Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services
Search is an incredibly powerful medium. In no other advertising arena are you able to get in front of people when they are looking for what you have to offer. The sheer power of Google as the dominant force on the web is a testament to the power of search. Quite simply, search is how people find things.
Search engine optimization is about making your site friendly to both users and to search engines. The more friendly your site is for users, the more friendly your site will be to search engines. It is fundamentally that simple, but there are many things that need to be done correctly for this to happen.
Our SEO process begins with gaining a thorough understanding of your business and what you hope to achieve with your SEO program. Depending on how competitive your niche is and what your goals are, SEO can be as simple as changing some of the code on your web pages or as complex as a lengthy campaign to develop a large amount of new content and build trusted inbound links from other sites.
SEO is not a single activity. It is the culmination of a number of factors that over time are designed to build trust and authority into your site so that the search engine algorithms determine that is more relevant and useful to users than the vast majority of the other sites in your space.
There are no shortcuts to SEO. In some small niche and local markets, getting good exposure can be as simple as knowing more than your competitors. In other markets, getting your site to rank well can take months and even years. In this way, SEO is no different than any other business.
Listed below is our usual menu of SEO services. If you are interested in working with us, please fill out the form located on our Get A Quote page and we will contact you.
Initial Site Review & SEO Action Plan Creation
We first like to do an initial site review where we analyze your existing site and get a general feel for your market. In conjunction with the review, we also schedule an initial client call to get a firm grasp of your goals and objectives with regard to your business and how SEO fits in to that.
Taking our initial site assessment and your goals into account, we then get to work in doing an in-depth review of your online space, how many competitors there are, and what we believe it will take in terms of time and work to get you where you want to be.
We then create a detailed SEO action plan with a list of activities and milestones we feel will be needed for you to accomplish your goals. If our estimates exceed your budget, we will try to accommodate you with the best course of action given your budget.
While there are a range of activities that fall under the umbrella of SEO, the main areas that need to be addressed are as follows:
Keyword Research & Selection
Keyword research is the essential foundation of any successful SEO campaign and is one of the areas where many people often go wrong with their SEO efforts. Get your keywords wrong and even the best SEO efforts are wasted.
Quite often, the keywords people think are the correct ones are way too general or irrelevant. To rank well for a general term such as a one word query or a general idea is to undertake a long and difficult task that is most often not even the most appropriate keyword. Conversely, ranking for a keyword that no one is searching for is just as harmful to your SEO efforts. It is necessary to find the “sweet spot” keywords where there is a balance between the keywords that most accurately fit your product or service and that people are actually searching for.
Effective keyword research means coming up with a long list of possible keyword candidates and weighing them based on their relevance and search volume. By doing this, it is possible to determine the most appropriate keywords for your given niche and all of the relevant variations of your keywords that someone might use to find what you have to offer.
On-Page Optimization Services
On-page optimization involves seeding the pages of your web site with your target keywords in the appropriate places within the HTML code of your page. Generally, the more specific and granular each page expresses a single keyword idea, the better chance that page will have to rank well for a given term.
Because keyword granularity is so important, we may sometimes recommend that you add additional pages to your site for important terms or in some cases redesign your site altogether. Ideally, SEO considerations should play a part in the initial design and planning of the site. If we do make the recommendation that your site should be redesigned, we can assist you with the planning, design, and coding of your site as well.
If your site is brand new, we will also formally submit your site with an XML sitemap to the major search engines. This ensures that your site has the best possible chance of being indexed correctly.
If you do not have an existing web analytics program, we will also install Google Analytics, the free web analytics program made available by Google which is absolutely essential to tracking your SEO program.
Content Creation & SEO Copywriting
Content is how you build authority in your niche and create a positive user experience. Content can take many forms but the content most important to search engines is text. Search engines can only read and understand text, not pictures, video, or Flash movies. Images and video can enhance the user experience, but it is text that drives the SEO process.
If you’re serious about SEO, then you need to be serious about content. There are many important aspects to content creation that help you address. Our team of experienced SEO copywriters will help you develop content that is relevant and useful to both search engines and visitors to your site.
Off-Page Optimization & Link Building
Inbound links from other sites or backlinks are highly important when you are targeting competitive niches. Backlinks are the foundation of Google’s PageRank algorithm and are at the very core of how Google determines whether a site is trustworthy and has authority for a given niche.
If you are in a competitive field, plan on doing a lot of link building to rank for your core keywords. Link building is also the most time-consuming part of SEO and can take many months depending on how competitive your niche is. In truth, link building never really ends.
Link building is also a highly strategic activity that demands creative and novel approaches to getting people’s attention and getting them to link to you. The best link building strategies are natural and hard to duplicate so that your position in the search rankings remains solid when Google changes their algorithm from time to time to combat webspam.