The Blog

SEO and the slimy salesmen

Posted on 23. Sep, 2011 by Philip in Web design

Great SEO article by Matt Gemmell that gets to the heart of my distaste for paid SEO services. We have warned clients over a number of years that SEO salesmen are selling a short term fix with a long term failure rate. Matt Gemmell places the emphasis exactly where it should be.

I recently read an account of John McElborough’s talk at Brighton SEO 2011, wherein he advocated some ethically questionable SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics involving creating a private network of fake blogs.

John McElborough - Brighton SEO

Now that is sounding familiar. We suggest that simple ideas that make sense and over time will create traffic through natural SEO.

Make sure the page title matches the first heading
Sounds sort of simple but test this with your own SEO approach

Incoming links are good.
This is how the web knows your stuff is good

Use titles that are relevant to the content.
How many times do I have to read “New story” or “Sale on now” as a post title? As Matt puts it, this is High School essay writing stuff.

Use descriptive anchor-text for links.
This does happen quite a lot and we often see the link click here.. or read more…

Keep writing
This is the mantra, write.. write again… write more, and keep doing it.

Stop wilfully conflating optimisation with being a slimy liar. Stop being a dick on the internet. Write something interesting, and keep doing it for months and years. SEO will then follow naturally.

Tags: failure rates, fix, gemmell, matt, matt gemmell, salesmen, seo, seo article, seo services, short term, slimy