The SEO companies that wear striped tops and balaclavas!

Working as a Graphic / Web Designer for the past 4 years, has been a very interesting ride. I have learned a lot to do with online marketing and I thought, to develop my skills further I would need to delve into the world of SEO, and become a jack of all trades.

The company that I currently work for, own a number of websites that SEO companies have torn to pieces, tried to glue back together with the wrong glue and left us with a shambling mess!

Within the first 2 weeks of being on the Search and Social Media Marketing course, I knew exactly where our sites were lacking optimisation and had produced a strategic plan of how to save our sites from the plummets of low Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Questioning certain “SEO services”

Here are some things which I noticed on our sites after attending the Foundation SSMM course:

I noticed that the Meta Title tags were duplicated throughout. This is obviously a big NO NO, as every page with-in your site needs to have a unique title.  Also, they were averaging at around 150 characters, which I know I could keep down to, at most 80 characters that include my primary keywords and secondary.

So once I was done with the unique titles throughout the whole of the site, it was time to start working on the descriptions for each of the pages. This I found was the most time consuming of all the on page stuff that I was doing, I remembered what Simon Wharton had told us about ” writing for the user, and NOT the search engine ” and made sure all my descriptions included my keywords for that page and read fluently.

Me Vs. SEO Company, the battle continues…

The next step that I was going to look at was the page structure and content. Now the previous bunch of “apes”, who carried out the SEO services for our sites, must have had literally NO IDEA what they were doing!

All our pages contained no <h1> tags and basically had copied all the content from other sites! Tools like Copyscape had helped me find the original source of all our content! So my mission was to create the <h> tags using the relevant keywords, come to the table with fresh new content that included the keywords for the relevant pages. Again remembering what Simon had said, we made sure the new content for our pages read very fluently, and delivered the message they intended too, without spamming it with random keywords.

Lets wrap this up…

The outcome of the work I have been putting into our sites is really starting to show through now. There are points which I haven’t even covered and I am already starting to see great results! In the next couple of weeks I will be looking more into the internal and external links for our sites and also be pushing towards some Social Media tools.

So unfortunately due to the nature of our business, I am not able to link to any of the sites that I am currently working on, so you can all have my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts instead! 🙂

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