Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of engineering a website with the goal of ranking as high as possible in search engine results for a given set of keywords. Choosing the right company to perform this service is now more important than ever. Long gone are the days when you can simply load your site with keywords and call it optimized. In fact, most modern search engines will penalize websites that do this with lower rankings, or in worst cases, complete removal from search results. A good, effective SEO campaign requires a dedicated, long-term investment of time and effort. Our understanding of the industry and of what it takes to get ranked high and our fanatical dedication to your success makes us an ideal choice to spearhead your SEO campaign.

How We Can Help...

Let's start by telling you what we won't do (this may sound odd, but bear with us):

1. indiscriminately flood your site with repetitive keywords - even irrelevant ones;
2. fill your site with a plethora of invisible text that is laden with keywords;
3. fill your site with repetitive keyword-laden pages that cannot be found by real users through the site's navigation;
4. create a ton of dummy sites that either refer to you, talk about you, or just outright redirect to your main website;
5. register numerous domain names that point to your main site for the sole purpose of having them indexed by search engines;
6. re-engineer your site to serve one set of content to search engine spiders and a completely different set of content to users;
7. participate in link-sharing schemes around the Internet in the hopes that search engines will index the links to your site and improve your ranking;

By now you might be asking yourself, "Well, why the heck not? All of these are everything I've ever heard about good search optimization". We wouldn't blame you for thinking this way, as there are actually a great many web developers and web marketers out there that believe the above list is the recipe for good SEO. But, believe it or not, all of the things listed above are widely recognized as unethical practices and they can actually only hurt your ranking on search engines - or worse, get you banned entirely! The first one is a technique known as "keyword stuffing", and it is the very reason almost all modern search engines now completely ignore any keywords META tag in the HTML source code of your site. Numbers 2 through 5 are various forms of a shady technique called "spamdexing". Number 6 has a name too - it's a technique known as "cloaking". And the last one is probably most commonly known as "link spam". Link spam is based on the idea that a search engine spider, while on other websites, follows links to your website, thus contributing to a higher ranking for your site. There is a fragment of truth here. It's based on a primitive and flawed understanding of Google's mysterious "PageRank" technology. The practice of link spam was only somewhat effective in the early days of Google. Google quickly adapted to this and link spam is now nothing more than a waste of time.

There are also a great many developers and web marketers today that recognize the above list as unethical, but still use it as the model for their SEO techniques. They'll stretch the rules as much as possible, or worse, knowing that search indexes aren't compiled by humans, will devise tactics to trick spiders into thinking unethical techniques are ethical techniques. In our experience, these sites are obvious and are still the most irrelevant and poorest quality listings in search results. For this reason, it's only a matter of time before Google and other search engines update their algorithms and filter those sites out too.

Our approach is different, but rediculously simple. We understand the philosophy of what makes a website deserving of high ranking and work fully and completely within the guidelines set forth by the search engines themselves for legitimate and respectable SEO practices. We have found that this ALWAYS produces the highest-quality results, and coincidentally, also results in a higher-quality, more information-rich website that is truly deserving of the rankings it achieves.

The techniques we employ for you all depends on how serious you are about the success of your website.

It is important to bear in mind that:

• It is impossible to guarantee a specific ranking for a given set of keywords. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're either lying, don't know what they're doing, or are working to have you ranked for a keyword so esoteric or unique that you'd probably achieve a high ranking for it anyway, perhaps even without any of their optimization "techniques".
• It is similarly impossible to guarantee the same ranking across multiple search engines. Search sites that build their own indexes are fiercely competitive with each other and their algorithms are closely guarded secrets. They all work differently to index the Internet. However, most modern search engines do appear to be following Google's lead in the philosophy for what makes a good website worthy of a high ranking.
• It is unrealistic to ever expect a ranking that you do not deserve - or a ranking of any kind for any keyword that is not closely relevant to your website. Search engines will mercilessly penalize websites attempting to achieve results for irrelevant keywords. The reason is simple. To not do so would mean the eventual devaluation of their search engine and its ability to give users high-quality, relevant results for their queries.
• A good SEO campaign and a high quality, information-rich website go hand-in-hand.
• A good SEO campaign is an ongoing, long-term process requiring a continuing effort to keep the website in peak condition. The moment you call your SEO campaign finished is the moment the website starts dropping in search results... Even letting it go for a couple months can result in at least as much time required to get your site back to where it was.
• An effective SEO campaign can take anywhere from a few weeks to a several months to start producing results. This is unavoidable - even if we submit your site manually to Google (which we will do), it all depends on when Google's spider, "GoogleBot" gets around to paying your site a visit. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to make it visit any sooner.
• The more saturated your industry is, the more difficult an SEO campaign will be, and the longer it will take to achieve results.

We can optimize any website, whether we develped it or not. It doesn't matter if it is all HTML or all Flash. It is cheaper if we developed your website, as basic optimization and priming your site for a dedicated SEO campaign are a natural part of our web development services, but we can work with any website.

Our Process

We have a simple, 3-phase process:

1. Analysis.
   1. As we briefly mentioned above, if we developed your site, Phase I would already be complete as a natural and automatic part of developing your website. If we didn't develop your site, the amount of effort involved depends on the size and complexity of your website.
   2. First, we'll work with you to determine the most appropriate keywords for your website. Many web developers and marketing firms go the easy route and focus on your name or other terms that will require your visitors to actually know who you are before they do a search. This will not help you in the least. We'll determine the most logical keywords that would be used by an average person that is trying to find the type of service you offer. This is how most people that don't already know who you are will find you online.
   3. Next, we study your website. In most cases, we'll need FTP access to your site so we can download all of the data and examine it thoroughly on one of our local servers, including any server-side code like PHP, ASP, etc. Things we'll be looking for include, but are not limited to:
      • anything employed by your original developers that may sabotage your ranking in searches, perhaps misguided attempts at SEO...
      • proper coding- errors in your code may prevent spiders from properly accessing and indexing your site...
      • overall usability and anything else that may prevent your site from being properly indexed...
      • here's where we'll also determine anything else that will benefit your SEO campaign.
   4. Based on our detailed analysis, we'll make recommendations to you on changes to your website that will be crucial to a successful SEO campaign.
   
   
2. Implementation. Here we begin with making all recommended changes to your site that you've approved. We'll also use as many other ethical techniques we have at our disposal to improve your rankings. And finally, we ensure your site is queued for indexing by manually submitting to all major search engines.
   
   
3. Active Monitoring & Maintenance. Any successful SEO campaign is a long-term commitment. Once a result is achieved, it needs to be maintained to avoid losing what progress that has been made. We'll also use advanced webmaster tools provided by the search engines themselves to give us first-hand data about how your website is performing. This combined with other information, tools and techniques at our disposal will allow us to continue making strategic tweaks wherever and whenever needed to continue enhancing your ranking in searches.

Are You Ready?

If you're as serious about your success as we are, click here for a free project quote.