Dangerous Search Engine Optimisation
In the olden days of the search engines, which can literally mean months ago, you could still get away with building thousands of poor quality links and see an excellent improvement in your Search Engine Rankings. For this reason, many SEO gurus would basically spam the internet with junk content to create more backlinks to their customer’s websites. They would syndicate rubbish content, swap links with dodgy websites and use all sorts of deceptive ‘black hat’ SEO strategies.
Avoid Spinning Content
One of the biggies was to Spin content, meaning they would take an article, often someone else’s, use an automated tool to rewrite it and submit these articles everywhere they could online. Of course, the content read terribly. However, it gave great search engine results fast. The basic principle was a link back to your website acted like a ‘vote’ for your website. The more votes you had the better you would rank.
High Quality Links ONLY
Even with all the search engine changes, backlinks are still powerful. However, they have got to be high quality links from high quality websites that have high quality relevant content related to your website in some way. No doubt many SEO companies are on their way trying new ways to beat Google. They may succeed for the short term and be able to charge customers a packet for the service but sooner or later those customers could lose their rankings and worse, they could be blacklisted.
Be Careful Who Does Your SEO
You have got to be so careful with who does your SEO and how they do it. Generally, you will pay a monthly fee for on-going SEO services and if the results are good, chances are you will continue. Trouble is it can really come back to bite you. You could have spent thousands and then all of a sudden you lose all your rankings. The SEO company might lose you as a customer, but they already have thousands of dollars out of your pocket and into theirs.
The general rule of thumb is build links for humans, not just links for SEO purposes only. If the link is positioned in such a way that it is useful and relevant for website visitors to click on, then it’s a sign it is a high quality link. You can still use article directories as long as your content is good but I would use them sparingly and stick with the best few like ezinearticles.com.
