use a thesaurus on a regular basis – much more than I ever did at school at any rate.

Google’s search engine has, in recent years, become much more adept at understanding different words that have the same meaning (synonyms) although, given the power and technology available in today’s computers, this is still one of the hardest things for a computer to do with great accuracy. Identifying two common words that mean the same thing is now relatively easy for a search engine but to understand two different sentences that mean the same thing is another matter, particularly given the variety of words that we have in the English language.

Search results typically show common synonyms for any words in your search term in bold so you can easily see how Google has used them in coming up with the search engine ranking positions for a particular keyword. As an example try out the search “contemporary settee” and you will see the word “sofa” in bold in the descriptions of a number of the top ranking sites. I do wonder why Google doesn’t recognise “modern” as the same as “contemporary” – of course, they are not strictly the same (particularly if you are talking about art) but they do tend to be used inter-changeably by most people.

The reason why synonyms are so important in search engine optimisation is that Google uses them to assess how relevant a phrase on your page is to the search term and to decide where to rank a particular page. And it doesn’t just assess individual pages for relevancy but also the whole website. This is known as latent semantic indexing (LSI) – more about how that works another time.

So the use of synonyms on a single page and across a whole website (as well as the targeted keywords, of course) can help a site to rank better than a competitor by indicating to Google that the page and site are highly relevant to the search term. And that’s why synonyms are SEOs best friend.

By Michelle Symonds