The most sought-after prize for search engine optimisation is to get into the number one position of the Google search results for a given search term but businesses still need to be aware that their plan could have unintended consequences.

Here we will highlight the problems that could happen should a business carry out its own SEO, there are  potential downsides; by using bad links a company website could suffer serious damage including a Google ‘Manual Penalty’ which would potentially depress the sites search positions.

So rather than having a website with high traffic the business could be faced with an expensive SEO rectification requiring much difficult work to rectify.

In the short term, a penalised website would need to use pay per click (PPC) and other methods to drive traffic. The company would also need to rectify its content and bad links to its website from other websites in order to get into the best position to reappear high in Google.

It is very important to stress that under no circumstances should a business respond to either an email advert or something seen online promising fantastic immediate results through links to get your website to the top of Google’s search results.

This is unlikely to happen; a Google manual penalty would be much more likely!

Acquiring links to boost the SEO of your website

While some level of link building is still necessary, it’s no longer the only crucial aspect for delivering great SEO results. The thing to remember is that any business should not confuse having lots of links with the quality of those links. Think quality not quantity.

For instance, most businesses will find that having a few high quality links from good websites is worth far more in the eyes of Google than hundreds of links from low value websites.

It’s these links that some SEO companies are trying to push and in turn exploit naïve businesses with. Everyone seems to know that to get high in the search engine results you need links pointing to your site, but they must be high quality in the eyes of Google.

Build high quality into your backlink profile

However, we must stress that most people don’t appreciate some of the latest updates and algorithm changes that Google has carried out and implemented recently. These changes have put a new emphasis on the quality of content that is contained on any business website.

The links to your content must come from high-ranking websites since Google sees these as having a value to internet users; Google estimates that they won’t just link to anyone and the pages they do link with must therefore have a value for their visitors.

This is where the experience of SEO & Web really does come to the fore: we will help your business to succeed online, helping you to avoid the pitfalls that less reputable firms don’t mind leading their gullible clients into.

Avoiding the bad links SEO trap!

A firm can undertake its own search engine optimisation and do quite well because one of the things that is needed is truly great content that is well written and relevant to what people want. Get it right and share the love with other great sites and website traffic will potentially quickly rise. But again, get it wrong and the opposite will happen!

Google has made plain that for any website to succeed they should avoid what they estimate to be paid links. Websites should also avoid low quality guest blogs and article directory links since these are easy to acquire and they previously did work quite well for search engine optimisation purposes.

However, growing amounts of badly written content that was then redistributed to other websites led to Google, and the other search engines, to penalise many guest blog sites and article directories, these techniques are therefore no longer very relevant as an SEO tactic.

The publishing of badly written press releases, particularly on free press release submission websites, are now also almost completely ignored by Google.

In addition, some of the old free directory sites which businesses would register their details on are now considered to be unreliable and a business should not have backlinks pointing from them to their site.

The world of organic natural search can be confusing, if you need help and advice, SEO & Web can help you through the SEO maze!