I go to Total Fitness in Altrincham every couple of days for a swim, in an attempt to keep fit. There were a couple of guys in the changing room chatting about business, one of them was an electrical retailer – “You wanna get that SEO for your business mate”, one said to the other, “Nah – I’ve heard its all a scam” , said the second guy. “No really I’ve got a mate that does in for companies” and there ended the brief conversation. So what lead the second guy in to thinking that SEO is a scam?

Well to me its pretty obvious – I can’t tell you how many emails I get every day telling me this or that company has done ‘thorough‘ research in to my company and that my website is not on the front page of Google for the most searched for terms. I have given up replying and telling them that they know absolutely nothing about my company, now I just delete them. 90% are sent by lazy idle idiots who are trying to drum up business by sending out ridculous faux scary emails like this and what’s the result? Its just given SEO a bad name. Sure there are bound to be scam companies out there, ripping people off by charging them the earth for not delivering but there are also some cracking companies doing a great job.

My advice to anyone looking in to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation),  is to get the basics right yourself, do some research in to the most common keywords for your business, if you are using Google Adwords then there is a nifty keyword tool that comes free with the package and its dead easy to use. Look at say the top 5 keywords and make sure that your site is peppered with them:

Simple on page SEO 

• Site Title and Page Titles – Use Keywords and make sure every page is unique – Google hates duplication
• Site and Page URl’s – Use Keywords in the URL’s, no one wants to see coded URL’s and Google hates them.
• Site and Page Descriptions – Make them readable and pepper them with Keywords make them unique.
• Bolded H1 tags in the body of the page, even going down to H2 and H3 (header tags) Google loves them.
• Image names and Alt tags – use Keywords as the names of images and USE the Alt tag.
• Hyperlinks between pages THROUGH the keywords.
• On page copy – USE Keywords.

These really simple steps will ensure that your website increases it Google rank – don’t pay people to do this, do it youself and you will notice your site rising in Google for the Keywords you have used. When you have gone as far as you can with this and need more THEN and only then consider getting external help with link building, article writing, Social Bookmarking, Hubpages, Squidoo and other forms of external SEO.

There is an article on Hubpages here for further reading:  http://hubpages.com/hub/On-Page-Search-Engine-Opimization-SEO

Have a great weekend!