Why SEO?

Everything You Wanted to Know about SEO But Were Afraid to Ask

“Build it and they will come…”

That just doesn’t work on the web. In order to be found by your customers, you absolutely need to be listed in the search engines. Traffic comes from the search engines, advertising, and return clients; but most of your traffic the first years will be from the search engines. Getting listed at the top of the results for your topic is critical to success.

There are many factors to look at when attempting to get high listings in the search engines. We’ve been studying the search engines and how to get to the top of our topics for as long as there have been search engines. Our experience has helped ensure that our clients are always at the top of the list for their topic.

We work with you to find the best “keywords” to use. You’re the expert on your business, so you know what words are used in your industry. We consider your goals in building a website, and ask you to identify your preferred customer.  Our goal becomes to get the right traffic to your site that is interested in your product or service. Using the right terms will get your site “targeted traffic”—visitors who are looking for what you have to offer.

• We work with you to create a list of words you believe people will use to find you in a search.
• We research to find out how many searches are done on those terms, and look for other related terms may not have been considered.
• We do searches using the keywords we find, to see where your competition is listed. 
• We develop an understanding of your web competition, and look at what they’re using.
• We make sure we have statistics on all the keywords found in our research, with a full understanding of the best keywords to use. 

We then “do the math” and come out with the best groups of words to target, based on how many searches were done and the number of competing websites.

This is when we optimize your website. We make sure that all pages have basic keywords and descriptions.  We optimize your top 5 pages, each for its own topic.  Good optimization is invisible to the reader.  Titles will be readable, and logical.  There won’t be huge long strings of keywords on the bottom of every page.  Changes made are subtle.  The website is for the visitor, not the search engines, and search engines want visitors to be happy with the results of their searches.

When done right, a website should need to be optimized once.  Most small websites don’t change their content much.  Your site is always about your topic.  If you change your site or add a lot of pages over time, then you’ll want to make sure those get optimized with regular updates.  It’s a valuable one-time investment for many small businesses, and invaluable to larger sites.

Some businesses offer to get you lots of traffic, cheap. They use spammy methods that could get you banned from the search engines altogether. Getting listed high in the search engines for terms that aren’t related to your business may get you traffic, but it won’t get you sales. If visitors aren’t interested in your topic, they’ll leave your site. When the search engines see a searcher go back to searching after a quick glance at your site, they start penalizing you by lowering your rankings. This is how they weed out non-relevant sites, and over time, that can get you banned.

The goal of the search engine is to provide relevant websites, consistent with the term the user typed in. If they can’t provide the right kind of sites, a user will go to another search engine. The search engines send out a “bot” or “spider”—a program that looks over your website. They list the words used on your website to determine its topic. They give each word a weight based on the number of times it was used and where it was located on the page. Some positions on the page hold more weight than others. It’s important to have someone who understands search engines working on your website.

When we’re all done adjusting your website, we submit your website to all major search engines for 6 months. This ensures that all the search engines send a spider to your website. Without this step, it could take years to get listed in the search engines, even with a perfectly optimized website. The spider follows links from other websites, so new websites take a lot of time to be found. Submitting the site makes sure they’ll know it exists.

When the search engines change their criteria, we update your website. After 6 months, you should have many top ten listings in all the search engines. Some engines will pick it up within 2 weeks; others can take up to 8 months to even start getting listings high enough to be useful. We can’t guarantee a certain number of top ten listings, as this depends on the competition and topic. We can guarantee that you will have top ten listings for the “keywords” we agreed upon.

We submit your website to the search engines as much as they allow, but not enough to get banned. Knowing these limits is important, because each search engine has different limits. This ensures that if any changes were made to your website, there is already a spider on its way to see those changes.

We make sure that your site is getting listed over time by checking all the search engines to see where you rank. A report is generated monthly, and you can ask for more reports as needed. This way, we can both track our progress easily. If we don’t see the results we’d like, we can adjust our optimizing over time.

How many additional sales would it take to recover the cost of optimizing? This depends on your product or service, but for most websites, the number of sales increases to more than recover the cost. The benefits far outweigh the costs. The question is how to do it most effectively, for the lowest cost? We think our service is the best on the market. We research, submit, and track our progress. This makes us one of the most full-service optimizing companies on the market.

Our SEO prices are lower than our competition. We think a website should be affordable for all small businesses. We will optimize the entire site, or page by page if you choose. It doesn’t matter where you website is hosted or how it’s built. 

Please contact us for prices on package deals for your whole website. We have flexible payment options, to make it easier to get started.