SMALL BUSINESS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Best Guide To Buying SEO Services

When you need an SEO what your business needs is someone who will do a good job.  Unfortunately most company representatives undertaking the task of seeking an SEO company or freelancer become more confused the longer they look.  Each SEO provides different answers to the question “How will you perform SEO on our Web Site?”  SEO is not approached the same way by any two professionals.  Over-promising and under-delivering without making many real changes to ease of site usability and concern for client conversion rate are the signs of either an immature or under-skilled SEO, or a charlatan.  SEO can be done largely through automation using various services and software, it can be done entirely manually, or it can be done with a combination of both.  The best SEO, in my opinion, uses both automated number, data, keyword, site analysis crunching software and services AND manual creativity in performing SEO.  That’s what Brooksville PC provides. There are some simple ways to check who is good at optimization. One of the easiest is to use Website.Grader.com (link opens in a new window) tool and check out an SEO’s own web site. It should be the flagship of how well he or she can optimize.

Some SEOs into affiliate marketing generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year through their affiliate marketing Web Sites, and employ several full time writers and marketers who also understand SEO.  Their sites tend to rank in the 80s and 90s simply because they make more money through better SEO – but their services can also cost $300 per hour.  Hundreds of hours of optimization performed by one of these firms can easily mount into six figures.   That doesn’t mean your optimization will be as good as theirs – it only means that with enough time and effort (and how much you can afford) your site could potentially reach this level or better (yes, I’ve seen that). One way to quickly check a site’s level of optimization is to use Website Grader.  Alltop Chief Information Officer (CIO) Guy Kawasaki has this to say about Website Grader: “I love this kind of stuff: Website Grader. You submit an URL, and the test grades how effective the site is in terms of search engine optimization.“ Those who are poor at performing SEO dislike this tool intensely. I believe that the quick analysis is a great time saver in analyzing and knocking out some of the rough work that needs to be done.  I suspect that those who don’t like Website Grader are actually so poorly skilled that even the things Website Grader points out as missing or improperly done are beyond their skill level.

As this post is about buying SEO services and how to choose an SEO company, the rest of this article will focus on how you can tell if you can begin to trust an SEO.

The indicator only guarantees technical ability and completeness, but some factors such as articles on Digg and other social websites, trackbacks, RSS subscriptions and so forth play a role too – and not every business web site owner has the time, interest or ability to invest in those things on an ongoing basis.

Using website grader tool you can then go out and check the level of optimization of your chief competitors on the internet and compare it to your sampling of SEOs scores – then you be the judge. An SEO who only scores a 34 or 50 cannot possibly rank your site against competitors who are ranking in the 70’s or 80’s. Checking the home sites of “Web Designers” who claim to also deliver SEO usually rank worse than the SEOs.

True SEOs have highly specific, in depth and time sensitive knowledge. Anyone interested in getting SEO services might do well to buy a few “dummies” books. Two good ones available on Amazon are by author/SEOs Peter Kent and another by Bruce Clay. Together they total 1152 pages – and these are just primers. Dozens of related field books and thousands of related websites offering tips, tutorials and training are the staple diet of good SEO professionals.

NOTE: This tool is not the is all and end all of website grading tools – it is just one quick indicator. Many professional SEOs absolutely hate it. But, if you have a web site and check it before optimization begins, your score should increase significantly with the right SEO. Even if you only gain 20 or 30 points and don’t skyrocket into the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s it doesn’t mean your SEO has done a bad job – it just means that certain industry web sites have barriers built in by company demand for how the site should look and what each page should say. These factors, plus budget constraints (reducing the amount of work needed to be done), hinder the SEO from going all out in many cases.

Hiring a good SEO should not be hard – This tool may help guide you in making the right decision for your web site.  Remember – creativity plays a major role in performing effective optimization.  Simply following the recommendations of a grading utility only covers some of the big areas that need to be addressed – and not all of them are always important.  A score in the 40’s or 50’s doesn’t mean a site is “bad”, and having a blog attached to your site to gain an extra ten points isn’t always “good”.  The main reason for the tool is to check a number of SEOs different sample web sites, as well as his or her own SEO site and look for those with the highest numbers, ignoring those with the lowest scores.  Many times hard-pressed-for-cash clients demand a site for a few hundred dollars that simply hasn’t had it in the budget to perform anything but the most rudimentary optimization.  Others may have very little content.  Some clients flat out refuse to allow optimization and demand that a site be built exactly to their specifications and graphics or flash are all they care about.  Still other site owners have spent less or more on optimization, and their return varies based upon whether they have enough.    To an SEO (and to any prudent company investing in SEO) “enough” means getting increasing return from the site, more conversions, generating more income, more sign-ups, consultation calls and walk in clientele.  At some point return may level off, but that point will be a happy day and keeping your SEO employed from time to time to make course adjustments will be a pleasure.

Visit www.WebsiteGrader.com – check out your site and your SEOs – then decide.

Taking the chance and spending money on Search Engine Optimization seems to many business owners like the early days of the Gold Rush when gold-seeking “forty-niners” took a big chance and traveled to California by ship, horse, or covered wagon. Individuals had just as much chance as big companies of finding gold – and because individuals were often acting faster and traveling lighter they got there faster to stake their claims.

Search Engine Optimization is a lot like that. Smaller businesses can set up optimization for their web sites and expect to see returns quickly if they get involved early enough. Once your site ranks well, it’s difficult for a newcomer to take your spot.

Right now with 216 million Americans on the web (and that number growing to a projected 288 million by 2012) there’s “gold in them thar hills” and Google rewards well optimized web sites with rankings and visitors – but only to a point. Once page one gets filled up with older optimized sites it’s harder for new site to reach page one. Waiting to optimize, just like waiting to stake a land claim, is not a good idea.

A good SEO web designer is worth his weight in gold.

The Starving Artist, and Why Discounts Don’t Work

As an SEO and Web Designer I get more than a few calls per year from artists (painters, sculptors, pottery makers, etc) who dearly want a web site. Most of them start off their conversations with me the same way: “I don’t really know anything about computers”. Though I started this post to refer only to artists, the same is true for any small business owner who thinks he or she needs to be cut a serious break. It’s just not a good way to do business on either end, and here’s why:

In the past I’ve told them I can help them (for a good low price – hey, I’m a sucker for artists. My mother, my stepfather and step-brother are or were all artists – but they were also business owners, so I had built in sympathy for small business owners as well). I expect that for any lower price deals though that the starving artist or struggling business owner must contribute his or her full fair share of the work. This is because without your help the time I’m limited to in order to keep paying bills won’t bring your site up to where you want it to be against your keyword competition.

SEO is all about function including how form affects function. Take a great looking performance car and look underneath – it’s not quite as pretty under there as it is from up above – but it needs heavy doses of engine optimization because the pretty body and leather interior aren’t going to make it perform competitively.

Page one in Google means getting to the first several spots against hundreds of thousands or tens of millions of competitors. You as a small business owner do not want to have discount optimization work done that you haven’t heavily contributed your own time and effort to and then expect to send it out into a race. No top notch mechanic in the world wants his reputation tainted by a string of losing cars on his or her record – and no SEO wants a string of sites that are only 1/4 optimized in his or her portfolio of example optimized web sites.

Get optimized – yes, but get prepared first with a proper optimization budget to invest so you can expect, and see, real winning results.

BLOGGING FOR THE RICH AND FAMOUS

Most SEO blogs will tell you “You need killer content, and you need to update your blog with that killer content at least twice a week”, but the fact is most* of that advice comes from those addicted to their blogs (and who have some source of independent income) or from those with multiple staff members working for them who are doing the actual writing. One of my Twitter contacts is performing Affiliate Marketing, runs three businesses and has several different site blogs. She has an office and six full time staff members who do nothing but blog professionally – and in return she is making seven figures per year through Affiliate Marketing and selling Affiliate Marketing training.

It’s likely that you won’t have much time to blog for your business unless you can free up time by delegating a lot of your other work that keeps your business running to employees.

Delivering quality work takes concentration and requires time away from all distractions. Alternatively you can hire a Ghost blogger or a Guest blogger who, for about $10 to $50 per posted article, will write something of interest for your blog. If they Ghost for you then what they do is kept private and they don’t reveal to anyone that they get paid to write online. The content, once paid for, belongs to you, just as if you wrote it.

Another successful option that doesn’t take way too much of your time is this: Set up “Google Alerts” for your type of industry and have them emailed to you real-time. Now, each morning, early, look for and select the headlines of stories related to your field of business from your alerts and paste the exact headline and the first few lines of the story into your blog and create a link to the actual story on the web.

Under the most controversial stories include your own view on the story. If you do this faithfully, then anyone on the web searching for things about your type of industry will find your blog and you’ll get tons of hits, and agreeing or dissenting comments on your blog.

*Some independent full time bloggers are earning money from their writing. Others are performing Affiliate Marketing and creating dozens of sites to sell products through affiliate links. There are exceptions.

Content vs SEO – is Optimizing Content “Gaming the Search Engines”?

The World According to Google

(There’s also a nice article written on Aaron Wall’s SEObook blog discussing SEO and content at http://www.seobook.com/content-vs-seo)

Ranking alone for sites that are lame is what is usually referred to as “gaming the search engines”. It’s work that is frowned upon because in most cases, black hat cloaking techniques must be employed that present one version of the web site to the search engines, and another to site visitors. On a legitimately worthy site optimization has to be done, in part, by creating good or great content so that the site ranks well. So, no, SEO is not “gaming the search engines” it is fine tuning the content to make it compatible and in line with the rules written by Google.

Search engines FAIL on a regular basis to rank worthy content (the NY Times online is a prime example) because their algorithms are looking for keywords and key phrases and neighboring text typically related to those words and phrases. Search engines can’t really “read” anything. So “NY Times” content or not – optimization has to be done on it to get it found. Understanding what Google defines as great content and gaming the search engines are two different things.

With over one Billion pages indexed by Google today’s world of getting your pages found in Google requires more complex solutions than just great content.

Hire an SEO if you want your site to be optimized. If you can’t afford it – then learn ho to do it yourself – no matter how long it takes, no matter how much effort you need to expend and no matter how many books and blogs you have to study. Google, Yahoo and Bing are grading your site – so after you write, edit it for a good final grade.

Internet Search Engine Optimization


THE TRADITIONAL WEB SITE & WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT

The traditional web site is something pretty – designed with pleasant looking graphics and several categories of pages (About Us, Contact, Products etc.). The categories are on so many sites that they have become universally accepted as what a site should be.

Simply having pages, a menu bar and graphics are not going to make things work for you. Authors Peter Kent (Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies) and David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing and PR) each point out that a website needs to be designed like a piece of software because when a visitor comes to your site you want them to fill out a form, pick up the phone and call, fill out an estimate form etc., and have visitors act just the way they would with a piece of software in order to accomplish a specific and desired task defined by you.

If you don’t have the focus of getting your visitors perform some task and funneling them towards an action such as buying then your site is not going to work.

The way to get a site built so that it does what is expected (sell items, get phone calls, sign up for newsletters, etc.) is by using web analytics and continually testing to see what gets the highest percentage of desired responses. It also means designing multiple versions of enewsletters to be sent out to a minimum of 30 to 50 recipients in your list at a time to test each versions’ subject line, body content, offer and benefits (by checking to see what percentage have landed on each landing page, and what percentage of those who have landed have performed desired tasks).

Plain vanilla Search Engine Optimization will get your site found, but if the site is not built with a call to action and funneling them to click where necessary, then the site is not going to work, and the software is broken.

Pages have to be written clearly and concisely without clutter. A good guide book on this topic is Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” a common sense approach to web usability. KISS is the rule – clutter equals confusion equals low click through rates.

Next comes testing. Test the site using small (paid) groups of participants. After creating a site, call in several people to sit down and look at the site without telling them what the site is supposed to be about or what you want them to do. See if they understand right away what your site is about. Then tell them to go ahead and “use” the site. See whether they are confused or not, and whether they click on the buttons you expect them to click. If they make a mistake and immediately go back, that’s ok, but if they get lost and have no idea where they are or what they are expected to be doing, then you know you have a real problem that has got to be worked on.

Afterwards, interview each of the participants and ask them about their impressions to gain further insights into what it was they were experiencing. Several people should be used in each test, and compensation should be about $15 per person.

Forget about the “Traditional Web Site”. When you go for optimization remember to also get the site tuned up for increasing sales by streamlining the design for purpose.