Plumbing Connection Autumn 2016

7 2

PLUMBING CONNECTION

AUTUMN 2016

THE TRUTH ABOUT SEO

SEO CAN SEEM LIKE THE PERFECT SOLUTION TO YOUR ONLINE MARKETING PROBLEMS – BUT NOTHING IS AS

SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS.

KATE JORDAN

EXPLAINS.

ONLINE MARKETING

f you have a website, I can guarantee someone has tried

to sell you SEO. The approach is generally the same: the

salesperson says they’ve been looking at your website

and think it can be improved. They promise the world; with

their expert help, your website will be the best, you’ll have

requests for work pouring in. All that’s needed is a small

investment of money...

So, what is this magical SEO? It’s Search Engine

Optimisation, the process of improving your website’s

ranking on search engines like Google (and sometimes

smaller sites like Yahoo and Bing). Google has an incredibly

large algorithm (a mathematical formula) that decides

which website best matches the word or phrase the user

searched for. A crawler bot assesses your website against

this algorithm to see if it is relevant. To rank on Google,

therefore, your website needs to impress the algorithm –

but that’s not as simple as it sounds.

Google closely guards the algorithm. Anyone who tells

you they know the algorithm is lying. Nobody knows the

entire algorithm or even which aspects of a website the

algorithm assesses or how much importance is placed on

each aspect.

If the algorithm is so mysterious, how do SEO companies

know what tactics to use? The good ones – of which there

are very few – monitor changes in their clients’ rankings

and feedback from the SEO community to see what works

and what doesn’t. They then make an educated guess about

what might cause a website to rank.

In short – SEO is a little like predicting the weather.

Through research and past experience, you can predict what

the most likely outcome is – but at the end of the day, there

are too many variables to be certain.

To make SEO even more complicated, the Google

algorithm is constantly changing. Small updates are

released every day, as well as occasional large updates.

SEO tactics that worked a week ago may not be as effective

next week.

IN SHORT – SEO IS A LITTLE LIKE

PREDICTING THE WEATHER.

Search Engine Optimisation is far from straight forward and

may not be worthy of your investment.

The factors that affect a website’s ranking can be broken

down into two parts: onsite and offsite. Onsite factors are

relatively simple and include the content of the website, how

the content is structured and how the pages of the website

are connected. There are also non-visible onsite factors, like

how easy it is for the crawler bot to access the site and the

speed of the website.

Offsite factors are a bit more complicated and harder

to fix. They include backlinks (when another website has a

link back to the original website) and social media cues (the

impact of which is heavily debated). In the ‘good old days’

it was only the number of backlinks that mattered and SEO

companies could simply build thousands of links. Now, it’s