The world of SEO can be a confusing one – especially when you are starting out with your own small business. Our own journey building websites here at Print Colchester has been one of learning and we’d like to share some of the tips that we’ve picked up along the way. As search engine optimisation is such a large subject area we’re not going to go through everything today, but for our first post on the subject – here is our One Golden Rule.

Are You Being Honest?

Being honest is a brilliant trait, but one that is unfortunately overlooked in today’s busy world of business. SEO is an area that has often been targeted by people selling get rich quick schemes – ‘Page One on Google’ – ‘15,000 followers on twitter’ – ‘A million likes on Facebook’, are all sales pitches we see time and time again in our inboxes. But the old adage stands true on this one, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. In the first instance these schemes are generally futile. Those 15,000 followers for your twitter page turn out to be an army of drones that have zero interaction with anyone outside their legion, making them next to useless in driving traffic to your twitter page (or indeed to your website). Same goes for those million likes on Facebook. But the real problem now is those guys that promised the first page on Google.

SEO and the first page of Google

Turns out the way the Google scheme worked was based on how Google used to rank your website – the more links from outside pages your website has, the higher the ranking. So these guys set up a million fake pages spread out across the internet. They added thousands of comments to blogs like this one, with links to your page in the text. You pay the moneys, they link your site. This allowed these unscrupulous companies to drive your page very quickly up the rankings. But Google got smart. They can see all the data and they could see exactly what was happening. So they turned the tables on the get rich quick guys. Anyone they caught using these tactics would lose their rankings. In fact these bad links now count against them, causing a lot of damage to small businesses to the little guys that hoped cutting corners with SEO would give them more time to concentrate on their own trade.

The Golden Rule – No Tricks!

The moral to this story is don’t cheat when it comes to SEO. No Tricks! If you are unsure on what to do when it comes to promoting your business via your website ask us. Ask Google. Just don’t cut corners, or it may well come back to haunt you.