Archive for January, 2010

SEO Experts and SEO Consultants, Find Out About Them and What They Offer

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a powerful tool available to all individuals and companies that have a website. This is one of the most powerful web marketing services available to really improve your online visibility. With proper use of SEO, one can increase traffic to their website and turn a large number of visitors in to customers. It is advisable for anyone who does own an online business to invest in an SEO consultant to ensure that their services are performed in a proper manner and to their benefit.

SEO experts offer a wide range of services for their clients, from natural SEO to paid advertising. SEO consultants review the content that you have in your website and optimize the information. Then they obtain quality links to your site. It is important at this point to understand that the content of your website affects your ranking on a search engine such as Google. SEO requires that keywords and phrases be used in the webpage appropriately. The keywords should be used in titles and in the name of the website or URL if possible. SEO experts review the content of your website and advise you accordingly. They are able to determine whether you will be ranked high or low in a search engine by comparing the content of your webpage with the standards of the search engine. They should be able to also determine what is needed to beat your competition.

SEO consultants also offer advice on the development of a website. The advice that SEO experts give is just technical advice. It may include things such as who to approach for quality links to your website as well as how your content should be laid out to improve rankings.

SEO experts can also help you develop new content on your website that will really make a major impact in the search engines. As mentioned earlier, the content of your webpage plays a significant role in the ranking of your site in the search engines. The content also matters when you desire to make sales; you must have a well-written and marketed page to sell your customers. When you have reached your goal of attaining top search ranking, you will be receiving plenty of traffic if you targeted quality terms. This is definitely needed to succeed online. Receiving plenty of traffic is not the end of SEO; you can constantly improve by branching off in similar terms by using synonym search phrases and other tactics to find more customers. It is important that you are able to sell your services or products online. SEO consultants can also help you meet your online goals by helping you develop the content of your website so that your visitors will actually buy your products or services.

Keywords are very important to research and focus on when hiring someone for these services. SEO experts deal with search engines and understand how they work. They keep track of algorithm changes and are always open to the latest advice in optimizing for the search engines. These consultants therefore need to know how to research and capitalize on keywords directly related to your website. SEO consultants can offer to perform keyword research on your behalf to help you grab those top rankings. Their research is aimed at what people look for when making searches in the field your website is in. They then use these keywords in your webpage content as well as in links pointing to your website. Your website’s external links make a huge impact on your ranking in the search engines.

Some SEO experts offer training in the field of SEO. They can give you the skills that they have learned in SEO and pass on the knowledge to you. In so doing, you will be able to perform SEO for your own websites so that you can grab those top rankings more effectively.

What to Know Before Hiring an SEO

Thinking about hiring an SEO?


As more and more small businesses look for opportunities to grow, the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) always seems to come up. Someone has a story about some business who made millions off tweaking a meta tag, and people get very excited. But before you go running out and hiring someone, there are a few things you need to know.

Don’t fall for the get rich quick story.


For one thing, let me be the first to tell you that a lot of stories about SEO are either exaggerated, or simply untrue. Yes, you can make a lot of money from SEO, there is no doubt about that. But in talks with people at parties, or other social gatherings I hear more and more “SEO stories” that sell a too good to be true situation and you should be aware of it. If they are unaware of my SEO background, they even tell me this stuff. They talk about some kid who tweaked a few tags and made millions of dollars off his blog, or a company who boosted their profits 300% in a month from a little SEO. I’m not sure where these stories originate, but you must keep in mind that SEO is new, but the same old rules apply. There is no get rich quick method, and you won’t get something for nothing. SEO will certainly be a positive addition to your business, but it requires hard work and sacrifice just like anything else. Which brings me to my next point.

Manage your own expectations


SEO is good, it’s obviously what I base my SEO website on. It’s what I do for a living, and I don’t want to try and downplay it’s importance. However, it is by no means a silver bullet that will make any business successful. It’s not the “secret trick” to make you rich. It’s something you do to grow your business and it works, but don’t expect millions to pour in every night.

SEO takes time


SEO is a long, continuous process that requires work and maintenance. Gone are the days where you could hire someone to tweak some code, and sit back to collect the riches. It takes a long time to get going, and requires maintenance. It could be months, or longer before you see any improvement in traffic and sales. Many times I’ve seen people talk in forums about hiring an SEO, seeing no immediate results and feeling “ripped off”. While it’s certainly true in some cases, in other cases the person or company actually did positive things for your site, and it took a while to kick in. It can take days, months or even years for the effects to be seen, so be patient. Content has to be spidered, links have to be built and indexed, and the major search engines do this at their own pace. While there are anomalies here and there, for the most part top rankings come with time.

There may not be a crowd of people waiting to find you.

This has been the hardest point for me to sell to a customer, and something I’ve personally been involved in before. Let’s say your business sells webkinz. If I work hard, and get you ranked up high, you’ll get thousands of new customers a day, because webkinz are hot. There are 7 million people a day searching for webkinz of some type. This is a hot term, and will get a lot of traffic (and will also have a lot of competition). But what if your business sells heating elements for clothes dryers? If I manage to get you a top spot, should you expect 7 million people a day? Of course not, in fact around 1,900 people a day search for this, and at best you can expect 10-20% of those people if you have a number one spot for it. Then, you have to convert those 190-300 visitors into sales. It may not yield the results you were expecting. That’s why you need to analyze your business, and your market. Are a lot of people searching for your product?

SEO is not always the answer.


I may get rotten tomatoes thrown at me, but there are times where you shouldn’t hire an SEO. If you are a small business that runs on a shoestring, and you have a small market, and an extremely limited niche market, it may not make sense to pay thousands for some top SEO company to get you a ranking. You may be better off grabbing a copy of SEO for dummies (which is actually a decent book for beginners) and seeing what you can learn on your own. Another option is, finding an SEO that’s “creative” enough to find other search terms and streams for your business. The final word on this is, don’t expect too much but make the best of what you can get. I have worked with several companies who were fully aware that only 300 people a day were searching for their product, but wanted to dominate the listings anyway for branding purposes. As a business owner this is your choice to make.

Ask up front


If you’re hiring an SEO, ask up front what they are planning to do, and what it’s going to cost. Make them go into detail. If they are concerned with trade secrets you may have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. But ask them specifically “what are you going to be doing to get these ranks”. And do a little research. If they say they are going to buy 1000 links from various sites, look up some things on google, or SEO forums to see what ramifications this method has. Ask the SEO for this information, and if they aren’t totally up front and honest with you, don’t hire them. I tell my customers exactly what I’m going to do, and why I do it, if they are concerned. Transparency is key, if they are trying to hide it from you it might be something sinister. Note: Don’t ever let a company tell you they can guarantee rankings. Nobody but Google can guarantee you a spot. Keep that in mind when talking to your sales person.

Ask about their rankings.


Ask them what rankings their company has. Check on them, and see how well they do for SEO. Because after all, what kind of SEO company wouldn’t employ their own tactics for themselves? Presently my website sits at the number one spot for “Portland SEO” on the big three, and has for quite a while. But am I the busiest SEO in Portland, Oregon? Not by a long shot. There are companies who are doing 10 times the amount of business I am, and they are nowhere to be found in the search engines. They employ traveling salesmen and cold calling to sell their product to hundreds of customers. Think about that for a second. If they are so great at SEO, how come they aren’t able to squash the rankings of a “little guy” like me? Why do they spend so much money on print ads and telemarketing? I’ll leave that up to you to decide. Would you hire a painting business who had a building that looks like it was painted by a group of preschoolers? If the answer is no, then don’t hire an SEO person or company who isn’t able to get their own site in the rankings (without paying for google ads).

Understand the Process


I can definitely sympathize with the business owner who doesn’t have time to learn SEO. You’re a business owner, a lawyer, insurance agent or painter. You’re not a marketer or computer programmer, and that’s why you hire an SEO. If you had the time, you’d do it yourself but that would take away from your own role. I have heard this from customers before, and I understand completely. However, knowledge is power. The more you understand what’s going on, the more you can control and contribute to your own site’s success. Browse through some SEO forums or websites in your spare time, or pick up a book on it. You can still hire an SEO but at least you’ll have a better understanding of what they’re doing, and maybe even be able to pitch in some valuable ideas. Who knows your own business better than you?

Be prepared to contribute


In a perfect world, you would be able to hire and SEO, throw them a small amount of pay and sit back and watch the numbers go up. But it’s not that easy. Be prepared to contribute and help out. Make sure your SEO knows everything you know about your customers, your business, and your market. The standard marketing rules apply here. Know your product, why it’s great and how it helps people. Know what makes you stand out from the competion, and know who you’re selling to. Then turn that information into power for the person doing SEO for you. Bounce ideas off them, answer their questions and help them out. You’ll get a lot more bang for your buck.

Treat SEO like any other service based investment.


To conclude, treat this like any other business investment. Take care to make sure that you are being treated well, and getting the most for your money. Get as much information as you can, and use common sense rules when searching for an SEO. If you can do this, and you get the right company or person you will go far and grow your business. Good luck to you all.

SEO – Why You Need it

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is popularly known as, is not something new nowadays.

Basically, if you want your online business to be successful, it’s a good idea to optimize your website on a regular basis to make sure it’s got a good position in the Web’s top search engines.

Now, what in the world is this SEO?

Thankfully, most of us here, know what it is, but for those who came in late… SEO stands for search-engine-optimization. Now in technical terminology, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. (Thanks wiki !)

So in other words SEO means if you trying to optimize your site for the search engines, you are basically optimizing your page for those keywords for which you want a high page ranking. Basically, in order to maintain your page-rank, you have to keep on top of what’s happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your page rank yesterday may be meaningless tomorrow!

Search engines analyze title tags, image tags, link structure, directory structure, keyword density, prominence, and proximity, total words, total words in specific areas, alt tags, input tags, word repetitions, comment lines, domain name, directory name, filename, etc. The list is endless…..Moreover, to complicate things further, each engine has it’s own unique way of ranking pages, so you need to create different pages to exactly match the criteria of each one.

So, do you have to use SEO?

The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need Search Engine Optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

For the past few years, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to, or the product or information they need. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. So you basically need to get it done right. In other words, you need an expert…

Now once again why do we need to pay for SEO, when we can do it ourselves?
When you get online, you would want people to visit your blog and for this you will need traffic and for that you need Search Engine Optimization. Now, although SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your site, it costs aplenty, unless you are skilled in it. Likewise, maximizing the benefits of an optimized website will also yield lots of earnings for the marketer.

It is not that people cannot make money from the net; it is because people can’t get traffic to their site. This is mainly because one of the common mistakes in generating traffic which we all tend to make is the method of how we generate traffic. The biggest mistake here is that you are not focusing on generating traffic, but instead, you’ve tried almost every method out there that can supposedly increase the traffic to your site.

If we adopt a pattern, that is to say, the first day, you try and find more links for better SEO, then the next day, you try and generate traffic with article marketing and the following day you try obtaining with CPC advertising – then the chances of getting traffic are much better.

Basically, if you want your online business to be successful, it’s a good idea to optimize your site on a regular basis to make sure it’s got a good position in the web’s top search engines. However, in order to maintain your page rank, you have to keep on top of what’s happening in the rapidly changing search engine industry. The rules that affected your page rank yesterday may be useless tomorrow!

With the rapid growth of the Internet, it is no doubt why Search Engine Optimization has become one of the hottest topics within Internet marketing. The amount of daily search engine traffic is staggering, and for an individual who is thinking of marketing their products or services online, the Internet can be a virtually limitless gold mine of potential customers.

However, to reach these customers you will need to position yourself on those same search engines that so many people are using daily looking for your services or products. When queried, a search engine will reveal all of the sites that it has in its database about a particular subject or product. If your site happens to fall into the requested search category, this is called your site or page ranking [PR].

However, and as mentioned earlier, usually only the first few (top 10) ranked websites get to reap the sweet fruit of victory over their competition.

To make matters worse, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not something new nowadays. In other words, the search engine industry is continually evolving. You need to know which of the major “players” is powering the smaller search engines if you want to know where you should focus your optimization efforts.

In order to achieve this, you need to create multiple streams of traffic for your site. Settling for one source of traffic is simply not enough for most small to mid-size sites, or home-based business sites. Considering the competition most people experience with search engines, not to mention the ever-increasing trend towards ‘pay for inclusion’ with the major search engines, it can be a real challenge to get decent traffic from search engines.

Google is still extremely powerful with Yahoo! a close runner-up and MSN still a distant but threatening third. It must be also noted that many of the smaller search engines plus some paid listings are still powered by Yahoo and Google

Before you can actually begin to start optimizing a site, you must understand how search engines and their robots work. This information will give you a head start on the process of building an optimized web site.

Almost daily, we meet web designers who do not truly understand the function of search engines. This usually results in poorly developed sites in regards to search engine placement that usually disappear. Sure, anyone can build a site with a little practice. However, knowing how search engines work and building a site that meets its ever changing ranking criteria and also achieves top ranking results for key search terms, is quite different.

There presently exist two types of major search engines, robot-indexed and human-indexed. It is important to understand the differences between the two because the way they index pages will dramatically affect your sites position within them. The main idea of web site optimization is about getting ranked on search engines. So, it has nothing to do with how fancy your web site looks or getting ranked in the last few pages. This is where the page rank plays an important part for which SEO is an important criterion.

Obviously it is important to have a practical and easy navigation system and favorable looks, so that you can maintain the visitors you receive form the search engines, but those all come to play after the page rank.

About 95% of the search engines on the Internet are self-indexing or spider / robot indexed. The other 5% are human indexed and are usually referred to as directories. At this point, the important point to learn is that human indexed search engines cannot be manipulated and optimized for, as freely as a spider index search engine can. The good news is that with the advancements in the robot indexed search engines and their algorithms, they are getting closer and closer to human indexed search engines.

Search engines will simply keep on producing traffic forever once your site has been indexed. The problem is getting a good placement (first page) on good keywords and gets lots of searches. This is not always easy, especially if you are in a competitive field. Even if you have a poor search engine placement, you will still get some traffic. Search engines frequently change the algorithms they use for page ranks and for ranking sites. They don’t want unscrupulous site owners manipulating their indexing methods in order to get high rankings. By doing so, they damage the integrity of free search!

Regardless of how poorly the site has been optimized, the domain name (URL) will be indexed in most search engines and in almost every case; search engines will be able to return a web site address when asked. This means that if you were to go to a major search engine and type in your site name, you will probably see it right on top of that search engines results. Don’t be deceived by this type of search engine response as search engines categorize sites based on keywords, and visitors search for sites using keywords not the site URL.

Bottom line, most search engines will be able to return the correct URL address for any site if asked to, provided the site was indexed by them. This does not mean that the site is ranking well.

Once again, if someone searches for your domain name, it should pop right up on most search engines.

In fact, if this does not happen, that means your Internet presence has some fundamental deficiencies. To be successfully ranked on a search engine means your web site must achieve a favorable position over others based on a scale such as the keyword used for the search.

As mentioned earlier, the search engine industry is continually evolving and it is difficult to put the entire process into one article. It would take a couple of pages to go about each phase and for those interested in hard-core SEO, it is better to get hold of a book or a much more detailed article source.

Basically, just use the above to get a brief idea on how and where you should focus your efforts on Search Engine Optimization.

 

Seo Elite- The Pros & Cons…A Review.

Are you interested in getting a higher rank in the search engines & generating more search engine traffic?

Then, you may be interested in checking out the world\’s #1 SEO Elite Software…

SEO Elite…!

I have owned SEO Elite since 2005 & use it to get more search engine traffic to my websites. It can be a very powerful tool in helping you rank higher.

Here is an independent review of the pros & cons of SEO Elite:

Cons:

1. At first, the software can be a little difficult to figure out. There are 8 different project types & you must figure out which one is best for your site.

2. The training is a little limited. The real power of the software you can either spend hours figuring out or look for bonus training in order to harness the full power of seo elite.

3. It can be a little slow at times. If the project is small, consider adjusting the search engine courtesy to make it run faster.

4. SEO Elite is constantly is coming out with new versions. Roughly 1 every 3 months it looks like. So, occasionally you have to download the new version.

5. Some of the steps in the sub project types are complex & take a lot of steps to implement properly.

Pros:

1. SEO Elite VERY powerful at finding linking partners IF you are very specific in the terms you use.

2. It\’s also great for \’spying\’ on competitors. You can figure out where your competitors are getting their traffic using project type #1.

3. Once you get the hang of the specific project types, it\’s very easy to use. The reward is worth the work.

4. SEO Elite is very versatile. It has 8 different project types to use (and many sub project types) all in one software package.

5. Seoelite is from a quality publisher- Brad Callen. This is not a fly by night operation. The updating mentioned above is necessary to keep the software working…

This is a nice change compared to other software vendors.

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