SEO for Dummies – What YOU Need to Know

What do you need to know about SEO to protect yourself? Just a few basics can help keep you from getting ripped off, so here’s a few pointers to keep you on the right track when you start looking into having your website optimized; basically, these are red flags to let you know when an SEO is NOT good at SEO!

1. Content must be valuable to the reader as well as the search engine. If an SEO tries to give you a lot of cheap content that is keyword stuffed and doesn’t have any useful information, or is so hard to read no-one would bother past the first paragraph, that’s NOT good SEO.

2. Links must be from relevant sites. If an SEO tries to get you to sign up for a lot of reciprocating links and spammy sites with hundreds of pages of unrelated links, that’s NOT good SEO.

3. Search Engines crawl text. If an SEO tries to build you a site with a bunch of Flash, you’re in trouble – the search engine can read text surrounding images, but unless you have taken the time to tag everything extensively, a flash site can kill your rankings – and that is NOT good SEO.

4. Tags, urls, subheads, metatags and snippets do matter. These aren’t the only thing search engines factor in, but they DO factor – and is an SEO tries to tell you either not to bother with any of them OR that one is hugely important and the key to all – that is bad SEO.

5. SEO is fairly straight-forward. That’s not saying that it isn’t hard to do, or that it isn’t worth paying money to have it done. It’s like… Tennis, let’s say. Tennis is hitting a ball over a net. But you may not have time to spend learning exactly how to hit the ball and how hard, and what all the rules and penalties are. A tennis player could tell you how to play tennis – it’s not a big secret. The same applies to SEO. An SEO knows what works and doesn’t, and how to win the game, but it’s no huge mystery – they are just trained to do it and can do it better than you, which is why they get paid to do it. If they try to tell you it’s a big trade secret and just to ‘trust them’ – that’s not a good SEO!

Now you know what warning signs of a bad SEO are – next time we’ll talk about how to recognize good SEO, how to find a good one and how to know when you’ve found them.