Search Engine Optimization

The great thing about building your business through SEO has been for smaller businesses, it is really a level the playing field and allows everyone to be competitive. You could be a business that doesn’t have a tremendous marketing budget and really make a significant impact online with a little elbow grease. All you need to do is make some time and learn the craft of marketing a website in the online space and you can quickly gain some much needed visibility through your SEO efforts in house. Offline you didn’t really have that choice, you either paid for the effort or it didn’t happen and the online space has really changed the way businesses now communicate with the masses.

Just because you do not have a 1 million dollar yearly PPC budget doesn’t mean that you can’t make a significant impact online. Writing some press releases, articles and getting active in your social space doesn’t cost you anything but time. Often times the biggest challenges are finding an employee in your company that can help you market your business and pull together your SEO efforts online. Go through your current employees and shift some roles and responsibilities around in order to give an employee some new room to help you spread your message in the web space. Chances are you have an employee sitting around at your business that should be helping you market your business online over what they might be doing now. Sometimes all you might need is to send that employee to some basic search engine marketing training to give them that extra knowledge on how to grow your business online in order to really help you. If you are not capable of hiring a search marketing employee and have not begun to do anything online you need to start to think about making this type of shift. Your business can’t afford to wait any longer sitting dormant online.

Chances are your competitors have already found a way to market themselves to your exact audience in the online space. Sitting around and waiting for things to change on their own will not help your brand grow in the search results. You have to start marketing yourself now and building your in house SEO resources. Go through your employees and find which one spends time online and could really be able to help you, you will be happy you did.

The way the search engines operate is almost always changing. Sometimes the changes happen while we sleep and sometimes we are given a heads up way in advance so that we can prepare for the blow. Regardless building links is always going to be an integral part of building up a business online.

In a recent blog post Google gives their advice on some ways to build up nice quality links pointing to your website in order to get on Google’s good side.

“Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.”

I’m really glad Google has addressed this because I still see people trying to purchase the mass directory submission services that simply blast out your information to a large amount of useless directories that virtually give off no linking power at all. Google recommends finding industry specific directories that are relevant to your business or your industry and focusing on getting your company listed in those websites.

“It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.”

Basically what Google is saying is that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Link building is an effort that takes time and strategy and trying to cut corners and buy links is a bad idea and should be removed from your marketing plan.

If you are somewhat new to the SEO world and you have been given the task of finding an SEO services company to hire to help your business might leave you with some investigative work to do. There are many, many SEO companies out there claiming they are the best and if you are trying to isolate the right SEO services company to partner with there are some things you should know before you make your final decision.

Don’t Base Your Entire Decision On Price

This theory can go in both directions. With many things in life if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Do you really think you are going to effectively market your business and beat out your competition on $49.95 per/month? Chances are no. This doesn’t mean that you have to go and spend $2,000 per/month either. Be realistic on what it takes to market a business online. There are distribution costs associated with some efforts, time to write articles and press releases along with the time and energy to constantly put together an ongoing SEO strategy that is going to help you grow
your business online the right way.

Research The SEO Services Company

Do a little bit of research on the companies you are thinking about working with. Find out everything about them. Search their company names online and see what you come up with. Take a look and see if other companies have done any write ups on them or what type of information is lurking in the search results for their company name. If there is nothing in the search results scratch them off your list.

Don’t Make Your Decision on Whether the SEO Website Ranks

If you search for “SEO” and you don’t see them on page 1 don’t rule them out as a company just yet. There are only ten parking spaces on the first page of Google and they can’t fit thousands of companies into this space. You have some SEO companies that have had their websites for ten plus years so it will be difficult to move them out of the way in the search results. Plus keep in mind that in our industry “most” SEO companies know exactly what they are doing so we have to compete against an industry that practices what they preach.

How Many Employees Does the SEO Services Company Have?

Think about it for a minute, if they have 40 or 50 employees chances are they have many business processes in place along with policies and protocols that are iron clad. Chances are you will hear “Sorry that is just policy” at some point during your SEO campaign. If you go with a firm that has 10 or 15 people you might have a bit more flexibility with pricing and special requests that the large firms won’t even budge on. I’m not saying every large company that offers SEO is bad to work with but you have to watch out for everything out there.

Not Every Hosting Company and Web Designer Knows SEO

Just because your hosting company or web designer claims they know how to do SEO, that doesn’t mean that they actually do. A hosting company’s primary focus was to host websites and along the way they realized that if they open an SEO division they can become slightly more profitable. Same goes with web designers and developers. Just because the recession came along and they slapped up an SEO page on their website does not mean they are trained to execute it properly.

Make Sure the SEO Services Company Speaks English

Would you really want someone who barley speaks English working on the marketing for your company? Since search engine optimization is an effort that really encompasses the art of language you need someone that completely 100% understand the language and also things like industry slang that could be a very important keyword in your vertical or niche. Someone doing search engine optimization on the other side of the world that barley speaks English is not going to get that part of the task right and you will not be running at full steam when the job is done – that is not an opinion that is reality.

Take the time to really analyze the SEO company you are going to work with before you do so you can avoid any shotty work or getting burned along the way.

SEO still seems like a very foggy effort to many website owners. I still see people in the forums and blogs that seem to be stuck in search engine optimization circa 2001 by looking for directory submission services and articles “blasts” which do nothing but flood the web pages with junk. There is such a thing as good search engine marketing and it is important to fully understand this.

Let’s take a look at some of the largest SEO mistakes a website can make that will ultimately hurt their SEO efforts:

SEO Sin#1 – Mass Submission:
A mass submission of almost anything online is just not as effective as it once was. There is no easy way of marketing your business online. There is a tremendous amount of activity in the search engines now than there ever has been and it takes a strategic approach to push your way through all the noise in the online space. Internet marketing is all about being strategic and placing things where they will deliver the most bang for your buck. Whether that buck is monetary or simply your time, it is important that your online effort also delivers some targeted traffic to your website.

SEO Sin#2 – Over Stuffing:
Your SEO is not Thanksgiving so don’t over stuff yourself. If you are launching a business profile don’t jam 16 keywords into the title. If the keyword is part of your business name that is fine but to leave a sentence of keywords in your company name, description or anywhere else for that matter is a horrible approach. Sometimes you can achieve this task tastefully but often times greed sets in for most. Same rule or principal applies to almost anything you do online. Whether it is a meta tag, h1 tag or even your Facebook fan page you have to keep it clean and tasteful. People can often notice when someone is over optimizing.

SEO Sin#3 – Duplicate Meta Info:
Sometimes I come across websites that have the same meta information going across the entire website. Your meta tag information is descriptive information relating directly to the topic of that page and should never be the same across the board. From an SEO standpoint this is horrible because it does not give your pages the ability to individually rank in search results.

SEO Sin#4 – Stale Content:
The content on your website is going to be a very important driving force on how people respond on your website. If your content seems stale and just not with it your web traffic is not going to respond very well and neither are your search rankings. Take the time to update your website and copy and make it search engine friendly by utilizing some SEO related keywords naturally throughout your text.

SEO Sin#5 – Duplicate Content:
Not only does duplicate content leave behind a very poor user experience but the ramifications from the search engines could be crippling. Duplicate content, if not managed properly could results in search penalties leaving search rankings in a state of disarray. Your website content should always be unique and compelling. Often times this will happen if you have different versions of your home page on three separate files and do not even know it, such as: www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html.

SEO Sin#6 – Too Much CSS:
CSS is the new html. CSS allows websites to really do some neat things without having to worry about flash or any other non-popular forms of coding. CSS works in sheets that overlap each other and too much CSS can either slow down your page load time or sometimes trick the search engines into thinking there is hidden content.

SEO Sin#7 – Sloppy Interlinking:
Interlinking should be done properly and strategically. Not everything requires interlinking and too much interlinking will cause your audience to tune out.

SEO Sin#8 – URL Structures:
Do your URL structures have a strong of characters at the end of the URL that look horrendous and sloppy? If they do they will react the same way they look in the search results. Clean and tighten them up and you will strengthen your SEO efforts a great deal.

SEO Sin#9 – Flash:
If you still think flash is nice and fancy you are going to have some problems in the search engines. Flash is outdated and tacky and if you plan on building your website in flash it will almost never rank in the search results.

SEO Sin#10 – Lack of Knowledge:
Take the time and study up on the industry before you deem your onsite SEO changes a failure. They are the foundation to everything you will do online so make sure you educate yourself if you plan on doing these efforts online yourself.

It is important to know that onsite SEO is the foundational step to building up your web presence, so don’t commit any SEO sins!

There are two different outcomes that many websites or businesses strive for when they market themselves online but which is more important: achieving higher search engine rankings or really building out your business brand in the online space? Both are important and crucial for success online but which do you prefer?

Since the spawn of the search engines many people’s mindset has always been to be on page 1. Everything they did online revolved around being on page 1 and we grew with the search engines thinking that the only way a website can succeed is to have high search rankings for their targeted keywords. As a website owner it is important to understand that things have changed, they are changing and they will change even more so it is important to be diverse. For some reason most people are in the mindset of approaching the search engine ranking ranking game with a short term marketing mindset (example: need high rankings by next week). Why is that? Do you plan on keeping your business around for just a short while? Building a brand around your business online will not only help your rankings but it helps you sustain your business well into the future. What is going to happen to your business if you spend all your time simply focused on rankings and all of a sudden Google makes a change where your rankings dip? If you have been simultaneously building your brand online you can weather that storm and keep bringing in new business but if you have been centered on just rankings than you could find yourself knee deep in mud with nowhere to go.

Search engine rankings and brand building should go hand in hand when venturing into the online marketing space. It doesn’t matter what your business is building a brand has become even more important than ever before. Things like social media and the recent economic decline have caused businesses to really strengthen their online image. Purchasing behavior has changed and if you have a hard time acknowledging that you might find your business drying up quickly. Don’t spend all your time on short term efforts because the long term marketing and branding efforts are just as important.