engine optimization (SEO) and search engine friendly
web development. You are looking for search engine
optimization tips and/or SEO Help:
of information about search engine optimization or SEO. Please feel free to
contact us if you can't find an answer to your question or need further
clarification or detail.
- What is SEO? Why is it important?
- What does Black Hat and White Hat mean?
- How do you decide which keywords to use?
- How long does it take to appear at or near
the top of search engine results? - Why does it take so long to appear at or near the top of search engine results?
- Which companies are at the top now?
- Why doesn't your site appear at the top of web results?
- What methods do you use to achieve high rankings?
- Why is it important to get listed in web directories?
- Will I ever need to start over?
- How do I know you are trustworthy, that you won't get my site blacklisted?
- What are some of the practices search engines consider unethical?
- How do I know if SEO is right for my business?
- How much will it cost?
- How can I pay you?
- Do you work with dynamic websites?
- How will I know I've gotten my money's worth?
What is SEO? Why is it important?
Search Engine Optimization is about traffic and location. Just like gas companies find it most profitable to have their business situated on the corner of a busy intersection, the most profitable websites appear at or near the top of search engine results for targeted and popular search terms. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process, a process that applies tools, techniques and best practices to maneuver a website to appear at or near the top of search engine results when specific keywords are typed into a browser window.
Consider an airport analogy. Which cab driver do you think makes the most money at the Air France arrival gate? The one who has learned Air France arrival times and sits outside the gate with a sign saying "Chauffeur de Taxi" or the one who does not? The most successful websites understand the surfing patterns of their intended audience and have tuned their website to target the most advantageous search terms used by propects and customers.
Is it really that important? Consider these statistics derived from Forrester Research in 2006:
in positions 11-30
Still not convinced there is a need to optimize your website? You might not be doing SEO for your website, but you can be sure your best competitors are. Why else do you think they are getting more traffic than you?
Lastly, search engine optimization is an investment. It does more than just put you at or near the top of search results. SEO can produce leads, generate sales, or convince someone to do something they might otherwise not do such as signing up for your newsletter or telling a friend about your site. Not only that, your website’s prominent position on the search engine results pages contributes to the branding and name recognition of your site. You need search engine optimization to stay competitive or, better yet, to beat your competition in the Internet world.
What are black hat and white hat SEO practices? Should I care about which are used?
There are many practices, tools and techniques that can be used to optimize a web site. Generally they fall into one of two broad categories - white hat or black hat.
White hat SEO practices are considered good or ethical. They are generally accepted means of acquiring high rankings within the leading search engines. Examples are using unique and compelling content on your site, using keywords and keyphrases that you know people use to search the web, and having reputable, high quality and relevant sites link back to your web site.
Black hat SEO practices are considered bad or unethical. Most, if not all, search engines will penalize or ban your site when they discover or suspect black-hat techniques are in use. Examples include stuffing web pages with keywords or keyphrases, hiding keywords (by using the same color font as background), participating in link farms, or immediately redirecting browsers to another site.
You absolutely should care about the type of practices a SEO proposes to use on your site. Black hat techniques are very easy to detect and you will be punished. Why take the chance?
How do you decide which keywords to use?That depends on whether you have an existing website or you are building a new one.
If you have an existing website, we start by inventorying the keywords currently in use. If you don't, we make a list of the keywords used by your competition to achieve high ranking results. Then we ask, and brainstorm with you, about possible keywords and phrases prospects and customers might use to search for your products and/or services on the web.
Once we have this initial set of potential keywords, we use a pair of proprietory tools called WordTracker and WebPosition to first expand the list to include other candidates we may not have thought of, then narrow it down to a manageable size. Wordtracker helps us identify other related, similar and misspelt keywords and phrases that relate to your business and are most likely to be used by individuals browsing the web. It tells us how many competing websites use those same keywords and which ones have the greatest liklihood of driving traffic to your site. WordPosition gives us more specifics; it tells us exactly which sites use the competing keywords and whether or not they rank in the top 30.
Lastly, we look at estimates of how many people will search the web using each of these terms in a 24 hour period. An optimal keyword choice would have a high number of searches every 24 hours, and few competing web sites optimized for that exact term. There aren't many terms that fit that criteria, sometimes there are none. But that's the goal!
I'm not trying to be evasive, but it really does depend on a lot of different factors; things like:
If you ask me for a ball park though, I will tell you it will typically take 9-12 months for a web site to achieve it's optimal ranking. You should start to see results sooner than that, and you should see a gradual improvement over time.
Why does it take so long to appear at or near the top of search engine results?
There are two reasons why it takes a long time to appear at or near the top of search engine results. One is the fact that spiders don't always come around that frequently to index a site, n or do they always index the whole site. The second reason is the amount of time it takes to build high quality inbound links to your site; a major influencing factor to your site's rankings. If you have a new site, it can take several months for the search engines to find and index you, even if you ask and/or pay them to index you quickly! If you have an existing site, the search engines will set up a "revisit / reindex" schedule based on how frequently it is updated. So if your site changes frequently the spiders will have learned to revisit your site frequently. If your site is fairly static, then the opposite will occur - you'll rarely get revisited / reindexed. Link building is a complicated and time consuming process but an abolute necessity to the achievement of high rankings. If you are willing to pay for links, they can be set up fairly quickly, but are generally frowned upon by search engines unless they come from the most reputable sites such as Yahoo.com or Business.com. Free links can take anywhere from minutes to never to be established, but deliver high value. These links need to be submitted manually and carefully so as to be sure they are not rejected due to lack of data, poor choice of directory category or anything else. It is important to know that although more links is always better than less, the relevance of the links carries more weight in search engine rankings than the mere quantity. Always lean towards acquiring more relevant links than acquiring mass quantities of links. Lastly, please also bear in mind that at any point in time there are approximately 7.5 billion websites all maneuvering for position. A website's ranking can change daily. If and when you do achieve a top ranking, there is no guarantee that you will stay there indefinitely. It's a very volatile environment. Usually if you see a significant (+/- 5) position change, it's because the search engine ranking algorithm has changed and many other sites are likely experiencing the same thing. The change may be temporary. If the search engine is correcting for black hat techniques, you'll soon be restored to or near your old position. As of November 30, 2007, the top three positions are held by (in order from the top down): Yahoo, Google and YouTube. For perspective, Microsoft is ranked #18, Amazon is #33, EBay is #71, Apple is #89 and CNN is #100. Bank of America is #500, Harvard University is #1,890, the White House is #11,345, General Motors is #14,279 and the Lance Armstrong Foundation is #201,696. B-SeenOnTop.com is #2,627,805. These rankings were derived from Alexa in December 2007. They will vary. This is just to give you perspective.
Why doesn't your site appear at the top of web results?
First off, we're still in the "waiting to see where we land" mode. Our site is targeted to a very specific niche of the market. If you found us using generalized terms like "search engine optimization" we probably appeared way down the list. If, on the other hand, you searched for us using "Philadelphia affordable small business SEO services" or "Main Line SEO", we should have appeared at or very near the top of the first page. We don't spend energy making sure we stay at the top of results. Due to the lag time around optimization, the number of competitors and a changing marketplace, it would be virtually impossible to maintain a top position all of the time. But you should stay within the same general area (say top 5, top 30) from day-to-day, week-to-week. Some things just can't be copied. We don't consider it a good use of our time to monitor where we stand on a daily basis once your position has stabilized. Typically we recommend monitoring a website's rankings once per quarter after stabilization has occured and to make changes as needed after that. That's sufficient. For an outline of the steps involved in optimizing a website, please see our SEO Services page. It will give you the basic steps which must be undertaken to optimize a website.
One of the many factors search engines take into consideration when ranking a website is how many large and reputable websites link to yours. It lends credibility to your site. Directories are not the primary tool used by individuals to find what they are looking for, but they are the yellow pages of the internet and will drive some traffic to your site. For both these reasons it is important to get listed in online directories.
There is a small chance that you may decide to start over or redesign your site. It will always be your choice of course, but we may find that there are too many things impeding our ability to optimize your website and our recommendation would be to start over. That would be the most expensive recommendation and not one that we would make lightly. Often we can suggest ways to stall having to make that decision by recommending suboptimal work arounds. But for the most part, the majority of the changes that will need to take place can occur on your existing website. We understand there are SEO companies who use unethical methods to optimize websites resulting in worse rather than better rankings. We are not one of those companies. Our goal is to be thought of as the most trusted, reliable and affordable small business SEO service provider on the main line of Philadelphia. That means we can't screw up; not even once. That means we want you to leave our engagement more than satisfied and wanting to refer others. We recommend you look at what Google has to say. The Google Webmaster Help Center lists what to look for to determine if the SEO company you are considering hiring might not be the best choice.
If you know someone who is comfortable with HTML, we recommend you have them take a look at our code to confirm for yourself that we have not used any unethical methods. We suggest you contact one of our clients to confirm their satisfaction. We have applied to be a member of the Washington, DC and Eastern Pennsylvania Better Business Bureau. Once the six month probationary period has elapsed, we expect to be a member in good standing. In the meantime, please feel free to contact them to learn if there have been any complaints registered against us. We are a US company and therefore subject to the same anti-fraud laws as is every other business in the United States. When we begin to work with you we will provide a written, money-back guarantee that no questionable (also known as Black Hat) SEO tactics will be used which could result in your website getting banned from the major search engines. We don't guarantee top rankings. No one can without trickery or deception. We will promise to do our best and guarantee that we will set, and then meet or exceed your expections. Search engine companies are the defacto governing body for search engine optimization. They decide which techniques and practices are considered ethical and which are not. If they don't like something, they ignore or ban you. It's that simple. What has happened in the past is a search engine optimizer will come up with a cool and creative way to boost website rankings. Others notice this improvement and because source code and meta tags are visible to the entire world, begin to copy it. Soon search engines recognize a pattern occuring in search results and modify their search algorithms to account for it. If they consider the practice deceptive or trickery, they penalize, gnore or ban you. Search engine optimizers watch for new releases of the search engine algorithms and must react quickly when they see this has happened. The offensive code is removed from the website source and replaced with something else. And so it goes. What should be apparent is that search engine optimizers can make a lot of money by applying these short-term techniques to achieve top rankings. Businesses are initially happy when they see increasing sales and recognition. But they are not happy when their websites are banned or ignored. Nor are they happy to be caught in a pattern of ongoing, continuous change which costs them money. So what are considered unethical SEO techniques? Here is a sampling: As in the last question, we also recommend you look at what Google has to say about how to recognize an unethical search engine optimization company. The Google Webmaster Help Center lists what to look for to determine if the SEO company you are considering hiring might not be the best choice. Please look at the answer to the "What is SEO" question for some global statistics on search engine use. More and more consumers are turning to the web to find products and services, 256 million in December 2006 alone according to Forrester Research. But of these, less than 4% will look beyond the first three pages of search engine results. Less than 2% look beyond the first three results! These statistics hold true regardless of industry. Every industry should be able to benefit from SEO.
Think of it this way - every business needs customers and the most cost effectivey way, the best way to turn prospects into customers is by way of search engine marketing. There is no one right or wrong answer to that question. It depends on a number of factors not least of which is your ability to pay. To be clear, when we say "It depends on your ability to pay", we mean that we can customize solutions to fit your budget if you ask us. When we say "affordable", we don't mean cheap, we mean we'll fit costs to suit your budget and set your expectations as to what that means.
At project initiation we will provide you with a work plan that breaks the work down into project phases and activities within phases. Each has a cost. You have a choice of which phases and activities you want us to undertake, which ones you prefer to do on your own, and which ones you don't want anyone to complete. We will walk you thru the plan. You will decide what works best. In addition to the cost of our time, you will need to budget for inclusion in some top tier and inter-related web directories. Inbound links to your website from large and reputable directories is a must in search engine optimization. The two top directories are Yahoo and DMOZ (an acronym for Mozilla Directory). Yahoo charges $299 / year for inclusion in its directory. DMOZ is free, but it can take a year or more to get listed. You may never get listed. Inbound links from other business and specialty-type directories related to your line of business are also extremely helpful. Inbound links from unrelated businesses are not helpful and may, in fact, hurt your website's rankings.
We ask for a retainer up front so we can begin to purchase directory listings for your site. We will work with you to determine the size of the retainer. After that, we ask for full payment at the end of each project phase. We accept check or cash only. It depends on the extent of parameterization of the system. Ideally you would arrange for us to login to your system to make an assessment. Some systems are very compatible with SEO and some are much less so. Our site was built using Yahoo SiteBuilder which is a dynamic website with a content management system overlay. It is reasonably compatible with SEO. Having said that, you might still be impeded from achieving top rankings because there are portions of your website Yahoo prevents you from editing, for example, directory names and the system generated HTML. The HTML does not meet all industry standards. You'll also need to know a bit of HTML yourself in order to be able to code around the shortcomings of the tool. The #1 best way to appear at or near the top of search results is to have your original web site designer work with a SEO specialist to ensure your site appears at or near the top of search engine results at initial launch. It's also the least costly way to "b-seenontop". At the start of our engagement we will run a baseline report showing where your site is ranking for the keywords you are currently using, and for the ones we plan to use. If statistics from your existing site are available, we will create a monthly trends report which shows the number of shoppers and customers, the number of sales and average sales, and conversion rates (visitors that are converted into customers). After our engagement we send six monthly reports using the same statistics so you can monitor progress. You can easily verify the rankings data on the reports by going to each search engine and typing in the keyword to see what your rankings are by hand.
So you can see there are many factors that play into when you will achieve your optimal ranking. There is no single right or wrong answer to that question.
We do things a bit differently. We start by reviewing optimization steps with our client and deciding on who will do what, if anything. Some clients want as little involvement as possible. Others choose to treat the assignment as a learning experience and are heavily involved. As a minimum, you will understand who's doing what when so you will have a realistic expectation around when you might begin to see results. One of our goals is to set expectations and exceed them. Agreeing on a timeline and plan is just the first step.
Which directories should you get listed in? The top two are Yahoo and DMOZ (short for Mozilla Directory). Yahoo charges a $299 annual fee to be listed in their online directory. DMOZ is free, but there is no guarantee you will get listed. Your best bet is to: (1) read their instructions carefully and comply with their requirements; and (2) choose the category in which you want to be listed carefully. Choosing the wrong category can delay your listing significantly. It can take a very long time to get listed. (This site took 9 months to be listed.) Do not resubmit. Take the time to do it right the first time and be patient. More information about DMOZ can be found at the Webworkshop Blog Site.
Depending on your budget and the nature of your business, there are many other directories you should get listed in. The Best of the Web is one. And there are lots of niche directories. We will prepare a list of the ones we think could benefit your ranking and you'll tell us which ones you want to be listed in. You should never pay to have your site listed in an unrelated directory. It won't help your rankings.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to the Federal Trade Commission at CRC-240 Washington, D.C. 20580.
Other factors which play a role in determining the cost to optimize your website include:
The other thing you should understand is that we present you with a comprehensive plan to optimize your site. If it's a shopping site, it takes more work because there is comparatively more competition. If it's a niche service provider site, it takes less time and effort. We give you a comprehensive plan, with price points within it, and you decide what you want to bite off and what you don't. Some people decide to start off small and optimize their home page only. We think that's a great place to start. Spend as little as possible and see where you land. The goal is for you to gain trust in us and come back and ask for more and/or refer others.
The #1 best, most effective, way to appear at or near the top of search results is to have your original web site designer work with a SEO specialist to ensure your site appears at or near the top of search engine results at initial launch. It's also the least costly way to "b-seenontop". If you are having a new website built, please call and ask our no-cost advice. Better yet, ask your web design firm if they'd be willing to work with us to ensure you're not only happy with the look and feel, but you're also happy with the traffic and conversions (number of people that elect to positively respond to your message). If you do that, you will B-SeenOnTop of your competitors and drive more business to your website.
Bottom line? Please have a win-win conversation with us about costs.
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Last Revised 07/21/2008
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