Read our History of Online Search
DID YOU KNOW?
43% of people looking online for a service or product, start with a search engine. If your site isn't in the top 20 results at Google, Yahoo or MSN, it may go site unseen.
A 2007 survey by Marketing Sherpa showed that the average search engine marketing budget is $5,000 to $10,000 per month. Big spenders pay $25,000 and up per month to improve their search engine ranking. Are you ready to invest in getting better rankings?
You can buy hits to create legitimate looking traffic. Robotraff sends 100s of visitors to web pages for pennies a hit. Hacked computers and applications that exploit browser weak points make it possible to fudge traffic results for any website.
SEO is a way of thinking about your content. Everyone involved in building the site should be thinking about the SEO. It takes experimentation and sometimes you'll find your rank goes up and sometimes down, when you try a new approach. Monitor it constantly.
C.R.Visuals moved Liaison College from a rank of 51 to #1 in their chosen key phrases in 3 months. We kept them on page one despite stiff competition from the public colleges for as long as they worked with us. Read our case study on Liaison College.
It makes a lot of sense to hire a company to help you optimize your site for search engine optimization. Don't assume your web designer or webmaster took care of this on their own. Some don't know how; some provide it as a separate service.
Include the SEO early in your web planning by developing a set of keywords and phrases you know your prospects will use to find your company.
A keyword is a word that your prospects might readily type when looking for a product or service like the one you offer. While these would include obvious product names, it also includes associated terms. For example, Tylenol uses: Feel better, TYLENOL®, acetaminophen, pain relief, headache relief, pain, headache, muscle pain, back pain, arthritis pain, flu, cold, allergy, sinus, sleeplessness, cough cold, muscle back, muscle back pain. Note that they don't use aspirin.
Most people actually type in 3 or 4 words to narrow their search. These are not always phrases, simply a series of related words one might associate with a need. For example, to find pain relief, one might type in "headache, muscle pain." You won't find tylenol's website. Give it a try.
Your first concern is whether or not to spend the time and money on SEO. If your website is designed to support your current client-base, or to answer questions from people to whom you gave your business card, it may not be important that your website ranks #1002 in Google. If your product is a household name, you may decide the name is the only keyword worth using.
If you are running an ecommerce site, or trying to brand or promote your product/service beyond your personal reach, then where your site ranks becomes important.
If you have decided that SEO is vital to your marketing, set your goals and expect to spend about 3 hours a week fighting for top billing. As soon as your competitors realize that you are working on moving up the lists, they will shift their strategy as well to out-rank you.
Google uses an ever-changing matrix to describe and rank web pages. Some of the essential features are alt tags, meta tags, links in and out, headings, and site maps. There are optimal page lengths and keyword usages. Google likes to see lots of intelligent information. They hate duplicity and replicas. They really despise link farms.
Since the matrix changes frequently as Google tries to counter cheating and provide real users with valuable options, your tactics may sometimes win you points and sometimes lose them. You could rank as a 5 one day and a 4 the next because the basis of ranking sites has changed.
You can check the status of your site with simple webmaster tools like Seoquake.
Remember that Google is not the only search engine out there and your site should be optimized for other engines and ways of searching the internet.
Understand your goal:
You will need to