Search Marketing Consultant

I have seen a few website design companies offer free SEO with their websites.  I have also seen specialist SEO companies charge £400+ per month per keyword for SEO. So what are these companies actually offering for free and what more do you get if you pay?

To understand the differences between to two extremes you first need to understand the basics of SEO.  SEO comes in two parts:

1. On site Optimisation.  This includes making your website easy to read by the search engines putting your keywords in the correct places in the right density. This includes adding your keywords in the title and meta tags as well as the main body text and many other places.
2. Off page Optimisation.  This is all about building incoming links to your website.  You can spend a lot of time asking other website owners to link to your site, adding your details in directories, posting in forums, commenting on blogs and social media sites etc.

Both companies above will do the on page SEO, I would assume the SEO company would do a lot more keyword and competitor analysis first to determine the best keywords to use to get relevant traffic to your website as quickly as possible.  The web design company would probably ask you which keywords you want to use or simply use appropriate keywords from the text on your site.

When it comes to off page SEO the offerings will be completely different.  The SEO company will actively build backlinks to your website from a variety of relevant websites with keywords correctly placed in the anchor text.  They may also build web 2.0 websites to link back to your site and post relevant articles with links as well as pro-actively building links from many other types of websites.

The web design company will give you a completely different story.  They will say “backlinks should be built naturally, what SEO companies do can be considered un-natural by Google and could get your site banned.  The only way to build backlinks is to create unique useful content and other website owners will then link to your site.”

The problem with the ‘natural’ way is it can take a very long time to get good rankings.  If no one can find your web site they will not be able to read your wonderful content and therefore won’t be linking to it.  You should also consider what your competitors are doing.  You want to be on the first page of Google for keywords relevant to your product or service.  Look at the 10 websites already on page one for your keywords.  If they are all building backlinks at the rate of a few hundred a month and you wait for links to build naturally your website may never catch up and never appear on page one of Google.

The ‘build it and they will come’ natural method may work for long tail keywords that are not very competitive but it is unlikely to work for competitive keywords.

To find out how competitive your market is, request a free keyword and SEO analysis from Sytec a Web Design and SEO company.

To gain top rankings on the major search engines you not only need to optimisation your web pages by adding your keywords in the title and meta tags etc but you will also need to build in bound links to your pages from other websites. 

Read my new report on my top 10 link building methods to find out the best ways to increase your websites link popularity.

There are many different ideas about how you should use links to increase your search engine ranking. Some say reciprocal linking (or link swapping) is bad and does not help or can even damage you rankings and others will say it is a good thing. Others will only use 3 way linking systems. Some say that incoming links should only be gained naturally by other website owners linking to your site purely because of the useful content you have. You can increase this by making sure your site contains useful unique content, (sometimes referred to as ‘link bait’). Generally you will want to speed up this process by finding your own link partners.

The way I see it is that one way links are preferred but it is the quality of the link that really matters. Exchanging links with a good quality site that is relevant to your site with the correct anchor text can be more beneficial than a one way link from a low quality site. Google places a lot of weight on your websites incoming links so you need to make sure that sites that link to you are the type of websites that Google likes. Nobody knows exactly how the Google algorithm works but as Google is always trying to improve the searchers’ experience you need to think what would be good for them. Linking with relevant websites that your visitors would also be interested in could only be a good thing.

What type of links should you avoid?
As relevance is highly important, exchanging links with “link farms” will be no good at all. These types of sites will mix all types of links together on one page so the page will have no clear theme. On the other hand exchanging links with structured directory sites can prove beneficial. For example, Google’s favorite directory is the ODP, dmoz.org. If you have a link to your site in this directory it will most probably improve your ranking. It may take a long time to get listed as it is a human edited directory but it is free so well worth adding your site.

When gaining links from other sites you should focus on authority websites that have relevant content. As well as directories, links from related blogs and forums can be useful but be aware that a lot of these sites have ‘no follow’ set on their links which means that the search engines will ignore these links and therefore will not help your rankings. These links can still be of benefit as humans may follow them to your site. Other places to get links from are article sites and social bookmark sites but beware that these also use ‘no follow’.

In conclusion, reciprocal links are not all bad, if used correctly, they can improve your search engine rankings.