SEO: Watch out for “snake oil” salesmen

If your business depends on website conversions for its income, then the best marketing investment you can make is in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

So how does it work? Put simply, each search engine uses a different algorithm to rank results. They look at various components of your site including the title, meta tags, keywords in the URL, keywords in the text, headings in the text, number of pages, and external links into the site.

Unfortunately, there are many SEO “experts” out there who would have probably made a great living as snake oil salesmen.

For example, some software used to promote you site can actually negatively affect your rankings. As can “cloaking” techniques which shows different content to search engines than to real live visitors. These are known as “black hat” SEO, and while they may work in the short term, may be disastrous later on.

Another vital thing that is often overlooked by these “experts” is that the number of visitors to your site is irrelevant if they are not targeted. For example, you might end up ranking high for “cheap widgets” but when visitors come to your site, what they actually see is “premium widgets”, so they leave immediately.

Which is why it is important to invest in an SEO company – such as Direct Digital Solutions – which will only use “white hat” SEO techniques to manual optimise your site for the necessary keywords, which will drive real potential customers to your business.

A good thing to look for when choosing an SEO company is whether it offers some kind of guarantee. But be careful if the guarantee is something like “number one spot in just one week” – this is a very good indication that their methods are not quite right.

Direct Digital Solutions’s guarantee is that we will follow accepted practices that will help search engines find relevant results for people looking for your product or service. Because we know that search engines regularly change algorithms and it’s just not possible to accurately predict the future.

We use techniques that we know have worked in the past, and we anticipate they will work for most businesses.

Direct Digital Solutions offers a wide range of SEO packages for our clients – from simple link building to our premium service.

If you need more traffic to your website, contact us today at us@directdigitalsolutions.com.au or phone 02 9557 7623.