I often get asked about overseas SEO companies that send out thousands of emails and fill our spam boxes.
Their subject lines include:
– Top 1st Page Ranking Results.
– Trust AU-based SEO firm to deliver real results.
– First Page Of Google 100% Guaranteed
– We can get your website on 1st page on natural search engines.
These are often referred to in the industry as “Burn and Churn”.
That means they tell you that it will take 3-6 months for results, and then when you don’t see results, they can usually get you to the 12 month mark before you leave them and try someone else. Meanwhile they have charged you $6,000-$12,000. You’ve been burnt.
They bank on keeping you for 6-12 months and then they find the next customer. They Burn…and Churn customers.
Some years ago, all you had to do to get better Google search results was to ensure your name was on directory sites around the world (Yellow pages, White Pages, Yelp, Reach Local, Four Square, Reddit, Super pages, Ezine Articles etc.) , and then pay someone in India to continue to post information snippets about your business to these directory sites every month. As long as the snippets or paragraphs had some of your keywords in them, the theory was that Google would be amazed at finding your name all over the world and therefore rank your site.
By definition SEO is not that easy. In fact, Google work very hard to ensure SEO doesn’t work. They do not want the Google search results to be manipulated.
They rely very heavily on giving searchers the best possible results pages and the last thing Google wants is sub-standard pages appearing on page 1 of search results.
But reputable SEO companies know that there are definitely things that we can do do give our websites the best chance of 1st page results.
These days, SEO or top of Google Search Results are all about reputation. Google wants to be able to calculate how valuable your website is to people wanting products, services or information. Google will measure:
– How long do people stay on your website
– How many pages do they read
– What other websites refer to your website
In fact, Google looks at over 200 + factors when ranking websites.
These days, most SEO experts agree that the following are all important ranking features:
– Keyword usage
– Site structure
– Site speed
– Time spent on site
– Number of inbound links
– Quality of inbound links
– Mobile Usability
Other factors can include:
– Has the site had regular recent updates
– Does the content cover a subject in depth or just a few paragraphs
– Is the content original or scraped or copied from another site
– Does the site have useful images and video content
– Internal links from words to another page with additional information
– Bullet points rather than lines of text make the text easier to read
If you are trying to grow your business and you recognise the importance of page ranking, please contact Andrew Holdsworth at Plan 4 Profit on 0412 548 609