Relax! You’re not alone… and we can help!
What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Organic SEO is all about getting your website to rank higher in the natural or “organic”– as opposed to paid – search engine listings.
The higher your website ranks, the more people – “traffic” – will visit it.
You see, chances are that hundreds – maybe thousands – of people are searching on keywords that relate to your website. And, as powerful as the paid listings are, the vast majority click on the organic search results.
So if you’re serious about selling your products and services on the Internet, you simply must commit to SEO. Otherwise you’ll be ignoring – or should I say, being ignored by – the vast majority of your target market.
Ultimately, SEO comes down to:
1. Using relevant keywords to describe your products and services. This means words that are visible on the page itself (known as copy) as well as words inside the html page (meta tags, links etc.).
2. Designing your website to be “search engine friendly”. This means structuring your website in such a way that a spider can easily crawl (find) your pages.
3. Taking advantage of a range of other factors that influence SEO including, but certainly not limited to:
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Links from popular, credible and relevant websites (newspapers, government, blogs etc.)
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The age and keywords used in your domain name
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Your website content.
(Although... if you don’t have your website in order, these things are practically useless!)
Can We Give You a No. 1 Position?
Now… you’re not going to like this… but the fact is:
Nobody can guarantee you a No.1 position.
Seriously.
Anyone who says, or implies, that they can give you a No.1 position is trying to rip you off or is living in “fantasyland”.
Why?
Because the search engines are constantly revising and modifying how they rank websites. In some cases, these changes don’t appear to change the order of the search results. Sometimes they result in a minor re-shuffle of the search results. And sometimes they cause websites to drop off the search results pages altogether!
What’s more, the search engines keep their algorithms – the mathematical methods by which they rank search results – top secret.
So how can anyone who doesn’t own or run the search engines guarantee you a top spot?
They can’t.
Oh, and by the way, we’re talking about getting a number 1 position for keywords that people actually search on and that are relevant to your website – not made-up words that nobody searches on and that are entirely irrelevant!
Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s what we can do:
We can use SEO to ensure your website generates the maximum volume of quality traffic possible.
That means people who are likely to buy your products and services.
So How Do We Do It?
Many people think that SEO is highly technical… beyond the understanding of an average person… or some sort of “mysterious art form” that you need to learn from the ancient mystics in the mountains of Tibet.
Well, we have some good news – you, yes you, can understand the principles of SEO.
In fact, I’m going to explain exactly how we optimize websites for the search engines right now.
There are eight (8) steps:
Step 1: Business Analysis
This step won’t involve much more than consulting with you and/or your marketing staff and reviewing any key documentation you can give us. But learning about your target market, positioning, unique selling proposition (USP) and products and services will be imperative for us to map out the keywords and copy for SEO.
Step 2: Baseline Reading
This is an essential step in developing an effective SEO strategy - one that many SEO companies conveniently overlook!
Basically, we examine your website by looking at:
1. How much traffic your website is currently receiving from the major search engines;
2. The number of “authority” of back-links to your website (back-links are links to your website from other websites); and
3. Where your website ranks on specific keywords.
This step usually involves us analyzing your existing log files and querying search engines based on relevant keywords found in your webpages (meta tags).
If you don’t have website logs or don’t even know what log files are, don’t worry – your ISP or webmaster will know and will probably already have them set up. If not, we can track this down for you.
Step 3: Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis
This step involves researching appropriate keywords for each of your webpages.
While we will review your existing meta tags, we’ll also use several keyword tools to find the most relevant keywords for your website. We will also use competitive analysis tools to analyze your competition. Our aim is to come up with the best possible keywords - keywords that:
1. Are highly specific and relevant to your product or service.
2. Are relatively popular – searched on by enough prospects.
3. Don’t have too much competition – such that it’s extremely difficult to get a top ranking in the first couple of pages of search results.
By the end of this step we’ll have a set of keywords for each webpage on your site.
Step 4: Search Engine Compatibility Analysis
This is the alleged “secret science” behind SEO . We’ll focus on three key areas of your website:
1. Keyword prominence and frequency
2. Website structure
3. Webpage continuity
Here are just some of the things we’ll review in each category:
Keyword Prominence and Frequency
To save you dropping off to sleep, let me simplify this as much as possible…
Basically, search engines rank websites higher if they have relevant keywords that are used in different combinations on a webpage. (There are lots of statistics and algorithms behind this, but this is about as close to a “plain English explanation” as I can get!)
Specifically, keyword prominence measures the degree to which a keyword appears at the start of a particular area. For example, are your important keywords towards the start or end of a paragraph?
Keyword frequency measures how often a keyword appears on a page or in an area of a page.
So… using a number of tools to automate the analysis, we consider how prominent and frequent your keywords are in the following sections of your webpages:
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Title
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Meta keywords
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Meta descriptions
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Headings
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Link text
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Hyperlink URL’s
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ALT tags
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Comments
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Body text
The results of this analysis will indicate the degree to which the keyword prominence and frequency on a given webpage should be increased.
Website Structure
If a search engine can’t find or read your webpages, then it’s not going to index them!
To ensure that the search engines can read your webpages, your website must be correctly structured. In particular, you want to get these three aspects of your structure right: site maps, robots.txt and html validation.
A site map is essentially a directory of links on your website designed for search engines. If you don’t have one, then search engine spiders may not be aware of all your webpages. As such, your site may not be receiving as many visitors as it should be receiving.
Robots.txt is a file on your web server that tells the search engines what they can and can’t index. Again, if you don’t have one, or it isn’t set up correctly, then your website could be at a disadvantage.
The impact of HTML validation in SEO is largely dependent on the quality of your website code. If your website designer used an industry standard design tool then chances are that there will be few, if any errors. However, if your site has been edited manually or designed without a tool then it’s likely to be filled with errors.
The theory behind HTML validation is that if there are errors in the HTML code of your webpage then the search engines won’t be able to read it properly – and consequently your website won’t be properly indexed.
Webpage Continuity
As your website evolves and changes over time, some of your old webpages may no longer exist.
Yet, they may still be listed in a given search engine. As a result, if a user visits that search engine and clicks on a link to a no-longer-existent webpage, they’ll end up at an error page on your website.
What do you do when you see an error? Click off it – never to return, right?
Well, that’s exactly what search engines do too! Only they also tend to drop the pages from their index, causing you to lose a valuable source of web traffic.
So, to see if this is happening – and advise on how to avoid the loss in traffic – we also review your website for:
Recommendations
Based on our analysis of our search engine compatibility analysis we’ll develop a set of recommendations about how to make your website more search engine compatible in order to maximize your traffic.
Step 5: Webpage Implementation
It’s crunch time!
We’ve come up with the best possible keywords and recommended changes to optimize your webpages. Now it’s time to put the theory into practice!
So, with your agreement, we’ll modify each of your webpages in line our recommendations.
Of course, if you have a design firm or webmaster who manages your website, you can also ask them to implement our recommendations.
Step 6: Search Engine / Directory Submission and Back-Link Strategy
Now that we’ve modified your website we need to attract the search engine spiders to come back and index it again.
Or if your site hasn’t been indexed, we need to attract them to your website for the first time.
This involves resubmitting or – if your website hasn’t yet been indexed – submitting your website to the major search engines and directories.
We will submit your website manually, rather than use any automated tools. We do this because many search engines – notably Google – explicitly disapprove of automated submission methods.
Hey, if you want a high ranking, you don’t bite the hand that feeds!
By the same token, we won’t just blindly resubmit all your webpages.
The baseline analysis in Step 2 will show us which webpages rank well, and for what specific keywords. If you are ranking well for one specific keyword then it’s usually best not to resubmit that particular page.
Typically, search engines can take between a week and three months to re-index your website… so patience is a virtue here!
On top of that, we'll recommend strategies to establish and/or increase the number of authoritative back-links to your website. Nowadays, many in the SEO industry believe that back-links from authoritative websites (websites the search engines regard as highly regarded and relevant in the context of specific keywords) have the most amount of influence over your search engine ranking than the content and structure of your webpages.
This means that you should ideally have a concerted, ongoing strategy for obtaining such back-links. This may include submitting articles to highly regarded article directories, issuing press releases and obtaining coverage in news websites, or obtaining links from other relevant and highly regarded websites in your industry. As such, we will develop and recommend a comprehensive strategy for acquiring authoritative back-links to your website on an ongoing basis.
Step 7: Second Reading
After completing Steps 1 to 6, and the search engines have re-indexed your website, we'll take a second reading.
Essentially, we'll repeat what we did in Step 1. However, this time there should be a targeted increase in search engine traffic. Depending on what you’ve asked us to do, you should see increased traffic from specific keywords, re-indexed webpages, and from your search engine listing.
Now your SEO reading will change over time. As I mentioned above, the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms for listing sites. However, the changes are unlikely to be the same for all the search engines, and the impact should generally be negligible… As long as we perform Step 8…
Step 8: SEO Management
Step 8 is simply ensuring that your site continues to generate the maximum possible quality traffic from your search engine listings.
We’ll keep abreast of changes introduced by the search engines… as well as changes to your business, products and services. If necessary, we’ll make – or, if you prefer, recommend – adjustments to your SEO strategy.
Moreover, we'll continue to actively manage and improve your search engine rankings by, among other things, recommending the modification and/or addition of certain content to your website and by implementing strategies to acquire authoritative back-links to your webpages.
That’s it! All you need do is sit back, relax and watch the traffic pour into your website.
So What Does It Cost?
We’ll quote a project fee based on your individual requirements, but here’s a guide to how we structure our fees, and the minimum you can expect to invest:
Search Engine Optimization
(All prices in USD)
For questions about pricing, see our FAQ. |
SEO program preparation and setup (steps 1-7): from $2,400
SEO program management (step 8): from $400 per month
Total: from $2,800 |
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| *Mon – Fri, 9 am – 5.30 pm, Australian EST (i.e. Melbourne time). To check what time this is for you, visit: Time and Date |
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