Why learn SEO?
Learning SEO is a never-ending process and by all means, I’m no SEO expert but read lot’s of material related to the SEO industry and on the v7n forum daily. I try to do what’s best when it comes to doing SEO and live and die by my own action’s. For the new website owners or just your average website owner wanting to do their own SEO for their websites, where to begin, who to trust, what to do? I’m going to just talk about a few things in this blog post to hopefully get you pointed in the right direction. Hiring SEO experts can tend to be expensive if you go for the good services and don’t go cheap. The cheap SEO business’s tend to use blackhat methods or don’t go all the way to make their clients site rank well on all the websites keywords and properly keep up the clients site as the algorithm changes from time to time.
What is SEO?
This is the most basic question that I see mentioned on forums. I’m going to post the definition straight from a Google search that I just did. You can actually find answers to most questions through searching any search engine.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more often a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target many kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Who to trust?
This is a tough question to ask for sure. Who to trust when looking to learn about SEO. My thoughts on this are as follows:
Any so-called SEO expert will try to convince you that their suggestion for your site will improve your rankings greatly and bring more traffic/revenue to your site. They will then try to charge you a monthly fee or a fee to rank each keyword to the results that you demand. You need to read in between the lines and ask that SEO expert questions, look up their rankings for their own website keyword’s. If they rank poorly for their own websites then don’t use them and don’t believe the excuse’s that they give you. I wouldn’t trust SEO expert if there page was ranked on page 3, 4 and so on. For myself, If I was to hire one, I’d spend the money on a good and trusted one who has the real proof to back up there “sales pitch”.
I’m going to direct you to another blog post for a few minutes to read with 13 Questions To Ask Before You Hire A Local SEO Consultant. This blog post is a must read for sure. Start to educate yourself on how to ask them question’s and see if they feed you a bunch of B.S. or tell you the truth. You don’t want to waste money on a service that get’s little to nothing as in improvements in the search engines or just get’s you slapped by a Google penalty.
Where can we learn and read about the latest SEO news?
A ways back I wrote a blog post with some SEO blogs that I trust and been reading for many years now. I’m going to post the list in this thread with new addition’s as the blog post is 1 years old and things change.
- http://searchengineland.com/
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog
- http://www.searchenginejournal.com/
- http://searchenginewatch.com/
- http://dailyseotip.com
- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/
- http://www.stateofsearch.com/
- http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog
- http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/
- http://www.seobook.com/blog
- http://www.seo.com/blog/
- http://outspokenmedia.com/blog/
- http://www.localseoguide.com
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog
- http://www.stateofsearch.com/category/news/
Learning SEO is not that hard if you have the right resources at your disposal. In this blog post, I mentioned the resources that I have used in the past and to this day to teach myself. Never trust a SEO expert till you do the research on their website and check out their portfolio to see if those sites rank good or not. Stay away from cheap services as going cheap can land you with a Google penalty. In fact, with the resources I mentioned in this blog post, you could do well with improving your websites ranking and site structure. Follow those blogs that I mentioned and when in doubt, create a thread on the v7n forum to get help with SEO stuff or to ask for information about a SEO company.
Before spending money on hiring someone, you need to know if there track record is excellent or poor. You don’t want to pay money and then have your website that you spent many hours on creating lose all its rankings because you went cheap. Learn the basic’s of SEO and by following a few SEO blogs, you could start to pickup on a few things to do on your own website or carry out in your marketing tactic’s to improve your rankings.
Disclaimer: I don’t do SEO for a living or consider myself an expert in this field, I’m just mentioning things that I have learned over the years and the blogs that I trust 100% in which I am a follower of. Do research on companies before spending your money.
Derek
@snakeair2
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Hello Snakeair,
Very informative indeed. I think hiring experts is not necessary; you just have to read about it online, experiment in your own site, until you get the results you wanted. SEO for me is writing a good content with appropriate keywords.
I don’t write for search engines. It’s the content that get’s visitors interacting on ones website.
I’ve found that out of everything you need to learn about starting a new website, SEO seems to be the most annoying. It’s mysterious and a pain to implement sometimes, especially if you just want to have a good time writing content. I kind of write with a stream of consciousness method, so it’s really hard for me to stop for a second and think about keywords and such.
Another thing is that even if you think you’ve done a great job with your SEO, chances are that if you’re just starting out you won’t see good results anyway. I dunno. It’s just kind of discouraging sometimes.
Having said that, I still think SEO is really important. Out of everything that I do with my site, I’d say I need to work on my SEO skills the most.
Thanks for the insight Derek.
Your welcome and thank you for your comments as well.
Like Zach, whenever I write, I don’t usually think about keywords. But of course, blogging involves being mindful of keywords because that’s how a blog site becomes visible to users. Still, our SEO strategies should also involve investing in relevant content that’s fit to be shared through social media. After all, they don’t say social media is the new SEO for nothing. Am I right?
Social media is becoming the best place to get traffic if your site got a Google penalty. I mean, you can fix your sites issues but won’t get your rankings back in a few days so using social media to get traffic is a good SEO tactic to remember.
I’m been doing SEO for 3 years now on several sites and it has changed so much in that short amount of time. You really have to read daily of the new changes Google makes. The only thing constant is good quality content. Look forward to your next post on this topic.
Thank you for your comments Lisa.
I’ve just started a backlinking campaign using article submission and social bookmarking, but I don’t see any results yet, I was wondering how much does it take Google to index the articles I submitted and acknowledge my backlinks…
Are these popular article directories? I’m talking about high traffic/high PR ones. I’ve submitted to some article directories and never got an email when the article was approved. Took over a week to find the article in Google. If the article is approved, submit it to some social bookmarking sites. Next month I’m going to write a few articles to begin a marketing campaign and i’ve been thinking about trying to get an approval on this highly popular directories. http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php (I know there quality guidelines will be strict so It could take me awhile to pump out a high quality one with no grammer mistakes)