If you have been keeping an eye on the Google guidelines as reported by Shaun Anderson they have changed

From:

“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

To:

“There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

Then on March 14th to:

“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question.”

So as we see Google is rewording, what does this mean. Many people see Google as the enemy and suspect Googles game plan is just profit by having search dominated by paid search results killing websites that don’t/cant pay for paid search listings.

We are seeing negative SEO companies springing up. A sort of assassin for websites working hard to kill your business. I recently read a forum post about a case study done detailing the take down of http://www.justgoodcars.com/ the owner tried to contact Google via its forums to no avail and if you check the rankings even today there is no sign of the site for the major keywords targeted

What is Negative SEO

Simply put Negative SEO is simply building lots of low quality links in a very short space of time. As a rule of thumb the easier it is to get those links the lower quality they will be. Of course there are going to be exceptions but not many. In the past Google always maintained that this sort of thing was not possible and low quality links carried very little weight and would not influence rankings positively or negatively.

The ability for a competitor to have a control of your rankings is going to have far reaching ramifications within the on-line business community. The world of SEO just got a whole lot darker. I’m interested to see when will Google take action will it be when the victim of an on line take down takes off-line action? We will have to wait and see. If Google does nothing then many will see it as part of the plan to make everybody switch to paid search.

In the past

In the past,seo was all about being number one. The top spot was the prised position as there could only be one top spot. Competition was fierce and in the early days a lot of the returned results were pages designed to gain rankings not to entice visitors. Spamming was rife. Meta tags held a large sway with the then search engine algorithms, they would be stuffed with words in the hope of getting traffic. I must even admit to using some of these tactics in the early days. Using software such as web position gold in the hope of it telling me the magic numbers to make me an SEO God

Business SEO has Matured

Like all things, SEO has aged, looking back on it’s past and reminiscing how silly it used to be. The modern online marketing consultant is no longer just interested in rankings , now he or she is interested in helping you the business owner.

SEO has gone all holistic

As I said previously SEO used to be all about the position. Now from my point of view I want to get your website and online marketing working seamlessly together. Using the term  SEO is a little misleading as search engine optimisation is only a part of what a good internet marketing company does.

So what does a “good” internet marketing company do

SEO is still a major part of the mix but for it to be done properly you need your SEO involved from the conception stage of the web design process. By having them involved they can advise the web designer on how to structure the site so it is search engine friendly. The other option would be to hire an SEO web designer with the skills in place to build a search engine friendly website.

Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of an SEO’s job finding good high traffic keywords and phrases relevant to your business.

Ditching Keywords

Once your SEO has built his list of key phrases he or she will “ditch” the ones with to much competition (new sites) or not enough searches to be profitable.

Copy writing

Your website copy could mean the difference between making a sale or not, your SEO will help you with your copy giving you pointers to improve the wording or take on the project themselves using a good SEO copywriter .

Calls to action

Call to action is a common phrase in the world of online marketing simply put it is asking the customer to perform a single or set of actions these may be as simple as using the phrase “buy now” or using your phone number as a focus point with “call us now”

Converting visitors to buyer, website conversion rates

The ability of a website to make sales or enquiries is measured in its conversion rate. A conversion rate of a page or a site is calculated in the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. An example would be a websites gets a thousand visitors a month and from that thousand 35 people go on to buy the product or service we would have a conversion rate of 35/1000 = 0. 035 or 3.5 %.

things that can decrease or increase conversion rates are headlines, copy, site design, colour and calls to action. For the bigger budget projects your SEO would undertake some split testing of different layouts, wording, headlines,colours and images. A quick way to get some results for the conversion rates would be to use PPC (pay per click) sending half the clicks to one page and the other half to the other modified page and compare conversion rates.

Off Page Optimisation

Off page SEO is a whole subject in it’s own right. To give you an idea it mainly involves link building and the way link building is done is dependent on the SEO. It could be blog commenting, article marketing or the creation of micro-sites to feed traffic back to your main site the list goes on.