Thursday, September 20, 2012

SEO Company Baton Rouge

Local SEO and Organic SEO for Baton Rouge

Published on by: James H. Hobson

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the umbrella term for the various tasks and elements that can be leveraged to improve search engine rankings. SEO work can be done for organic rankings (main search results) and for local search listings. Unlike money spent on short life print advertising, SEO can have a lasting benefit that generates more sales.

While this article is written around Baton Rouge SEO, the information here is relevant to any city that has been experiencing rapid population growth.

Unique SEO Needs For Baton Rouge

Since the post-Katrina floods the population of Baton Rouge has skyrocketed. For a majority of businesses this means a substantial opportunity to serve more customers. This presents a combination of challenges and opportunities that Baton Rouge businesses have never experienced.

The geographical size of the city has greatly expanded. A majority of these potential customers are not necessarily close to your business. The new residents are not familiar with the established businesses in the area. The new residents outside of your immediate area are very likely to be searching online for what they need. If your business has strong, competitive search engine rankings you can engage these new potential customers all across the greater Baton Rouge area.

Local SEO

The term "local" refers to online listings such as a Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and citation listings on local search oriented directory sites. Local listings are blended into the organic search results. If your business thrives on local customers then you need a strong local search presence.

Local SEO services are how to improve online visibility. To have high local search ranking you have to do much more than just "fill in your information". There are technical tricks and methodologies that are essential for improving the value and relevance of your local search business listings.

Organic SEO

The term "organic ranking" or "organic placement" refers to the websites shown in the main area of search engine results pages (SERP's). SEO best practices are continually evolving. Understanding how to rise in organic rankings and not get penalized by search engine algorithms requires knowing specific current requirements. Desperation can drive some to deliberately apply black-hat SEO to achieve high rankings, and some people innocently do harm to their site when attemping to optimize their site. SEO work, especially technical website optimization, must be done using only best practices.

SEO Best Practices

SEO best practices change often in order to compliment search engine algorithm changes. Buying books on SEO provide information that is probably at least one or more years old, thus outdated. Online forums and blogs may give poor quality information meaning that trusting advice online is not always a good idea. Because of the complexity of SEO in 2012 the best option is to hire a SEO company.

The on-page SEO items include:

  • Create unique page titles, descriptions and keywords meta data. The use of a keywords tag is not necessarily used by all search engines but many high ranking sites still include this tag.

  • Streamline your code and content to affect fast page load times. Ideally this would be under half a second.
  • Do not use text copied from other online content. This will be viewed as "duplicate content" which is bad, and it is an illegal practice which can cause your site to be dropped from search results. You could be sued by the content owner under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
  • Always use "alt tags" and "title attributes" that contain accurate information, and do not use these for keyword stuffing.
  • Remove site-wide links and utilize rel nofollow on outbound links.
  • Use a logical heirarchy for structuring content, and strategically plan your linking.

The off-page SEO items include:

  • Building backlinks from sites that are relevant to your business.
  • Establish Google Authorship and use it.
  • Create social media pages and link to them from your site.
  • NOT using services that sell links,offer link wheels or blog networks.

SEO Prices and Timeframes

SEO prices vary depending upon the amount of work to be done. The level to which your competiton has optimized their site will largely influence the timeframe to get first page rankings can be a few months to several years. The good news is that if you hire a good SEO company you are almost assured of receiving a multifold ROI. It's important to implement SEO as quickly as possible to get the bottom line benefits and prevent losing business to competitors.

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