The Penalties Of No SEO

There are websites in existence today on virtually every single angle of every single subject you could think of. But not all of them understand the benefits offered by SEO.Search engine optimization can get you found more readily on all search engines to a huge customer-base. It’s the equivalent of sticking a flag in your website (or perhaps a number of flags) and saying, ‘Hey! Here I am! Come and see me!’Without those flags you are, by default, making it a lot harder for the search engine spiders to find and index your site. It will probably still happen, and you will get ranked somewhere in those listings, but it won’t be in a particularly great position.Unfortunately some people still find search engine optimization  to be a mystery. Admittedly it can seem like a minefield if you aren’t used to it. There are some things you absolutely should do, and some things that you should steer well clear of. There is black hat SEO and white hat SEO – and then there are all the ‘grey hat’ methods in between. How do you know what methods to use?But in the end it is all about educating yourself. The worst thing you can possibly do is to think that all this SEO is really not that important after all. If you take that point of view your website will suffer as a result.There is no doubt that having readable content on your website is important. People should be drawn in by what you have written, not distracted by it. And unfortunately some people who focus too hard on keywords end up with content that is clearly written more for the search engines than for their human visitors.You have probably come across these websites yourself. I came across one the other day that was selling gifts – and the words ‘gift’ and ‘gifts’ must have been used twenty or thirty times in the two or three paragraphs that appeared on the home page.That is certainly overkill and rather than providing some content that helped you understand what type of gifts could be found on the site, you were faced with writing that had been SEO’d to death. And overkill is frowned on by the search engines anyway.You will often find that if you are writing something about a specific subject, some keywords will naturally creep into your writing. You can then edit the writing to incorporate others if necessary, but the flow of the piece shouldn’t be interrupted by trying to cram in too many. That can be off-putting, as mentioned above.The trick is obviously to please both man and machine. This can be a fine balance to strike, which is why it’s a good idea to consult the experts when it comes to figuring out how to write the content for your website.Of course it does still pay to understand how search engine optimization works. And if you learn as much as you can, you’ll be able to identify the strong and weak points of your website much more readily.