SEO Tips

You still hear a lot about the 'Dark Arts' of SEO. This means using unethical methods to fool search engines, by exploiting loopholes in the way they calculate rankings. Some companies use these techniques. Some even try and kid you that they use these procedures, but only in an ethical way — grey arts, anybody?

We don't touch these approaches with a barge-pole. If they do work at all, it's only for a short time until the loopholes are closed; and detection of their use may lead to a website being penalised in the rankings. Our approach is to build excellent, highly usable sites featuring the best available content — yours or ours. Sites for people, not just for search engines. Then we make sure they're looked after properly.

The principle of optimisation is easy — make sure the website features the key words and phrases you want to be ranked for on searches. There's a lot of advice out there (last time we Googled 'SEO tips' it came up with 1.2 million pages), and the basic suggestions are usually very sound — things like updating content and making it worth linking to, targeting better keywords, optimising title tags and using meta description tags.

However, some of the material is too technical, out-of-date, plain wrong or positively dangerous to your website — and how can you tell the difference? Our question is simple: would a legitimate, top-end SEO professional really be in the business of giving the game away?

The biggest problem of DIY SEO is that the goalposts keep shifting — Google planned to improve its algorithm in over 550 ways in 2010, for example. Keeping one eye on these changes, the other on understanding them and yet a third on modifying your website to suit them means that no-one's taking care of your business. That's why your site really needs TLC from reputable SEO professionals.

We have nothing to hide at Kalexiko. Our basic work generates leads and results in decent conversions. Our ethical SEO work maintains and improves the situation. Generally, we do the technical stuff and support you to update the content via regular blogs, news items, and so on. We'll help get you content into all sorts of places; if the content's right, it wins hits and gains links.