VIEW OUR PORTFOLIO

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 have kept them on page one despite stiff competition from the public colleges. Read our case study on Liaison College.

READ OUR TIPS

Search Engine Optimization

If your website is going to do you any good, it needs to be seen and seen by the right people. Most people looking for a website, even when they know the URL, go to a search engine to find it. By far the most popular search engine is Google. But don't stop there. Though realistically, your website should be configured to suit Google's search robots, There is more to SEO than pleasing Google.

Fortunately, Google is pro-active and provides a wealth of webmaster tools and a blog to help web developers improve their ranks. The drawbacks are 5.

1. It takes a lot of time to read everything Google has to say about building better web sites.
2. It takes time to enact everything Google suggests.
3. Google is constantly coming up with new products for handling search and analysing traffic. Read our tips for more details.
4. There are other search engines to consider.
5. Your competitors are in the game, optimizing their web pages. There is only 1 slot at the top and you need to be in the top 10 at least.

It makes a lot of sense to start early, with a plan, and 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.

Plan Your SEO Strategy

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.

Know What Is Involved

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.

Best SEO Practices

Understand your goal:

• The site can be crawled easily by search engine robots: investigate how the site is built, check for 404 (not found) errors (dead links).
• Rank number one with specific key phrases: re-write and re-organize your content.
• Get 30% more traffic: choose popular keywords that draw attention, build links.
• Get 15% more conversions: choose key phrases that targeted audiences would use, build links with targeted sites.

You will need to

• re-write text
• add alt tags to all of your images
• place key phrases in prominent places
• test different styles of presentation to see which one out-performs the others
• verify your keywords and phrases are popular choices
• find words that differentiate you from competitors, but which your clients use
• do it all again next week.

Websites  |  3D Modeling  |  DTP & Graphics  |  Multimedia  |   Communications  |  Training
© C.R.Visuals Inc. 1995-2008     1334 King St. East, Kitchener ON N2G 2N7     519-749-6379