SEO - Tag Archive

SEO – becoming a victim of your own success

11 Replies Christopher Roberts

If you succeed, others copy you. Some say that this imitation should be seen as flattery. Those who are being imitated may just think you are being plain darn rude.

This is a story of how I had an idea, and that idea trued into an overnight success – with yours truly receiving nul points for it.

Okay, I am over dramatising things here.

SEO

Quite ironically, one of the toughest industries to succeed in is SEO, as the market is hugely over saturated with literally tens of thousands of people and firms, offering their services to help you “reach top of Google” or rank “on page 1 for your keywords” – believe what you will. Food for thought: Google the term ‘SEO’, and there are (to quote Google) “About 224,000,000 results“. Who is top? No, not the best SEO agency, but Wikipedia – naturally!

My Success

Anyhow, the story goes that I had an idea, an idea to make a new image for an article. One of our writers had contributed a guest post, and in that article they talked about SEO. I thought that an interesting image to accompany the article would be an upward pointing arrow (to demonstrate improvement) and the word ‘Google’ balanced on top.

I found an image off the internet, and took Google’s logo for the text, and set about making a large, high quality version of my idea.

The image I created can be seen below.

SEO Graph - GoogleQuite a good image I thought. Apparently, other people like it to. After just 4 months being live on the blog, many other people have found it in Google, and the image now ranks in the top 25 images when you Google Image Search the term ‘SEO’, and the top 10 when you type ‘Google SEO’.

Okay it ranks on an image search, not a ‘web search’, however I still got an image of my design and [part] creation, very high in the SERPs for a very difficult keyword.

The Problem

The problem was the aforementioned popularity. As I opened: “If you succeed, others copy you” – it’s true.

After just a few weeks of the image being live, it had been copied, and Technology Bloggers (the image source) was no longer the site that showed up with the image, as other sites with higher reputations (in Google’s view) stole our limelight.

As the images creator, I believe that when people find the image in Google and then click on it, they should be taken to our site, as without this site, there would have been no image! However we don’t show anymore.

Stealing Images

This lead me to think about stealing images. I was unhappy that other people were taking my work and passing it off as their own, and benefiting more than me because of it.

However who am I to moan, as I steal images too. If I like an image I will use it in an article. Is this right? Possibly not.

Ideas lightbulb

The ‘light bulb’ image I used in my post yesterday.

That said, when using images, I tend not to lift the image straight off a website and put it in my post, I will usually modify it in some way first, so that the image is different from the creators version. I feel this is slightly more justifiable than just ‘stealing’ another’s work.

Take the image in my post on Monday, the idea light bulb, that wasn’t my image, but I resized it and added some text to it – therefore making it a variation, not a copy.

In my Google SEO image, the SEO graph image was an origional image, as was Google’s logo; neither of these images belonged to me, but I still used them.

Right and Wrong

I feel that straight out lifting and pasting images is wrong, and anyone who has ever suffered because of my use of their image, I apologise, get in touch and I will see what I can do.

If you modify an image in some way to make it your own, then I feel you are in a slightly different position.

The Fight Back

As you have probably gathered by now if you are a loyal reader, I [sometimes] have a mild case of perfectionism and am one to constantly tweak, change and improve.

After a while I started to dislike the image I had made; the letters were a little skeewiff and the shadow at the bottom finished a little abruptly.

So I went back the the drawing board and remade the image, but better.

I knew if the last image was successful, and this one was better then it would probably be more popular and therefore shared even more, so I hatched a plan. I decided to watermark the image, very faintly, with Technology Bloggers web address. I don’t really like watermarking much, but it seemed to be the only option I had.

Below is the new image.
Google SEO ChartNotice that there is no watermark on the smaller version of the image, however if you click on the image, the big version does bear the watermark. If you want to use a small version, fine, no problemo. If you use the big version, you advertise our site – simple. That way, if the image is stolen, all credit is not lost, and hopefully, Technology Bloggers should show in the search results for the image, as we have the biggest version hosted on the site.

UPDATE: I have updated the SEO image again! Click the link to view the new version. 🙂

Common Reasons Online Business Startups Fail

9 Replies Debra Johnson

It seems like starting a website should be easy enough – there are almost unlimited free online resources spouting off advice, it can be relatively cheap to launch a website, and, naturally, you have the best business idea for your website. So why is it that so many website startups fail?

1. Low Quality Web Design

One of the biggest mistakes that web startups make is having poor web design. Your website is the most important aspect of you company so why would you skimp on that? The overall design of your site is what initially draws people in, it’s what their first impression of you as a company is, so having a solid website design is crucial to your success.

2. Poor Content

In the same respect as low quality web design, having poor content on your site will be a huge turn off to people. To retain visitors you need to be able to provide content that wows them. You want to show anyone and everyone that visits your site the best you have to offer, so why would you fill your site with uninteresting or poorly written content?

3. Poor Marketing

Google SEO Chart

Google is one of the best places to start your online marketing – both simple SEO and paid ads are are good place to start.

You can have the best website and the best content in the world, but if no one ever sees it then it won’t really matter, will it? You can never retain a customer if you can’t even catch their eye to begin with. This is why it’s imperative to spend ample time marketing on social media, through email campaigns, and through traditional marketing routes. You have to be willing to put time and money into your marketing scheme to achieve the best possible outcome – after all, you reap what you sow.

4. No Passion

Picking a niche market just because you think it will be profitable is one of the worst reasons to start a business. You have to actually be passionate about what you’re trying to make money off of, otherwise it’s going to be a lost cause and people will be able to see right through you.

5. Not Enough Funds

When you don’t allocate enough money for a startup company, you run the risk of forcing the company to fizzle out because you lack the proper funds to keep it going – or worse, you risk driving yourself into debt.

Get rich quick schemes rarely work in life and the same holds true for web startups. The road to success can only be reached by hard work, dedication, and money. So if you’re contemplating launching a startup business, make sure that it’s something you really want to do, otherwise you’ll be doing your potential customers and yourself a disservice.

Finding a career in SEO and digital marketing

1 Reply MattRawlings

If you’re looking to move into a career that’s only getting bigger and more influential in the IT industry, then look no further than SEO and digital marketing agencies. The industries are growing rapidly, with more and more opportunities for passionate computer and content enthusiasts to make a difference to the online world.

SEO Graph - GoogleSEO – or search engine optimisation to give it its full title – is the process of creating websites that are viewed favourably by Google and meeting the requirements of its algorithm. Get on Google’s good side, and you’ll find the site you’re working on ranks in the highest positions, but get it wrong and the consequences could be disastrous.

Getting it wrong could be anything from over optimizing the page with key terms and phrases that you want the site to rank well for, as Google will see this as an almost ‘spammy’ attempt at manipulating the rankings; or linking to poor authority or frowned upon websites, such as adult entertainment or gambling.

Digital marketing is an area of SEO that has grown out of the main search campaigns, and become one of the most influential strategies going at improving web traffic. In the past, it was a case of blogging on the site itself being crucial, to show that the site is being regularly updated with high quality content on a frequent basis, as opposed to a flash in the pan campaign around peak times.

Now, it’s all about creating the high quality content and distributing it to high authority websites with strong domain rankings, page rankings and more, and linking back to the site you’re working with to build up a backlink profile that Google’s crawlers take one look at and think – yes, I like what this site is about and doing, they can rank highly.

These two areas of the tech world open up a variety of career opportunities for a wide range of people. From those sitting at home having graduated from University or left college, searching the web for jobs in Portsmouth in an attempt to get their foot on the ladder; as well as those in the big city already established in online or ICT careers. For those with a passion for writing, there are content writing positions springing up – either as full-time or freelance positions – and also opportunities for those looking to do something more pro-active with websites and the Internet, challenging yourself to overcome the challenges set by the site owners and Google to achieve what your client demands. This is usually the number one ranking for their “key term”, or the first page of the search results.