Common SEO Mistakes. Part Two of the Edge45® seminar at Made in York

Part Two of our seminar series! You can find previous videos in the series here. Today Edge45® founder Colin Docherty takes us through SEO mistakes and issues that we still see time and again. It’s not something we want to see happen, so we’ll share with you what NOT to do.

[TRANSCRIPT]

“This is key word stuffing on the page. There you go, courses in York, some more courses in York. Let’s talk about courses in York some more. And again, and again and it’s just awful. That is not what SEO is, it just isn’t, it used to be back in like, I don’t know 2003 but you know, who’s gonna read that? You know, you’re trying to sell a service to somebody who’s visited this page, okay, so you got the page ranking because of manipulation, but you’re still trying to convert it into a sale and well it’s crap isn’t it? So it’s written for search engines not humans.

You’ll get penalized if you go mad at it. He actually ranks very well. It’s just a matter of time… per user experience, I wouldn’t wanna rank well doing it that way it just says really bad stuff about my business and my approach to doing business. It gives a poor impression of the brand.

Here’s another one, another SEO company in York, make sure that the name is not visible. So you know, written for search engines not humans, what do I mean by that? So are you using York SEO techniques to maximize its potential. Reads unnaturally, doesn’t really tell you anything insightful or useful and again reflects poorly on the company and to top it off they’re not even in York.

“And our office is based in Leeds” so hidden text. Web designers still think this is an acceptable thing to do like and they genuinely don’t mean to be doing naughty stuff but you can’t see it there but actually there’s a load of text hidden there cuz text is the some colour as the background.

Fast track to a penalty. Here’s another one. Doorway pages. Pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They’re not directly accessible from anywhere on the site navigation links. So here you can’t find this page it’s all on the first page but Google found it. And let’s just stick some random terms in there , CEO, CFO, finance director recruitment.

So this is how we’re gonna rank for this term. Let’s create a load of invisible pages and shove keywords in them. Just not cool, basically. Spam content, this is a big one. So content is being generated programmatically. So it just takes loads of words and spits them out on the pages like vomit.

If you read that it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Learn the way technology is made infertile because it’s best speaks your code dad or mom or have a few questions and answers with your spouse. And then randomly this link on the word in, not sure why, and it goes to these guys. So this spam content is being hosted on the website to get this link to link to them, so they rank better for whatever it is they want them to rank for, again, very bad.

[TRANSCRIPT]