RAD FAQ Section

Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps websites perform better naturally in search engines. Websites rank higher in search engines for a range of key phrases and increase targeted website traffic. 

Backlinks should be natural and help improve the authority and trust signals that in turn can help drive traffic to a website and increase overall rankings. Backlinks count as a vote for your site, not all votes are equal and not all backlinks carry the same type of authority. Quality is more important than quantity and backlinks should be natural and earned and not paid for. 

There are no rules and too many backlinks gained in a short space of time may be deemed unnatural especially if they are not from reputable sources. One high quality backlink linking to unique content on your page can be worth far more than 100 low quality spammy backlinks.  In fact the large scale spammy link building by other SEO companies is the reason we launched our backlink removal service to clean up low quality backlinks.

You will know your own industry and how competitive It is online. We can help you look into more details regarding competitors, backlinks, keywords and traffic. Keeping expectations realistic will help keep costs affordable based on expected results. However making the decision on who to work with based on price of quality is very risky in the SEO industry. RAD SEO’s fees are very reasonable and targeted to meet the demands and targets of most companies. 

There are over 200 factors that make up the search engine algorithm. Search engine optimisation is not an art form but it does take a combination of time, effort, technical know how and research to get the best results. Most importantly is keeping up to date with Google’s best practice standards on not cutting corners or using out of date tactics and methods to rank a site. 

Meta tags are on page elements, the title and description both appear in search results (on most occasions). The meta keyword tag is no longer recognised as a ranking factor. Page titles are a great call to action to get a search engine user to click on your result. This also is an important way to tell search engines what your page is about. Titles should be unique for each page and relevant to the content to help rank for specific key phrases. The meta description plays a similar role to titles but does not have as high a ranking factor. The description helps browsers understand what the content is about and should be optimised accordingly. This is also a great way to entice the user in the search results to click your listing. 

Google uses spider bots to crawl and index pages of your site. Websites are regularly scanned for new content and changes to technical elements. The bots help Google decide how to catalogue your pages and judge their importance when ranking a site. 

Google Webmaster Tools is a free Google tool for webmasters to help manage the technical performance of a website. Webmaster can check a number of items from indexing to backlinks as well as generate robot.tx files, submit sitemaps, disavow links and much more. Every site owner should be using Google Webmaster tools.

An XML sitemap is a list of pages on a website aimed at being read by search engine crawlers. It usually lists all of the pages on a site organised in hierarchical order. This is used to help search bots crawl, discover and index all applicable pages on a site. 

A robots.txt file is a file that gives instructions to search engine crawlers telling them how they should visit your site, this is called the Robots Exclusion Protocol. The robots.txt file enables you to block crawlers from files and directories that you do not want indexed by search engines. 

A 301 redirect is a status code for a permanent redirect of one web page to another. The 301 signal tells crawlers that the content on a page is being permanently redirected to another location. This also then automatically redirects users to the new page if they come to land on the old url. 

PageRank is a website quality metric that no longer has the same impact as it did in the early days of Google. It was named after one of Google’s owners Larry Page and is one of the best know algorithm factors. Every website is given an overall value from 0-10 based on a number of factors including, website authority, amount of backlinks, quality of backlinks, reliability, age, content quality and other factors. Although in the early days ‘page rank’ was a ranking factor for Google it is now no longer deemed to be anything significant in the current 200+ algorithm factors. 

Google Analytics is a free online service offered by Google for website owners to analyse visitor behaviour. The analytics tool generates detailed statistics about a number of visitor details including traffic sources, browser types, geo location, time on pages, pages visited and much more. Google analytics is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters. It is essential in helping manage, understand and target a website to an audience as well as measure conversions and sales.

SEO results are dependant on a large number of factors. There are no quick fixes for results that are in line with Google’s guidelines when it comes to link building. However you can make technical changes quickly that may play a strong part in how a website is crawled and indexed. Most SEO campaigns will have to run for at least 6 months to achieve good results. This does not always mean that KPI’s will be achieved in this time as this will vary from one campaign to another. SEO done the right way often takes time but can help achieve long lasting results. 

There is a clear difference between paid and organic results that are produced in search results when a user makes a search. The paid results appear above the organic results and down the right hand side of the search page. The ads at the top of the page can be seen with an orange ‘Ads’ symbol next to them. The paid results (Adwords) are paid for based on an Adwords campaign and once the budget has been used up the ads stop appearing. Organic results sit in the middle of the page under the first 2 or 3 paid ads. There are generally 10 organic results per search results page (SERP’s). These results appear all of the time and are not paid for. These are what are generated by the Google search algorithm and good SEO practices and when ranking well can work out better value than paid results.

Great website content is a key element of search engine optimisation. The term ‘content is king’ is heard all over the web and despite being a ‘cliché’ it does hold real value when it comes to optimising a website. Google aims to show well optimised pages in search results from websites that contain a mix of unique, quality content that is produced regularly on a website. Websites with great content are not only more likely to be crawled by search engines but also more likely to be linked to by other websites and have more social shares. 

Social media provides a platform for link bait In particular for your website, in particular to blog pages and fresh content. Social media can help generate social mentions and increase brand presence. Social media helps to grow a niche presence with a community of interested followers to share and engage with about your products or services. Social media compliments your overall marketing efforts as well as being able to push information out fast for campaign related online marketing. 

Reputation Management is much more than a buzzword and is important for businesses to understand how their company is perceived across the web with or without a website. Originally the reputation management term was associated with PR but social media and the internet in general has made it stand out. Managing reputation enables you to react quickly to negative feedback, comments and reviews as well as having a plan in place in how to deal with each of the issues. 

A landing page is a page on a website targeted towards your audience for a specific goal. The landing page should have great content and a clear call to action, anything from a purchase to a download. Landing pages are particularly popular with Adwords campaigns as you can easily send the visitors to a specific page customised to fit in with their original search query and ad clicked. 

RAD SEO are an SEO supplier you can trust. We believe we offer the best SEO service at an affordable price to fit in with our clients business goals. We take time not only to understand your business and services but also research how you compare against your competitors websites and their backlink profiles. If you are searching for the lowest price SEO then we probably aren’t the right fit and neither will be any professional SEO agency. Cheap SEO is often using out of date or spammy and sometimes harmful tactics. At RAD SEO we offer a high quality service from our technical research all the way through to SEO reporting. We do not take on all potential clients and instead select those where we feel we can offer the most value and best co-ordinate with. 

At RAD SEO we are different to most other companies that offer SEO services. This is mainly because our business is built around offering SEO services. We spend most of our time developing strategies, coming up with creative link bait ideas and creating link building relationships. Most other companies are primarily web designers and PR people who offer SEO as an add on service. Using inexperienced SEO people is a big risk and can harm your site. A good SEO consultant should be up to date on Google best practice, understand how to review competitors, run a technical website audit and build quality backlinks….and this just part of the role. 

 This can vary from client to client dependent on a number of factors including the keywords you are targeting, how competitive your market is, the strength of the top competitors, the set up of your site and historical backlinks. All this and much more can play a part when we assess a campaign costs. We do not offer standard SEO packages as one size does not fit all and instead we tailor bespoke SEO services to meet the needs and goals of our clients. 

No, we simply do not believe in using all the hard work we put into marketing your website to just replicate it directly for your competitor. If you choose to work with RAD SEO you will be our sole SEO client in your targeted area. For instance if you are an accountant targeting customers in Cambridge we would not take on another accountant targeting the same key phrases. When you work with RAD SEO you secure our services, trust and full attention.