search engine optimization



It's not enough to create your site and host it...

You've designed the perfect website, but unless you know how to market your site using the search engines and other online resources, no one's ever going to find it. It's like building your home but not telling anyone your address, then throwing a party and wondering why no one comes to visit.

That's why you must "market" your website

Marketing your site is one of the most important things you do after you complete your site. Traditional advertising methods don't work on the Internet. Putting your URL in your ad in the newspaper or the yellow pages of your phone directory will get a few visitors, but what about all the people out there who are looking for your kind of business on the Internet? More than half of all users use a search engine to find you.

Competition for top keywords/keyphrases is tough, however, and you don't just want lots of traffic, you want targeted traffic. What's the difference? Targeted traffic is users who are looking for what you have to offer. And you also don't want to have only those users who are looking for some keyphrase that hardly anyone is searching for, you want to find users who are looking for your type of business using keyphrases that are not as commonly used by your competitors. In other words, you want to find "niche" keyphrases.

Registering your site with search engines is only the beginning....

Unless your site is registered with search engines and shows up within the first 30 listings on a search engine, chances are excellent that prospective customers aren't going to find you. You'll find that designing your home page  takes a lot longer than designing any other page on your site for this very reason—this is the key page to optimize for search engine submission, and you want it to show up as high up in the listings as you can get it.

What does "search engine optimization" mean?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, takes a lot more effort than just finding a few keyphrases. Finding the right keyphrases is the first step, and takes research using various tools to discover. This is the most important step you will take, however, as everything else in SEO revolves around it. And you must repeat the process every so often just to be sure that you're not missing important keyphrases that may have been added or changed. Once you have your cornerstone list of keyphrases, you can then move on to all the other steps of optimization--making sure your pages "validate" (i.e., are correctly coded with as few errors as possible), making sure your page titles are optimized, meta tags are added (for keyword density close to the top of the page) and so on. There are a number of different factors to take into consideration, although some will not need to be done again (like validation) until a site is redesigned. All these items work together to make your site more attractive to search engines.

How long will it take till my site shows up in the search engines?

Did you know it can take as long as 9 months to get your site to show up in Google if you don't pay for adwords or some other search engine's pay-per-click advertising? This is known as the "Google Sandbox", and it can really hurt a fledgling Internet business. This is why we work with you to build alternate ways to get your site showing up in search engines faster and start building the traffic and links that will help you to achieve better rankings in Google and other major search engines.

In general , some search engines will list your site in as little as 2-3 days, but some of the biggest search engines take upwards of 3 months till a new domain begins to show up in them. With good marketing techniques, however, you can get your site to show up a lot sooner, and that's our aim.

What do you do in the meantime?

If we've designed your site we've made suggestions about optimizing it for search engine placement, and we include search engine optimization for the home page as part of the design package. However, search engines are always changing, and this means your web pages also need to keep changing to remain optimized for search engines. Once a website has been submitted to the major search engines you really don't need to resubmit it, but you do need to keep making changes to it, even minor changes, so that search engines see your site as an active and evolving website. This is the first part of what helps your page ranking to increase or continue to maintain ranking.

Ideally, you want to optimize every page in your site. Periodically you should re-optimize your pages to help keep them fresh, adding new content if necessary, in order to continue to maintain your site's ranking and increase it if possible. If your web site starts to slip down in the search engines, you'll definitely want to review your pages and re-optimize them, preferably adding some fresh content. This also has the added benefit of giving users more reasons to visit to your site. The more users who visit your site and link to it, the better your ranking will be.

It is important to note that your website must be up and running before you submit it to the search engines or the search engines might find a "page not found" reference when they attempt to "spider" your site, which automatically takes you out of their database.

With search engines these days content is "king"--the more quality content you have on your site, the better. Quality is the operative word. Having a lot of repetitive content is not going to do much for you, any more than it will do much for your visitors.

Another key factor with search engines is "backlinks", i.e., those links that are pointing TO your site, not those that are on your site pointing to other sites. You will want to build quality backlinks and continue to build them over time.

If we have designed or redesigned your site, we will submit your site to the 3 major search engines--Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN)--for FREE following the initial completion of your site. Three months later we will review your site with you to see how it's doing in the search engines, and make any needed changes at that time to help improve your rankings. If you wish to continue to review and improve the search engine optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for your site, we can assist you in this process. We offer maintenance packages for continuing optimization, as required.

What about exchange links?

Exchanging links with other sites can be used to help improve your search engine ranking, but exchange links do not carry much benefit any longer other than as additional vectors by which users find your site. Nonetheless, every quality link to your site will help you one way or another. Affiliate programs and the links they create to and from your site may no longer help your ranking--Links from affiliate sites have been downgraded substantially and can even hurt you. This may change--search engines are always evolving, trying to find the best way to provide pertinent links to your searches--so it's important to keep an eye on your site and where it's showing up for your chosen keyword phrases.

How important are keywords and other meta tags?

In general search engines give no weight to the meta tags of keywords and description, and have not done so for a long time. However... and this is very important... the exercise of researching keywords and finding key phrases that will help promote your site is a good one since it helps you to find the phrases that users are actually using to search as well as eliminate those that are not working for you. Plus there are still search engines that will not list you unless these meta tags are present. Meta tags also have the effect of raising keyword frequency in a web page, and that can work to your advantage.

What IS important for search engines?

The most important items on your web page are page title (you can see it in the bar at the very top of your browser screen) and the actual written content of your page that is viewable to your visitors. These need to have value for the user and be written in a human-friendly manner, not stuffed with key phrases for search engines. The important thing to remember is that your site is ultimately for your users, not just for search engines. Give enough value on your site with the articles and information that you offer, and you're going to do well in search engines as long as you take the time to figure out who your users are, and narrow down the niche of users you are really trying to reach.

We will work with you on this and many other issues that will help to get your site listed higher in the search engines when we design, redesign, or simply work with you on the SEO and SEM for your site.

Call us at 828.891.2563 and ask how we can help you improve your site's visibility!