Couple a weeks back we made Grange Handling Groups catalogue site live, this site dragged out for months as some sites do, our client wanted to add more and more. We were happy to help and we are very proud of the completed site. Hopefully in the next 2 weeks we’ll have another 2 sites live. I’ll throw up the details anyway and have some background about our latest work.

Hope all are well.

The Irish blogosphere has been buzzing with the talk of SEO and linkbaiting lately…

Eoghan has been saying that SEO is a load of crap while at the same time a lot of people are calling his posts nothing but linkbait, which is a popular SEO technique. Eoghan’s post has also inspired a thread on the Irish webmaster forum, where some of the Irish Heavyweights in SEO have their say.

Then today Damien and Donncha pull up Glengarriff Lodge for more linkbaiting. Glengarriff Lodge want you to write a post about them with the term “Luxury Self Catering” linking back to them as part of a competition they are running.

So what does all this mean, well for one, SEO is a hotly debated topic right now and with Google making more and more changes to their algorithm and their penalties for breaking the rules, this is likely to continue. As to whether Eoghan is right about SEO or linkbaiting is a good technique, only one group really have the answer.

I would take a middle of the road approach, I don’t mean sit on the fence, more don’t do it to the extreme. Eoghan would have been better off if he had said basic-on-page SEO is crap, and it is now, it should be done by your developer at build time. These are things like unique titles, meta descriptions and headers for your pages and proper use of header tags and semantic coding. But if your website was built five or ten years ago when no one would have known of these things and Google was still a small player in search or if you are operating in a ultra-competitive niche, then you might need an SEO professional. Also, had Glengarriff Lodge gone about their competition a little cleverer and not forced their anchor text on to people then they might have gotten away with it too.

As with many things in life, what it all comes down to is that it is okay in moderation. If you get too many links too fast, Google will penalise you. If you use the same anchor text over and over again, Google will penalise you. If you stuff your pages with keywords, Google will penalise you. What you need is to strike a natural balance and Google will reward you and never forget “good content is king”.