So getting the balance right is essential to success with your website.
Google’s algorithm is updated about twice a week and keeping up with those updates is the job of your SEO team. The experts can make live changes to your website in order to keep it in line with the latest Google ‘rules’ – keeping a prominent position within search engine results.
Penguin Update
Google likes to name its larger scale updates with animal titles – Penguin was the latest major change to how the search engine reads your website. From an internal and external perspective, Google extracts every bit of information it knows about your website and reads it so thoroughly that the software can identify if you are trying to cheat the system in an attempt to improve your rankings – this is known as ‘black hat SEO’.
Black hat SEO
Pre-Penguin, Google has always been policing black-hat techniques and the online community has worked to report any obvious instances of cheating. But what exactly is cheating?
Google uses an automated robot to read a website and identify its relevant subject. In a nutshell, black hat SEO would involve tricking this robot (the ‘spider’) into reading a site as more relevant than it actually is, by using a number of sly techniques:
- Doorway page – a separate page than what the user is led to when entering a site. This doorway page is packed full of keywords and ‘spammy’ content to force-feed Google with information. The page the user actually sees is perfectly readable
- Hidden text – disguising manipulative and nonsensical keywords by using a font colour that blends in with the background of a page
- Content scraping – stealing text from various related websites to create an amalgamation of words for your website, instead of writing fresh content yourself
- Keyword stuffing – littering a website with keywords that do not fit naturally into readable content.
Google’s software is so sophisticated that all of these techniques are now obsolete – adopting them could even result in a penalty for the associated website.
Quality SEO
To succeed online, your business needs to understand the rapidly evolving world of good SEO. Employing the expertise of the BT SEO Service is an ideal start: Your site can be reviewed in-depth from a search perspective and amended accordingly to adhere to Google’s requirements. At the same time, you can learn from the professionals about what you can do to strengthen your website’s authority going forward. On top of that, the BT Web Expert package gives you a full web redesign and content refresh every two years, so your site always looks new and remains at the frontier of online best practice.
See how BT SEO services can help your business achieve its goals.
