Due to the economic problems many countries are facing its citisens have been looking for several ways on how to save money. Some also have been looking for extra income thus have resorted to utilising the power of the internet, it is no secret that having a website would increase the possibility of gaining extra income as long as you can incorporate proper marketing strategies. Again, due to the fact that there are some financial limitations on the part of the investor such businesses tend to resort to creating their own website and conducting online marketing and search engine optimisation processes. The question then looms, should you perform a Do-It-Yourself Search engine optimisation? If so, are the SEO Company or SEO Consultant and their services not really necessary?

Go Ahead Perform DIY SEO

There are a lot of people engaged in online marketing who are conducting their own search engine optimisation efforts. So basically, in principle, you could also conduct your Do-it-yourself Search engine Optimisation campaign. The only thing that you have to consider is the fact that search engine optimisation is vast in scope and topic thus there is a need for a very high learning curve. There are a lot of people who have started their Do-it-yourself SEO implementation and succeeded since they already are well versed with the different tenets of search engine optimisation. So if you have a high level of understanding on what search engine optimisation is then go ahead conduct and in-house or a do-it-yourself search engine optimisation campaign.

Don’t Go On to DIY SEO

On the other hand if you are someone who is just starting out with search engine optimisation or have just researched recently what search engine optimisation is then a do-it-yourself search engine optimisation campaign may not be for you. This is because of the following reasons:

1. High Learning Curve – in order to learn what SEO is you have to read up, practice and learn. There is no single rule in search engine optimisation this is why your learning curve aside from being dynamic should also be adaptive.

2. Search engine algorithm is dynamic – this is the main reason why your search engine optimisation learning curve must be adaptive, search engine algorithms are dynamic thus you have to be constantly updated regarding the changes in the field of search engine algorithm. So learning does not stop there every time that there is a change in the algorithm there must also be a high learning curve.

3. Time Element – probably one of the main problem for a DIY SEO campaign is the fact that there are lots of things to implement from article writing to link building. You have to be on top of the implementation of the different strategies, thus if you do not have the time to fully oversee your own SEO campaign then you might lose financial investments poured into the SEO Campaign.

Conclusion

So to answer the question can you implement do-it-yourself SEO, the answer depends on your SEO capabilities, if you are just starting out to learning SEO and do not have the time to implement and manage a full scale SEO campaign then hiring the services of an SEO Company or SEO Consultant would be the best choice. That way you are guaranteed of results and you do not have to worry about any learning curve.

Many SEO companies and SEO consultants know that link building is an essential part of search engine optimisation. It is of course important to note that just like for content development, link building is also considered as the cornerstone of search engine optimisation. This is why after building the website, SEO companies and SEO Consultants would resort to content development as well as link building. What is important to note however is that some SEO Companies and SEO consultants have been missing out on the different characteristics or signals on what makes a good and high quality link. Links should not be taken from anywhere especially so that search engines especially Google have incorporated in their algorithm that which would penalise any website that will utilise web spam techniques both in content development and link building.

What is a Link Signal?

Before we identify what are the different link signals let us explain what a link signal is. When search engine algorithms were developed and improved search engine companies have incorporated in their algorithm a link signal evaluation system. It evaluates whether a link is of high quality or not. Link signals would be the indicator where the search engines would base on in order to know whether a link is of high quality or not.

What are the different Link Signals?

1. Origin Websites’ Worldwide Popularity – a website considered as having a wide audience base or simply with large global popularity is a great site to acquire a link from. This is because a globally popular website exudes lots of authority as well as trust rating.

2. Locally Popular Website – aside from the globally popular website a website which is also locally popular or those that are popular in their own niche would be considered as a website that also has credibility thus it would be a good way source for your links.

3. Neighbourhood – time and time again it is said that a site’s neighbourhood is always detected by search engines in order to know to which the site is linked with and which websites the target site is linking to. This is to determine whether the site in focus is linked to a bad neighbourhood or not. A site linked to a bad neighbourhood would sound the alarms of a search engine prompting it to de-rank a website or worst penalise such website.

4. Trust Ranking – just as what was stated above, search engine algorithms are built to identify low or poor quality links like those originating from bad neighbourhoods. In order to account for the link spams trust rankings of websites are also determined. Trust ranking could be built by building links from high quality websites, this is why it is very important to acquire links only from websites that are of high quality seo-wise.

5. The Anchor Text – a website that utilises keywords as their anchor text would be a good signal for search engines as making such keyword important and building lots of links using a specific anchor text would mean that there is a great chance for such website to rank or be indexed in the search engine using that keyword.

Conclusion on Link Building Signals

When building links it is important not only for you to know on how to create links for your website, it is also very important that you determine whether the website where you are gaining your link from would be of high quality and emanates positive signals to the search engines, otherwise you will be endangering your website in terms of the search engine results page rankings.

So Google has released another algorithm update and they have named it the Google Penguin. The SEO forums have burned in discussions because of this Google algorithm update and as usual many would again imply that the “sky is falling” rankings are lost and of course with it are their return of investments. Some have gone from page one of Google’s search engine results page to page one hundred or worst they may have lost their rankings and indexing from Google entirely. It is because of these lost rankings that many have been saying that “the sky is falling”. The question is should you believe them?

What is the Google Penguin

Many SEO companies and SEO consultants have had their sites hit by the Google penguin algorithm because of the fact that they have been using unscrupulous methods in order to increase the ranking of their website. The Google Penguin was developed in order to target web spam or those strategies which would result to manipulating the search engines. Strategies like link farming, duplicate content among other similar strategies are considered to be strategies that would tend to manipulate the search engine rankings.

Why Should You Not Be Bothered By The Penguin?

You should not be bothered by the penguin if you utilise white hat strategies. White hat SEO strategies directed into link building and content development will ensure that your rankings will increase and it will be able to create a reliable source of information worthy of being ranked in the first page of the Google search engine results page rankings. The following are some strategies which you can do in order not to be bothered by the penguin.

1. Write Informative and Unique Content – your website needs to have fresh content every time this is why you have to incorporate such content, however it should not only be just any content but rather it should be unique, informative and relevant to your websites’ content.

2. Build Quality Links – when building links you have to create such links organically or in such a way that you will not be manipulating the search engines. Building links naturally would mean to do them manually without the aide of any automation software application.

Conclusion

So you should not really be bothered by the Penguin if you have been doing white hat SEO strategies. Make sure that what you incorporate in your website whether be it a content or a link should be of high quality and not intended to manipulate any of the search engine algorithms.

Of course every SEO company and SEO consultant know that Google is the primary search engine of choice when it comes to gaining traffic due to the fact that Google has the highest number of user’s base. Google has about sixty to seventy percent share of search engine users worldwide while its competitors like Bing and Yahoo shares about twenty percent of internet users while the remaining ten percent is being shared among the different tertiary search engines. Google indeed is considered as the biggest source of traffic in terms of search engines. With that huge amount of internet users using Google the question is, is it possible to gain traffic without Google?

Other Traffic Sources

The answer is yes, there are other traffic sources other than Google and aggregating these sources may very well give enough traffic to your website to increase your readership, viewership and return of investment. The following alternative traffic sources are:

1. Social Media – ever heard of Facebook? Twitters? MySpace? And other social media websites? Well throughout the years social media websites have increased in popularity, take Facebook for example, it already have close to one billion users. This number of users from Facebook makes it a good target for gaining traffic. Many have utilised Facebook pages to create business pages to promote their products and services. How about Twitter? The limited number of characters allowed to be placed in the microblog is enough to promote your business or website to your followers just make sure that you make your Tweets interesting.

2. Social Bookmark – believe it or not there are internet users who are bookmarking websites or web content for them to easily remember the site url. Bookmarks gives a list of websites that have interesting contents in it, having your site placed in as many bookmarks as possible will guarantee a traffic flow from social bookmarks.

3. Blogs – if you cannot have your site rank in the search engine having your business promoted through blog sites which is considered as the online media will also be a good source of traffic for your website. Further, blogs have regular followers and subscribers thus if your site is promoted via blog sites you will gain visibility as well as traffic.

Conclusion

Well the question which you may be asking yourself is if websites could gain traffic from other sources aside from Google then should you just optimise without taking Google in consideration? Believe it or not, if you optimise your website without trying to manipulate the Google search engine you might actually get your website high into the Google search engine results page considering the fact that Google frowns upon strategies that may tend to manipulate rankings in their SERP.

Inbound links or those links that comes from another website going to a target website is sought after by all SEO companies and SEO consultants. This is because inbound links are considered as “votes” to the website and if the origin of the link came from a website which could be considered of high quality. A link coming from a high quality website would also tantamount to having a high quality link. Acquiring high quality links to your website would help ensure that your website is going to be considered by search engines as reliable thus making it rank better in the search engine results page. With the current requirement from Google to penalise those websites with poor quality links and contents makes it all important for an SEO company and an SEO consultant to acquire high quality links from high quality website.

Characteristics of a High Quality Link

What is a high quality link? What makes a high quality link? The following are the characteristics of a high quality link:

1. The Website where the link is coming from should be of high page rank – page ranking is Google’s way of showing the reliability of the website by ranking it from zero to ten where ten is the highest value. If your link is emanating from a website with a high page rank the value of such link is increased and thus making your website a recipient of a high page rank value.

2. High Trust Ranking – a website that has a high trust ranking linking to your target website will give your target website also with a high trust ranking thus making your link to be considered as a high quality link.

3. Quality Content – believe it or not content also plays an important role in the determination of a quality link. If your websites does not contain relevant contents, where each content pertains to any topic and are really poorly written and spinned then the link to your website is of no value. Because of Google Panda content plays a role in the determination of link quality.

Conclusion

Links is considered as the lifeblood of search engines because of the fact that links are used as gateways for crawlers to move from one web page to another while gathering relevant information about the website for proper processing. This is why it is important for links to be of the highest quality in order to assure search engines that your site is not associated with unscrupulous websites that may contain malwares or contents that may be detrimental to your sites rankings. Thus in link building, determining what makes a link to be of high quality is important in order not to compromise your rankings.

For some time the process known as search engine optimisation have come to follow the industry standard of keyword research, content development and link building. Combining these strategies makes your search engine optimisation efforts to be very effective. The only question is how much work you will be putting into your website in order to fully optimise them. Many SEO companies and SEO consultants however, has the tendency to skip several steps in the so called SEO industry standard, this may be caused by the fact that search engine optimisation strategies are very tedious and takes considerable amount of time. Content development for one requires talent and writing skills as well as requiring time allotment in order to create a well thought out content. Link building is also a tedious task since it requires searching for quality sites and determining how you would be able to incorporate a link to your website. Keyword research also takes a considerable amount of time, which is if you are not only relying on keyword research software might cut the time considerably but reliability of the keywords are compromised.

Can I Skip Keyword Research?

Many SEO companies and SEO consultant may not entirely abandon keyword research however taking the shorter route in keyword research will do a lot of damage to your entire search engine optimisation campaign. There is a very significant reason why keyword research is the first step in every search engine optimisation strategy. This is because keyword research allows you to determine which keywords you will be targeting in your entire SEO campaign. If content development and link building is search engine optimisations’ cornerstone, keyword research is the building block of content development and link building. This is why it is very important to give due priority to keyword research, so to answer the question, can you skip keyword research? In our opinion no, unless of course keywords were already predetermined by your client.

Conclusion

Go ahead skip keyword research, but you have to be ready for the consequences, a search engine optimisation campaign can be compared to a ship going nowhere. This is because of the fact that there is no definite keyword to target, if in case there is a keyword but was just taken out of the creative minds of the SEO company or SEO consultant without any solid backup data supporting the viability of the keyword based on traffic then the campaign would just be a money drain, with no apparent accomplishments. So finally should you forego keyword research? Definitely not.

On May 5, 2012, the different social media sites burned because of the extensive discussion regarding the latest page rank update conducted by Google, of course a lot of website owners were very happy because of the fact that their page ranking increased and some even jumped two page ranks up. Some were felt the opposite because of the simple fact that their rankings went down. This roller coaster emotions by SEO companies and SEO consultants is because of the changes in the page ranking of their target website.

What is Page Rank?

In order to understand why many SEO companies and SEO consultants are worrying about their websites page ranking we have to understand what page ranking is. Page Rank basically is patented by Google, it is a ranking set in order to indicate the authority of the website. The ranking will start from a low zero to a high of page rank 10. The increase in page rank can be attributed with the link building SEO strategy where link page rank is passed on if it originated from a website with a high page rank. This is because of the fact that links from one website to another is considered as a “vote” to the recipient website which means that the more websites with high page rank linking the higher the page rank of the recipient website.

Page Rank and Panda or Penguin

Many would wonder if Penguin and Panda interplays with the Page rank. One of Panda and Penguins main focus is to track poor and spinned content making it reduce the ranking of the website in SERP. The main question therefore is does content now play a role in determining the page rank?

The Answer

Content nowadays play a significant role in determining the page rank of the website, this is because Google utilises the flesch-kincaid method where it tracks word spelling and sentence grammar and checks whether they are correct. Of course content is only one of the determining factors as links are still key players in determining the page rank of a website.

Conclusion

This just proves what we have always been saying on this blog time and again. In order for you to gain ranking either in the search engine results page or in the page ranking you have to incorporate quality not only in your link building efforts but most of all in your content development.

According to the different latest updates in Google’s algorithm quality content is imperative in order for your site to be indexed and be given a higher ranking. Quality is what Google have been emphasising in its latest blast of algorithm updates from the Panda to the Penguin. Of course writing quality content just to increase in ranking or to speed up site indexing may be the primary motivation of SEO companies and SEO consultants however such should not be the primary reason why you should be writing quality content.

What is Quality Content?

In article writing or any forms of online writing quality content merely means writing something informative and interesting. Quality is further gauged by the content’s way of being written. The grammar should be correctly done and the words and sentences should be within context and are cohesively written. Spellings should also be correct according to the language which you are using. Finally the content must be unique or original which means copying from the internet or other medium is prohibited, the search engines have a way of detecting if the content is copied similar to those anti-plagiarism website applications.

Why Write Quality Content?

So now that we know what quality content it is time to know why we should write quality content for our websites. As stated above the primary motivation for every SEO company and SEO consultant is to improve search engine rankings however this should not be the primary focus. The primary focus on why you should write your content is to make the internet and the search engines deliver an improved search result. Imagine clicking on a search engine results page link the after spending time reading an article you found out that the article is not really what you are looking for and it is meaningless, that would be frustration right? This is why it is important to write quality content, write something informative and that is relevant to the keywords utilised in the search engine results page.

Conclusion

It is important to write quality content not to gain ranking from the search engines but instead it is to improve the overall quality of search engine results and ultimately to improve the delivery of information via the internet where garbage information are supposed to be scrapped and those high quality information are indexed and ranked by the different search engines and even in social media.

Time and again, if you have been reading this blog you may find out that we are always talking about the different strategies and news about the world of search engine optimisation. However, there may be some of you that may have stumbled upon this page because you are looking for information about what search engine optimisation is. Many would say the search engine optimisation is the newest way on promoting your business this is because of the fact that it utilises the new media or some would call it the fourth media and that is the internet.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO companies and SEO consultants would define search engine optimisation differently their definitions are the following:

1. Search engine optimisation is the process of improving a websites feature or visibility in the search engines by way of incorporating different search engine optimisation strategies such as link building and content development. This definition of course is the most common among SEO Companies and SEO Consultants, some would even add the statement that these strategies to increase search engine visibility in order to increase the websites’ return of investment.

2. Search engine optimisation is the process of creating quality content and quality links without any intentions of manipulating the rankings and without intentions of increasing ROI. This definition is mostly according to search engines whereby it is like saying “hey I care about sharing quality information through the internet”, so most of the strategies inclusive here are based on quality and not on quantity.

Conclusion on What is SEO

The second definition is the ideal definition of search engine optimisation, this is because it helps improve the overall search engine results page. Since it has the highest probability of sharing the most relevant information based on the keywords used by the searcher or the search engine user.

Ok so maybe we have been talking a lot about Google penguin these past days, why not? It is the hottest news in the field of Search engine optimisation. Many SEO companies and SEO consultants have been talking about this latest algorithm update by Google this is because of the fact that there are a lot of losers in terms of search engine results page ranking upon the roll out of the Google Penguin algorithm. Of course according to Google the Penguin algorithm is used to combat web spam and although Google has enumerated quite a few web spam techniques there are still some SEO companies and SEO consultants that may be in the dark so to speak with regards to what can be considered as web spam or not.

What Is Web Spam?

The definition of a web spam is very simple, it is the strategies used in order to manipulate or trick the search engines in order to increase your websites’ search engine ranking. These strategies include all those that are considered to be black hat strategies. These include keyword stuffing, duplicate contents, link schemes among others.

How to Recover From Penguin Update

Of course we know that in every Google algorithm update there are always those websites that will take the hit. Depending on the algorithm’s “flavor” specific websites will take the fall and be de-ranked or banned by Google. If your site is among the three percent (3%) hit by the Google Penguin update then it is important that you retrace your SEO steps from content development to link building where you could do the following:

1. Identify Duplicate Content in Your Website – you might have used some contents that were just copied from another site, previously or many moons ago this practice escapes the eye of the search engines but not today, so if you have some duplicate contents that may still be in your website it is time for you to delete them.

2. Identify Low Quality Links – to put it into proper context low quality links here pertains to those links that were from link farms or from bad neighbourhood sites, these types of links are easy to acquire however it is potentially dangerous to your websites’ ranking.

3. Plead Your Case – one of the features included in the Penguin update is the fact that you can plead your case with Google. You can plead your case through the Google Webmaster Tools. Here you can specify or inform Google about reconsidering your sites ranking especially if you think that Google has mistakenly de-ranked your website.

Conclusion

As always Google will continue to update their algorithm and it is essential that SEO Companies and SEO Consultants are always updated on such changes. If their site is hit by such algorithm change it is also very important to know what to do to remedy the situation, proper knowledge is needed and to acquire such knowledge research and being always on the lookout for relevant information would be very beneficial.