They want me to be a magician. I am not a magician. No web developer is.

There are some basic measures you need to take for SEO. They are as follows:

• You need good, fresh content. In other words, update your website once in a while!
• Each page needs to have a good title and a description meta tag. Keyword meta tags are no longer necessary.
• Your site needs to be mobile friendly.
• Your site needs to be running SSL (https).

If you’ve done all of this, then relax! There is another important factor which is out of your control. 

The age of your domain!

That’s right. Brand new domains are not going to rank very high on Google. The older your website gets, the more Google will trust it. 

So what can you do in the meantime to drive content to your site? 

If you are selling products, I would suggest using Google Adwords to bring customers to your site. Yes, you have to pay-per-click but if you use Adwords correctly, you can very finely tune the people visiting your site. No other ad service rivals Google in terms of traffic quality. 

Sure, perhaps your website will make it to the first page of Google someday but it’s never a good idea to stake your whole business model on SEO. SEO can change very quickly. You want to make sure you have another way to bring in visitors.

If you are not selling products and don’t want to spend money on advertising then you need to look to social media to get the word out. Start with your own social media accounts. Ask your friends to spread the word. You can also join forums and post on other people’s blogs.

Become the expert in your field. People will visit your website to learn from you. Then hopefully they will share your website with others. 

Do you need help with the basics? Or do you want to set up a Google Adwords campaign? Contact me here. I am standing by to help! 

The post What you need to know about SEO appeared first on Website Issues, WordPress errors, Maneo Web.

A few weeks ago, a very nice lady contacted me to ask if I could build a ‘content rich’ website for her legions of followers on Facebook. She told me that she wanted to impart some financial knowledge to her fans through a membership platform. She explained that the content was not her own but had been purchased through a Private Label Rights (PLR) website. The next day, she sent me her PLR credentials so that I could have a look at the content that I was supposed to put on her new website.

I will admit that I was not familiar with Private Label Rights and I had to some research into this supposedly booming market.

Private label rights is basically a license that you purchase which allows you to use another person’s work (books, graphics, articles, audio, etc) as if it was your own. You can put your name to it and sell access to it or do whatever you want with it. The advantage of private label rights is that instead of spending hours and hours producing your own content on a given subject, you can have someone else do that work for a nominal fee.

This lady wanted me to integrate her PLR content into a website that would be branded under her own name. I was tempted, of course, to go along with this, because it was a pretty easy job. But after looking into private label rights, I decided to decline the project, telling her that I did not feel good about working with PLR. Call me uptight or “goody two-shoes” but here is why I don’t like PLR.

1. I don’t think it’s right for people to publish content under their names that they did not produce themselves. If I am not an expert on scuba diving, for example, I should not be telling people that I am.
2. It seems that PLR floods the internet with duplicate content. Often, a PLR author will sell his work to many people which means that this work will show up all over the internet.
3. Some (certainly not all) PLR has been plagiarized and/or is not quality content at all. The internet is already flooded with enough subpar and dubious content. I don’t want to be involved with creating more of this.
4. One of the main purposes of implementing PLR content is to make Google notice your site and generate ad revenue from visitors who think that they are actually obtaining some valuable insights or knowledge from an ‘expert’. To me, this is a black-hat technique upon which I am sure Google and other search engines frown.

Once this lady understood what PLR was, she immediately decided that she didn’t want to have anything to do with it either. I suggested to her that she write her own quality articles on subjects that she knows well. Yes, the process might be slower, but in the long run, I think that coming up with your own content will win the day over private label rights.

Got a different opinion about PLR? I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below.

The post Why I don’t work with private label rights content appeared first on Website Issues, WordPress errors, Maneo Web.