Search Engine Optimisation - Everything you should know

“How To Multiply Your Search Engine Rankings, Achieve Them Up To 85% Faster, And Increase The Traffic, Sales & Profitability Of Your Online Business”

Overview

Search engine optimization (SEO) has gained credibility and is now vitally important in a company’s effort to conduct business online, to build traffic and increase revenues.

SEO is also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Positioning (SEP) and various other titles. SEO is a service that “optimizes” or prepares your web site in order for it to be spidered, indexed and ranked by major search engines. Over 400 million searches are performed EVERY DAY on the various engines, and business owners today are seeing that they need to take a piece of that action and be prominently listed to be found by the potential customers performing these searches. Not being ranked prominently literally means giving business to your competitors that are ranked!

The following report is designed to share information with you about the service, techniques used and questions you must ask any SEO company before working with them. Becoming an educated consumer will help you make the best possible SEO decisions.

SEO services have many wonderful benefits, and a long term commitment to a correct SEO campaign, done properly with targeted keywords and ethical techniques can produce great returns on your investment.

SEO Firms

There are hundreds of SEO firms out there today, all varying in skill level as well as experience. Our goal is to help you learn what is important in an SEO company and to know what questions to ask to compare services and benefits to you.

There are SEO companies that focus only on SEO, and some say that targeted focus will deliver the most benefit to you. We respectfully disagree with that opinion and feel that your best bet is with a SEO company that can look at your big picture and help in other important areas, such as web design and maintenance, other marketing techniques and technical help. True, the company must have experience in all areas and should be able to provide references, case studies and samples of their work to earn your trust and respect. The main fact to remember here is just because other people in the company have the ability to help you in other areas, does not mean that your SEO consultant will be any less focused on their task at hand. A company that has staff experienced in other areas can only maximize your potential online and also work with you on various other projects.

A lot of SEO companies have a cookie cutter method, and don't supply you with hands on support and customer service. We feel if you are going to entrust a company with that type of investment, they must be available to answer questions, and give you personalized service.

Be very wary of companies that promise results that seem too good to be true, they usually are. Companies that assure you they can gain numerous top 5 or top 10 rankings within days are most likely using less than ethical techniques that can actually harm your site and result in you being banned from the engines in the future. It is realistic to expect numerous top 20 rankings within a period of a few weeks to 4 months (depending on past ranking history, site SEO readiness and various other factors).

Be sure to ask any SEO company what methods and techniques they use to achieve your rankings, and when you can expect to receive them by. Read further to see an overview of acceptable techniques.

Software

You will encounter many automated software services that will claim to submit you to thousands of engines and gain you so many rankings, this has become a popular and confusing trend – as companies see the opportunity to automate the process and gain profit for little work. These software packages appear attractive, due to their ease of use and low cost. The old saying, you get what you pay for is true once again. Without the proper education and understanding of the SEO process, you are limiting your success – you need to know what criteria the engines have in place to ensure your site’s SEO readiness, you need to know when to submit and how often to submit (and this varies from engine to engine). Over submitting can harm you and under submitting does not really benefit you. Also submitting a site that does not meet their basic criteria, will not gain you the rankings you are looking for. With that being said, I'm sure you can see that the investment in the software or automated service actually didn't benefit you and could potentially jeopardize your ability to be ranked in the future.

Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion refers to fee based listings in engines and directories, such as: Yahoo!, LookSmart, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, Inktomi and FAST. Fees range from a per URL cost of $20-$30 for each page of your site you want included to an annual fee of $300 for a directory listing in Yahoo!

When looking into paid inclusion programs, you'll always want to know some of the recent history with the search engine or directory. Be careful not to put yourself in a situation where you are liable for higher fees than you agreed to, or where you can be automatically transferred to a PPC model. It is best if your SEO Company will handle these paid inclusions for you. You are often still responsible for the fees, but your SEO Company should handle the submission process for you.

Service Components

SEO services have evolved into a complex process that involves staying aware daily of the changes in the engines and their criteria and utilizing many optimization techniques to ensure the best possible rankings.

Aside from optimizations, it is important to have the basic key elements of your site meet the engines criteria – essentially ensuring that your site is “SEO ready” or “SEO friendly.”

If you take 2 sites – one SEO friendly and one not, optimize them both identically and submit them at the same time – you will see better rankings faster on the site that is SEO friendly. The engines require that your site be valid from a SEO friendliness perspective and reward with higher rankings for compliance with their criteria. Criteria is subject to change and an effective SEO Company will stay informed daily about the most current information.

Current criteria is as follows; your copy should be high in keyword rich text, and there should be at least 5 pages (Content Is King – relevant keyword rich text is their most important criteria), your site should be static and not have dynamically delivered content that the engines can't read, header tags and ALT tags also draw spiders attention to your site, Flash and over usage of graphics also pose a problem for the engines, sites in frames can often not be read, as well as various other criteria.

Keywords

Keyword research is the first and most vital step in the SEO process. Keywords are the foundation for your campaign and can make or break it.

You will want a company that is thorough in it’s research, a company that asks your input, researches your competitors and gives you final approval on their recommended list.

It cannot be emphasized enough that TARGETED keywords are the only way to go. Your keywords must be relevant to your content and should attract the kind of traffic you can actually convert into customers. Let this example illustrate for you the benefit in targeted keywords.

If you sell diesel, and you select the following keywords: diesel, cars, (name of specific) ________ diesel, and maintenance – what would you expect from those keywords? People often think that (in this example) the keywords cars and maintenance are a big coop. Think of all that traffic. Now let’s look at this way, what good is traffic if it isn't targeted? Sure you may catch the attention of a few people that accidentally wander onto your site – but what are the chances that someone who types cars into an engine are actually looking to purchase diesel. Can you see that you have essentially wasted a keyword here? Whereas, if you select (name of specific)_________ diesel as a keyword – can you see where, yes you may get less traffic but that traffic would actually be looking for exactly what you offer – therefore that traffic is automatically more valuable to you.

The point of our little tangent is simply that the keywords you select are key (no pun intended) and the proper energy, time and experience needs to be used to select these words.

Body Text

Body text is THE key component in the your SEO strategy. Your text MUST include the keywords and phrases that tell about your business, its products and services. Be sure your SEO Company will analyze your body text for keyword ratio and relevancy. Without this very important correct ratio of keyword rich text, you will not see the results you are hoping for and could be achieving, no matter how talented the SEO Company is.

Title Tags

The title tag is one of the most important components of SEO since it is given great consideration by all the search engines. The title is also important because it is usually the hyper linked sentence that leads to the site from the search engine results pages and users must be enticed to click on it. It is crucial to include your company’s top key terms within the title tag.

Hidden Text

Hidden text is another spamming technique that is easily detectable. Often people change the font color to the same as the background, and then SEO companies can fill the pages with enormous amounts of key term text that some believe is appealing to the search engine spiders. This will result in you being banned from the engines – do not allow your SEO company to employ this method.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a spamming technique that uses specific software programs to send search engine spiders to alternative pages that are not seen by the user. These pages mislead the spider, allowing it to deliver the results based on these pages rather than the actual pages the public sees on the site. Spamming/cloaking is a very serious offense in the eyes of the engines, and usually results in your site being permanently banned.

Site Maps

Site Maps are highly effective when created properly. They are a keyword rich static page that lists all the pages and topics on your site, with links for your visitors and the engines to follow through out your site.

Promotional Domains

Promotional domains are used as a secondary, yet integrated domain location for the engines to visit and rank. If the primary domain is not SEO friendly, or the owner does not want the original site altered, this is an effective technique. You must ensure that you own the new site and optimizations and that they reside on your server.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are the descriptive terms used within the HTML code of a web page. Your meta tags act as a summary of the content a search engine spider might find on that page and were once one of the main factors behind great placements. Current algorithmic studies have shown that the meta tag is no longer such an important part of your optimizations. Although most engines don't use meta tags in their ranking algorithms, they do display them in the results which can help with getting people to click onto your site. Overall, the engines are unpredictable and criteria changes, so keeping the meta tags strong, relevant and descriptive of your content is too important to forego.

Reporting

Ensure that you are receiving a detailed and easy to read and understand report from your SEO Company at least once a month so you may track results.

Submission

Your submissions to the top engines should be done manually and based on each engines time frame. This is very important.

Conclusion

There are many SEO companies, and techniques that should and shouldn't be used. Stay informed, ask questions and be involved in your campaign. Best wishes for your success online!

...........LD Sharma