Redding Web Development Professional

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

tiggerjay — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:31:18 +0000

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Perform a search on Google for “Search Engine Optimization” and you’ll see over 43 MILLION pages. The concept of Search Engine Optimization is huge and very profitable. Sadly a large among of those gains are from illegitimate methods which result in only short term gains to your website. At ProactiveWeb our experienced web developers will work with you to determine the correct path to take to meet your desired objectives. We will determine realistic expectations for search results and create a plan, implement and monitor those results.

While there is no “black magic” or “secret sauce” to improving your search results, there are some well published techniques and, most significantly, qualified experience to help guide you through the process. Our overall goal for SEO is to produce a plan which shows steady, positive, sustainable growth in search ranking. Promises from companies for rapid success are from unsustainable, and sometimes unethical methods which will be short lived, and perhaps lead to your website being blacklisted or banned by Google and other search engines.

Here is some of the specific elements we can bring to help you improve your search rank:

Review of your website, both content and technical attributes
Advice on website hosting, services or other technical or programming elements
Content development and management
Online marking and social media presence
Key word and target marketing research
Training on SEO

Google has published an excellent guide which can help both webmasters as well as interested parties in Search Engine Optimization, as well as selecting a firm. We will use some of those ideas here and answer the questions they present for you.

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- Absolutely, we have some published case studies, including: Silicon Valley Driving School which was able to eliminate their YellowPages print ad because of our SEO work. Of course, please contact us for additional references or information.
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- Absolutely! In fact, we’re referencing their own questions and guidelines here. This is an excellent question to ask.
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
- Our primary focus is on organic search results and optimization, however we will make recommendations for some online marketing when appropriate. We do not resell these services, but rather refer you directly to the vendor.
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
- We work with our customers to develop specific, measurable objectives. Our primary goal is steady, positive and sustainable growth – rapid growth tends to be a red-herring, and of little long term value for most businesses. All objectives will be documented, and measured in a verifiable method.
What’s your experience in my industry?
- Definitely contact us and let us know what industry you’re involved in and we can provide additional detail. Areas we’ve recently been involved in, but certainly not limited to is: non-profit, church/religious, medical/health-care, daycare/childcare, government.
What’s your experience in my country/city?
- We have extensive experience throughout the state of California with an emphasis in Shasta County (Redding, Anderson); Silicon Valley (San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino); rural health-care; and nation wide e-commerce.
What’s your experience developing international sites?
- We do not offer or specialize in international sites; we have some very limited experience with internationally based missionaries, but that would be the greatest extent of our prior involvement.
What are your most important SEO techniques?
- Our largest focus is on ensuring the website has discoverable/searchable content which is of real value to the individual performing the keyword searches. Valuable content is the most significant element of any SEO campaign, followed by execution and technical skill-sets.
How long have you been in business?
- ProactiveWeb is a division of ProactiveITC which was founded in 2006. Our two lead SEO engineers have been providing professional web development services since 1998 and 2000.
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
- All communication will be a combination of phone, web-conference and e-mail documentation; if you’re in the greater Shasta County area, on-site appointments are preferred when possible. All changes will be reviewed before being executed. In some instances a mock-up website will be created for review before being published on the internet. You are free to ask any questions as to our methodology and process, again, we don’t believe there is any secret sauce to SEO, simply well published methods and experienced execution of those methods.

Here are some additional things about us, which is (in part) taken from the aforementioned Google document:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google: Our approach is to work with you to create long-term, realistic goals for your websites and related search terms. While the majority of the time we can help you get first page placement, and in some cases first ranking position, there are a few things you need to know. First, there is no guarantee of ranking, for MANY reasons, including the nature of the organic search – if we both searched at the same time for the same term, you will sometimes find that your computer and mine return different results, even in the #1 position. We can guarantee satisfaction with our service and that if we work together you will see a positive direction on your search result placement.
Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do: Again, we don’t believe in any secret sauce, when we are working together, we will provide you a detailed approach to how we’re going to implement the plan to meet agreed upon objectives. Of course, to protect ourselves from being abused, we don’t provided detailed plans before we’re under a service agreement.
You should never have to link to an SEO: We definitely agree with this one, that is a method used my many to create inflated search results, which are short lived — our method is long term, sustainable growth! However, with that said, we always appreciate our customers linking to us in attribution to the services we’ve provided that hopefully results in customer referrals, but nothing more – no page rank or backlink scheme here!
Be sure to understand where the money goes: All fees paid to us goes directly to our company to pay operating and staff expenses, none of the monies paid to us ever goes to third party firms. Only in select instances, typically when requested by the client, will we recommend they directly work with Google/Yahoo/etc for ad placement.
What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter? While there are many abusive methods on the internet to provide short term gains, ProactiveWeb avoids and refuses to perform any of the following: shadow domains, keyword laden doorway pages, SEO link exchanges, paid-for-inclusion methods, spam, backlink spam, and anything illegal.

Our overall goal for SEO is to produce a plan which shows steady, positive, sustainable growth in search ranking.

Domain Privacy

tiggerjay — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 06:31:50 +0000

Internet privacy is a big deal these days. Privacy breaches at various sites have exposed sensitive data like home addresses, phone numbers and email and more.But for domain name owners, there’s another easily preventable privacy pitfall out there that could cause just as much headache as a major social networking site leaking their personal data.There are thousands of home-based businesses launched every year where the owner fails to enable the Contact Privacy feature of his or her domain name, resulting in the publishing of their home address, phone number and email address the domain’s publicly searching WHOIS record.

Domain Privacy is provided as a FREE service to all proactiveWeb subscribers!

Blog Ideas: Parties

tiggerjay — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:42:10 +0000

Here is a great place to share on what your organization did to celebrate the holidays. This could be pictures from an office party, your decorations or perhaps how your company volunteered to help out a charity. Whatever you do special this time of year, be sure to share it!

Blog Ideas: Holiday Hours

tiggerjay — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 01:15:16 +0000

As we’re looking to the upcoming Holidays, be sure to post your hours of operations for the holiday. This can apply to almost any business. Even if you’re a 24x7x365 operation, be sure to state that as well so your customers know that you’ll be open over Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years. If you have modified schedules or perhaps only an answering service, be sure to share that. Make sure you take a moment to show your commitment to customer service in the way you present your information.

Also take the moment to pre-schedule your Holiday Greetings to your clients on a separate blog celebrating the season with them in whatever fashion is appropriate for your company. Also think of other ways you may want to spread the holidays in your homepage design or even in other technologies such as your voicemail greeting or e-mail signatures.

Blog Ideas: Testimonials

tiggerjay — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:37:29 +0000

Here is a great use of blogs… start to enter in your client testimonials onto your blog! Be sure to provide enough information to make the testimony appear valid, such as partial name and city, or other such identifying information. Another source you can freely choose to grab is from online website reviews such as yelp or insider pages, freely copy their testimonials onto your own website and simply provide a link back to the source as your validation of the testimonial. Be sure to think about what level of client confidentiality you need to maintain, which is industry specific. Also, it is generally a good idea to include all errors as they appear in the testimonial to retain their genuine feel. However feel free to edit as necessary but clearly indicate where you’ve done that.

Also I will create a specific tag or category in the blog software and use that to feed an RSS reader on my website so it will show the most current (or perhaps select one out of the most recent 3) testimonials to display on the website.

Website Submission

tiggerjay — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:44:25 +0000

Generally there is no need to submit your website to the major search engines anymore because of how quickly they are able to crawl the internet for new resources. If you have quality inbound links, you can expect to be discovered by major search engines with 30 days. And submitting your website URL to them may not improve that turn around time either. However, with that said, there is no reason why you shouldn’t submit them manually except for the time and effort it takes. Personally I am in favor of manually submitting it to the major engines you use, and avoid the submission tools available on the internet. Also, submitting your website more than once can actually have a negative affect on how quickly your site is searched.

Business Cards

tiggerjay — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:11:49 +0000

Your business card is the best place to advertise your business and your website. Whenever you hand out your business card, always give at least 3. That way they have one for themselves and two to give away. Even consider giving them cards every time you see them, or visit their offices, or however you transact business with them. Business cards are a very inexpensive, but long lasting form of advertising.

There are a lot of marketing reasons behind the simple business card, but there is one unique thing I’d like to bring up regarding website specifically…

Consider using a different domain name for your business card, something that is still inline with your business, so say you’re acme.com, consider acmecorp.com or something else for your website listed on your business cards. And the reason is simple, it will permit you to track how much of your clients come from handing out business cards. This can be a deciding factor when you evaluate your marketing costs. I was able to assist a small business to transition from a $24,000 annual marketing budget between online ads and traditional phone book, to $1,000 annual budget between business cards and a basic yp.com online ad. This was assisted by strong SEO and website enhancements to bring it to the top spot in Google for the past 3 years. Imagine how much we could charge in consulting costs if we saved them $69,000 in marketing costs over three years? It is also worth noting that we’re exceeding the expectations of their marketing efforts each quarter.

Inbound Links

tiggerjay — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 23:53:33 +0000

Inbound links to your website, those coming from other websites, can help your overall website ranking. In the past, this was weighed heavily, but in recent years, the value has decreased. This is probably one of the biggest areas which has been abused in the last 5 years, with people selling SEO by basically spamming the internet with your website address. Google has cracked down and has all sorts of ways to detect this sort of spam. A sample of that includes:

The more outbound links on a page, the less value each link holds
Links outside of any content (basically just a directly of links) hold little value
Links from comment sections of other blogs which are in unrelated topics (links to your animal website from a automotive website)
Paid ads on a website rarely count as inbound links

What you want to do is find a couple of relevant, respected websites to link directly to your website in a value-adding way to real people. Some good examples of this would be:

Just about any link from a website with a high google pagerank (2/5 or higher), particularly if it is from a related website.
Having a friend write a positive review of your website or service and include a link to your website in the middle of the review.
Write papers, articles, white-papers, presentations which can be syndicated and shared on the internet with a backlink to your website. If you create presentations or even PDF which you share on relevant websites, be sure to include your website in the document.
Blogging on your own website is great, as well as contributing and commenting on other blogs which are relavant to your own website.
Setup a link exchange between affiliated websites (you link to their website and vise verse), but many of the larger exchanges have little value, so setting up your own one-to-one exchange is often more valuable.
Be sure to include a “share” link or some other method for readers to easily link to your website from social networking places like Facebook or Twitter.

There is an affinity that Google knows between link partners, and if there is no obvious connections, say a “general contractor” linking to a “wedding planners” website, then the link value is diminished. However affiliated trades, such as a “photography magazine” linking to a “photography studio”, the value is improved. But at the end of the day, think about how creating the best brand for your website, providing value to end users, advertising and connecting with affiliated businesses and their websites, and you should be all set.

Fresh Data

tiggerjay — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:38:18 +0000

One thing that can materially affect your search page ranking is constantly updating information. Nobody likes a stale website, and the majority of information available is always changing and updating. Yes, certain pages will always be static, but in most categories of websites, there will always be new information to share. When a website never updates their pages, the information becomes stale, and thus, can lose search ranking.

If you don’t find your website important enough to update, why should anyone else place value on it. Even the most basic advertorial webpages can contain fresh data.

In 2003 I designed a website for a driving school with 14 very informative pages. The information is generally very static, and I have a reminder every 6 months to contact the owner to have him review the website to make any updates to his pricing, fees, terms or policies, as well as any changes due to the changes in driving laws. But beyond that, what we have added is a blog to bring fresh data to the website on a roughly monthly basis. That blog contains student testimonials, announcements of changes by the DMV, or other driving tips as the instructors encounter them. All of this information is relevant information to our visitors and helps keep the website filled with current information.

Google finds this new information, and the more often your website posts new data, the more frequently Google visits your website, and this has an uplifting affect on your search results.

SEO: Moving up the Google Ladder

tiggerjay — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:02:46 +0000

I am frequently asked by people how they can achieve better search ranking on Google. They have been exposed to all sorts of marketing about companies who claim to bring peoples websites to the first page of Google. However, the truth of the matter is this: Google is constantly changing their ranking system to provide better results to their users, so only truely valuable websites stay on the top. It isn’t hard to get invaluable sites to the top for a short period of time using a variety of black-hat or grey-hat methods. So at the end of the day, only truely valuable websites are going to show up on the top of Google over the long term.

So the first thing you need to look at is your website to see if it is providing a valuable resource to the internet compared to those above your current search results. If you’re not, then you need to start there, improve and ehance your content before attempting to perform any form of SEO or SEM.

The question you should honestly ask yourself is, does the content of my website exceed that of the other leaders? It it doesn’t, work on that first, but once you feel that has been accomplished then the other tools on this blog can help: