Baton Rouge Web Design

2013 Strategic Website Redesign

Published on December 20, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

• Scoop.it
• 

The beginning of the new year is when many business owners begin to think about a website redesign process. The most common objectives are increasing leads, improving search engine ranking and simply updating the look and feel of their website.

We applaud any business owner who seeks to be on the leading edge of internet marketing. This article will present some of the important considerations in 2013 to maximize the opportunities available when doing a website redesign and redeployment.

Website Redesign Tips in 2013

Upgrade to HTML5

HTML5 is the most current specification for coding a traditional (desktop) website. HTML5 enables your web design company to deliver more features with less work. Using HTML5 means that your website can utilize tags for video that allows streaming multimedia content directly into a browser, enable the placement of interactive content without Flash or plug-ins, enable better controls and features for forms, and is a huge advantage for employing special utility features.

HTML5 Canvas is a great example of how your redesigned website can deliver a much improved user experience. Rather than use the outdated Flash presentation, the CANVAS element allows you to draw graphs, graphics, games, art, and other visuals right on the web page in real time within the user's browser. HTML5 can really make your site stand out!

Use Responsive Design To Impress

The better customers, people with money to spend, have larger monitors. This means that a new website can easily be built around 25% wider than most sites that are over 5 years old. With responsive web design your website can be made to auto-scale to fill the entire viewing space which maximizes your impact on potential customers.

Rethink Your Marketing

The best performing business websites are far more than a "cool design" with some photos and bland text. Your website should be a strategically crafted marketing tool. Your website should reinforce your brand, influence and persuade prospects, and be ranked where the highest relevant traffic is searching.

A good website design copany shuld never require YOU to write the content copy. Certainly client input is valuable but the text must be refined for search engine optimization, visual presentation, optimal messaging, grammar and the typical behaviors of a website user. Additionally, your site architecture, intra-site linking, interactivity, and inclusion of downloadable content are all powerful marketing components.

A large percentage of local website companies are WordPress template tweakers that lack the business knowledge, professional expertise, and physical resources to create a well planned marketing tool. A review of a website designers portfolio, and an interview to discuss their processes should enable you to find the agency that will give you the most value for your investment.

Get A Mobile Website

It is very common for an entertainment venue, trades service business, or professional practice to soon find that 30% or more of their website traffic uses the mobile website. Without a mobile website your business stands to lose a lot of potential customers.

How is a mobile website any better? Your traditional website may display on a mobile device or smart phone without any noticeable problems but that does not make it a mobile website. A true mobile website design requires a different approach to meet browser requirements and deliver a better user experience. A mobile website auto-scales its size to fit the viewing screen whereas a traditional desktop website must be scrolled around or even pinched to expand the page to a size where the message can be read. A mobile website is coded to deliver the fast load times required by mobile devices, networks and platforms. And a mobile website is designed to leverage smart phone functions such as making your phone number a tap-to-dial feature.

Although the development of some features or functionalities still requires more time and cost, many of the valuable upgrades can be made with the same amount of effort as not using these options. When you're ready to redesign your website you should work with a company that has the knowledge and experience to truly move your site performance to true 2013 standards - and not deliver a rehash of what you had before.

For more information that includes valuable advice from a website redsign consultant you can view and download this free Website Redesign Guide.

SEO Link Building Tips - Anchor Text 2013

Anchor Text vs. Co-Occurrence

Published on December 11, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

• Scoop.it
• 

There is a growing belief among the leading SEO experts that the optimization value from keyword rich anchor text is diminishing. I think we can all agree that the individual personality of each link is usually tailored to affect a specific and targeted ranking. A devaluation of anchor text is a logical step in the progressive efforts being made by search engines to mitigate manipulation of SERPs.

A new observation made by these same SEO experts is that Google’s Phrase Based Indexing capabilities may be placing greater value on overall content specifics. A critical component of phrase based indexing is the ability to associate page content by somewhat averaging the meaning of anchor text. The term for this is co-occurrence, and although this term is new to most SEO companies it has been in play for quite some time.

Although we won't go into the related concept of co-citations it is an area of SEO that any bonafide local SEO company will explore and consider. Co-citation and Co-occurrence are going to be active parts of SEO discussions in 2013.

Anchor Text in 2013

Anchor Text Diversity Is Important

Let me first clarify that every link you acquire should be a the result of tying your great content to places where users would be interested in your information. When these quality linking opportunities are available you would be well served to use diverse wording for the anchor text. First, this keeps your link diversity ratios in scale, and second this is a favorable practice for trending anchor text evaluations.

SEO Experts Speak About Anchor Text Importance

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz

Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea

A very well written article on this subject, which was cited by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, is Not All Anchor Text is Equal which was written by Bill Slawski.

A teaser from this article, and a tidbit to demonstrate the quality of the article is the following pull quote:

The patent includes a number of features associated with a link, and I’ve included a handful that involve which text is actually used within a link, and how they might be analyzed.

• Actual words in the anchor text associated with the link.
• Commerciality of the anchor text associated with the link.
• A topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated.
• A degree to which a topical cluster associated with the source document matches a topical cluster associated with anchor text of a link.

Just as exact match domains have become a detriment for many sites, so may become too many exact match links. And in the end this all comes full circle to what we have known all along - quit gaming the system and simply do things that best serve the user.

What Is SEO ?

The Real Meaning of SEO

Published on November 22, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Even after years of active promotion and implementation business owners and managers continue to misunderstand SEO. SEO, the acronym for search engine optimization, refers to the practices used to affect specific search engine rankings for targeted keywords or phrases. Search engine optimization is recognized by Google as a good and legitimate service however certain techniques are objectionable and unacceptable.

As with any professional service, SEO has both good and bad practitioners. Whether SEO is good or bad is determined by the style of implementation and purpose of its use. A total SEO strategy should include on-page and off-page SEO work. Any work should begin with keyword and competitor research to create an effective strategy.

The Various Ways to Define SEO

As an ethical Atlanta SEO company we work with only legitimate businesses, and therefore seek to place their website for relevant terms. Anyone doing search engine optimization should first and foremost consider the search engine! To this point we strongly recommend becoming familiar with, and adhering to, Google Webmaster Guielines.

SEO - The Laymans Definition

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a generic term for the many methods used to get a website ranked on search engine results pages (SERP's) for specific keywords or search phrases.

It is important to understand that SEO is not a commodity which may be purchased in truly tangible measures. To better understand this term as a consumer, you can think of it as if you were buying home remodeling services. There is a lot that can be done, and each job has its own level of finished quality, time required to complete, and value. SEO work can include specialized website coding, optimizing text or images, link building, content marketing, social media marketing and much more. Each of these areas can be further segmented into specific tasks and needs. All of these tasks can be completed and implemented in varying degrees of quality.

SEO - The Technical Definition

SEO from a technical perspective includes implementing and optimizing code and content elements. This work certainly requires technical coding but also marketing concepts, user preferences and search engine algorithms. While forums and articles can give some technical pointers it takes years of practice and constant study in oder to become an SEO expert. Technical considerations include page load time, block level SEO, using unique page titles and descriptions, alt tags, title attributes and new tools such as Google's tag manager.

SEO - The Marketing Definition

From an internet marketing perspective SEO is the Holy Grail for driving higher volumes of relevant traffic to a website. For the marketing person SEO is a method to get a website ranked and also a process to build branding. To a marketing person this includes content marketing, articles, press releases and distributing white-papers. In a marketing perspective SEO is about implementing brand building content that also improves organic ranking.

Optimizing content for websites and articles includes an understanding on block level SEO, authorship, latent semantic indexing (LSI), and payig attention to word counts, non-spam writing tactics and proper link building methods.

Figure Lie and Liars Figure is a saying I use to alert business owners to some common tricks of unethical hustlers. The person or company working on your ranking should give you progress reports. Typically these reports are a list of keywords where your site is ranked with the actual ranking. Here's where the lies and deception often start. You may be excited about your reports that show a steady increase in ranked terms. You think your SEO company is doing a great job right? Maybe not. Have they shown you the amount of real world search traffic for these terms? Are you ranked for a lot of terms where there is no traffic and that won't generate leads? You need to have a good understanding of what your SEO companies strategy, tactics and goals.

How Search Engines View SEO

Search engines look at SEO in both a good perspective and a bad perspecive. The good perspective holds that ethical internet marketing professionals employ coding, links and content that actually assist a search engine in knowing how to classify and on what SERP's to display a website. The bad perspective is that certain SEO practices may be leveraged in order to manipulate SERP's and thereby provide what may be low quality content.

---

SEO Providers Are Not All Alike

Because consumers do not understand "What is SEO?" or what is required to do quality work, they often rely on price or a slick sales pitch. Because consumers do not understand what they need there are a lot of people who have read forums and blogs enough to speak as though they are knowledgeable. The quality and effectiveness among people offering SEO varies as much as day and night.

There are a LOT of "website designers" and freelancers who pitch SEO simply because they can make some money. A business owner, thnking of SEO as a commodity, can falsely believe they got a great deal because they "got a guy to do our SEO really cheap". Any competitor who hires a legitimate SEO company will slaughter the owner who goes cheap. So, the next question is, "how do you find a good seo company?". Click the following link to learn more about how to hire a good SEO company.

How To Improve Website Ranking

SEO Tips and Essentials for 2013

Published on October 22, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

In 2012 Google's two algorithm bombshells were Panda and Penguin. There were numerous other algorithm changes to adjust and refine search results. Visit this link to see the major Google algorithm changes in 2012. As of this week they addeed the "Top Heavy" penalty and the "Exact Match Domain" penalty. Before 2013 arrives we strongly recommend that website owners make a critical assessment of all of their SEO practices for the past two years, and take a hard look at their SEO providers current understanding of best practices.

Out With The Old, In With The New

The Old: Outdated and Harmful SEO

There is a strong possibility that your company website has at least minor associations with outdated or harmful SEO practices. There are "gray hat SEO" practices that are now going to cause ranking losses, and other practices (of any shade) will lose their influence on search engine results pages (SERPs).

You have a very real problem if you have received a message from Google that is similar to the following:

"Dear site owner or webmaster of https://www._____________________/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results."

The fourth quarter of 2012 is a good time to make a top to bottom review of your site to do a comprehensive SEO overhaul. You definitely want to be proactive in avoiding search engine's algorithm based penalties, and certainly prevent manual actions taken by Google. Proactive website SEO maintenance can only help your site, and will almost certainly mitigate having a gut wrenching surprise drop in rankings.

The New: Ethical and Sustainable SEO

On-Page SEO things to look at are your page titles and descriptions which should be unique to each page, alt tags and title attributes which should be written to help the user and not for keyword stuffing, eliminate sitewide footer links, use a canonical meta tag, limit outbound links, keep ads below the fold on your pages, correct spelling errors, don't use h-tags in a spammy manner, make sure your page load times are ultra fast, use an XML site map, add Schema markup when applicable, eliminate low quality or near duplicate content pages, and focus on branding in your messaging.

There are very specific requirements, standards and implementation methods for all of the aforementioned items. Google searches for any of these topics will lead you to pages with more detailed information.

Another great way to get an evaluation of how well your website desginer has performed is to check your website for technical errors. Because things like the Google code for the +1 button and publisher attribute do not validate, your website probably will not validate.

Even with such unavoidable issues, your website should have no more than 6-8 errors or warnings. You should correct as many deficiencies as possible.

Stepping Up Your Game

You can make substantial forward progress by rebuilding your site as HTML5 complaint and get superb enhancements by utilizing CSS3 in your design. An HTML5 site with CSS3 delievrs better performance and alleviates some code deficiencies associated with older doc types. The really top tier website designers offer responsive website designs that resize to fit various browsers using a liquid or elastic layout. Can your web designer do this?

Related SEO Considerations

You need to have these tools in place and use them to improve your SEO efforts. Google Analytics provides key user metrics and can provide valuable insights on ways to improve your website. Webmaster Tools enables you to verify your site, confirm technical settings and manage your site within Google standards. If your current SEO provider has not done this for you it's time to find a new SEO company.

If you're uncertain about the state of your website's SEO feel free to leave a question or comment. We welcome phone inquiries about any SEO matters.

Inbound Marketing - Content Marketing Benefits

How Content Marketing Can Help You

Published on October 18, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

The art of content marketing is perhaps the most valuable way to improve your SEO results in 2013. Content marketing requires the development of high quality user focused content, and strategic curation and publishing methods. Content marketing can deliver measurable improvements in organic rankings and bring forth other benefits.

Three Reasons To Use Content Marketing

Increase Social Signals

Social Signals are an important part of search engine algorithms. Nothing improves social signals more than providing content that users enjoy and want to read and share. Obviously not every business can create that great video that becomes a viral juggernaut but steady improvement in social signals means better SEO results.

When you post your content on social media sites a specific goal should be to generate (as appropriate) a Share, +1, Retweet, LIKE, Pin, or similar interaction. It is icing on the cake if you are added to a new Google+ Circle or get a new Follower on your social media business pages.

Earn More Links to Your Website

People link to websites, information and content that they like. Whether it is white papers, articles, videos, press releases or other informative content you can provide the content to which people will link.

The people who find your content, and certainly those that link to it, are almost certain to be considered relevant to your business thus these links pass the legitimacy test. Sharing your content increases the possibility of gaining even more links, and increasing site traffic, and further developing your brand.

Develop Your Brand

Business owners often fail to understand or appreciate the true value of branding. Branding should be valued as a key element of the marketing strategy for any size business. Branding goes beyond having a recognizaable logo. Branding encompasses every aspect of how people view and feel about your company.

Content marketing, even for a relatively unknown company, introduces your business to prospects and creates that all important first impression. Both prospects and customers that are engaged with trustworthy and valuable information will embrace your company. Ultimately, through a consistent delivery of high quality content, your brand will become a "first-in-mind business" when an engaged consumer needs your type of service or product.

Content Marketing Challenges

Because of the known benefits of professional content marketing, internet marketing companies and SEO companies are working to use this new approach. The challenge for most is that they lack adequate understanding of the proper methods and they lack the resources to make it happen. Content marketing requires more than the average website company or freelancer can grasp or provide. For content marketing success you must know how the pieces fit together!

Examples of resources are third party software to facilitate and expedite the processes. Personnel resources you need are internet marketing analysts, professional copy writers and social media experts. Content marketing failures result from trying to post low quality content to social media sites and using spammy promotions.

Professional content marketing requires strategic planning and implementation, as well as a deep understanding of how all of the pieces fit together. When it is properly managed content marketing delivers incredibly good benefits.

Top 10 SEO Mistakes in 2013

Is Your SEO Company Competent?

Published on October 18, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is as relevant and useful as ever. What you need to know is that the best SEO practices for 2013 will be substantially different than in 2012 or before. Search engine algorithms changed dramatically in 2012 and the older ways of SEO can now cause extreme ranking losses. It is vital for every business owner to know the Top 10 SEO Mistakes in 2013.

Who Does Your SEO Work?

The issue of who does your SEO work, and their level of expertise has never been more important than now. To cite an example, in 2012 Google sent almost 1,000,000 notices to website owners concerning bad SEO that was going to harm their rankings. These messages were sent to only website owners using Webmaster Tools, so obviously these types of problems are very widespread.

You need to learn how to evaluate your SEO provider to avoid search engine problems and confirm that only good, safe SEO work is being done on your website.

A Top 10 List of SEO Mistakes in 2013

There are far more than 10 items that can harm your SEO efforts. Many of these are very technical issues, and some have generally been out of practice for many years. Our top ten list includes issues that are common to do-it-yourself types and the average web design company or freelancer. Here are our Top 10 Bad SEO Practices:

• Ignoring Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools is a free product and an invaluable tool for helping you to manage your website in a Google friendly way. If your SEO company has failed to implement this for you they are not worth whatever you are paying them. Being able to affect page settings, verify your site on Google, and measure key performance metrics are very important. You need to be using Google Webmaster Tools.
• Chaotic Site Architecture: Many websites are created without adequate strategic site architecture planning. Your site should have a logical page flow (navigation). Top level pages should be more general with lower level pages providing more and specific details. Intrasite, page-to-page, linking should be limited to related content. A content silo methodology is often a very good strategy. In 2013 you should eliminate low quality pages (use 301's!) and add richer content.
• Using Low Quality Content: If your site has very little content, text that is more sales pitch than factual information, has spelling or grammar errors, or is poorly structured your site is going to suffer ranking losses. Your site should use well structured content that informs users. Use shorter statements and don't engage in keyword stuffing or blatant attempts to affect search engines.
• Using Duplicate Content: Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act your site can be totally banned in search engines if you hav palgiarized content. Even innocent instances of duplicate content can cause multi-page ranking losses. An example of innocent duplicate content is very common on e-commerce sites. Iamgine every dealer of a product uses same product description provided by the manufacturer - this is duplicate content in the eyes of a search engine. Plagiarism was not committed but nonetheless the site gets penalized. You can visit Copyscape to see if your website pages have duplicate content issues.
• Keeping Sitewide Links: You should immediately eliminate sitewide links! Obviously this does not apply to your site navigation, although navigation link structure is another important aspect of SEO work. The types of sitewide links to drop are the redundant links often found in website footers or sidebars. Social media links may get a pass if you use them above the footer and the socail media pages are actively maintained.
• Long Page Load Times: Page load times have become another key factor in search engine algorithms. This matter is complicated by the need to load quickly on both desktop PC's and mobile devices. Eliminating Flash content, optimizing image files and streamlining code are easy ways to reduce page load times. Creating a mobile website design is strongly recommended because mobile use in many areas represents over 30% of searches.
• Bad Inbound Linking: Bad link building is perhaps the number one problem with ranking problems today. Link building needs to be very controlled and paced with an eye on domain diversity, link velocity and natural anchor text. Any SEO company using blog wheels, link farms, mass link building services and article spinning is on a path to extreme and perhaps permanent ranking losses. If your SEO provider is continuing to stress link building as a top tactic you need to drop them without delay!
• Too Many Outbound Links: Google looks at your outbound link quantity and evaluates the sites to which you link. You should not use Adsense on your site, link to affilliate programs or any type of spammy, low quality content sites. Any outbound links should go to only sites with definite value for your site visitor.
• Bad Page Titles and Descriptions: First, each page needs a unique page title and description. Your title tage should be 70 characters or less, and your description tag should be 150 characters or less. Keyword stuffing is an absolute no-no.
• Ignoring Social Media: Search engine algorithms now measure social signals when ranking websites. Social media has become a critical tool for brand development, content marketing and lead generation. Business owners who say "our customers are not on social media" are missing the big picture and lack proper understanding on SEO in 2013. At a minimum you need business pages on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. It is absolutely critical to create complete pages and integrate them into your online footprint.

The Benfefits of Better SEO

Improving on-page SEO will improve your search engine rankings. Higher rankings means more traffic. Improving your content improves user engagement and icrease on-page conversions. All of this means that applying new best SEO practices will improve your lead generation and branding. Inversely, allowing your website ranking to plummet will relegate your website to virtually an online brochure that few people will see.

SEO has changed and internet useage continues to climb. To improve your situation, make certain that you are not making mistakes in your SEO work, and get in touch with a SEO company to make your site ready for 2013.

Hire an SEO Expert - What Really Matters

How To Hire SEO Services in Baton Rouge

Published on October 17, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Whether your customers are local or spread across a wide geographical area you can increase your sales when you hire an SEO expert. Before you hire SEO services it is very important to understand that effective SEO requires a strong skillset. Almost every website company claims to provide SEO but few actually know SEO best practices.

Risks of Hiring Bad SEO Services

If you make a bad decision when you hire SEO services it can cause long lasting and even permanent ranking losses. Poor SEO work, whether intentional or simply done from ignorance of best practices, now carries a high risk of search engine penalties. If you engage an unskilled person or company for SEO you are gambling with your sales.

Is A Local Company Better?

It is extremely important to hire a SEO company that is in the United States, and that does their SEO work in-house. In cities with populations under 1,000,000 it is always a very big challenge to find a very good SEO company. SEO companies in small markets simply don't have top notch talent and rarely have had to perfect their skills by competing against other top SEO companies.

Your chosen SEO company does need to be able to understand your business, types of customers and be able to relate to your marketing area. Ideally they would be willing to sometimes come to your location for a personal meeting, and certainly be able to provide convenient forms of communication.

For top SEO, results are the top priority, location is not. Through phone and email communications, SEO reports and seeing ranking results you will be able to assess how well your SEO company is serving your business.

Finding A True SEO Expert

When you speak with someone who knows more than you do, and tehy have a convincng tone, you can easily begine to view them as somewhat of an expert. The SEO and internet marketing industry is packed with people who espouse unfounded claims, ill-advised practices and mislead clients. We believe that you need to know how to evaluate and hire SEO experts.

Experience matters to some degree but can be misleading. Because SEO changes so much, SEO experience that is over 3 years old does not mean a lot for being able to do current SEO best practices. Ask questions about on-page and off-page techniques. Ask to see live examples of client rankings. Definitely ask about tier inhouse team, tools and processes. If they use outsource services, rely on free keyword tools and can't explain their SEO process then they are one of the places to avoid.

Local Search SEO

For the traditional brick and mortar store it is important to hire a company that understands local SEO. This means how to properly create and customize local search listings and business pages. How to create local search citations and how to improve local search rankings. Local search SEO requires techniques that are unlike what you need for organic SEO.

How well developed is your local search presence? Local search services such as TigerSEO Marketing offer a free local search evaluation and a phone consultation to discuss how to improve your local search presence.

Organic SEO

Is your site ranked well on Google? Organic SEO services improve your search engine rankings for specific search phrases. Organic SEO techniques must evolve in order to keep up with changes to search engine algorithms. In 2012 alone, Google Panda and Penguin algorith updates caused significant turmoil in search engine rankings. SEO companies using sketchy or outdated practices caused their clients to lose a LOT of business, and are finding it nearly impossible to help their clients recover.

These black-hat and novice SEO people rely on meta tags, keyword stuffing, cloaking, doorway pages, exact match URL's, blog wheels, link farms and other bad practices to get their clients ranked on search engines. These bits of trickery did work for a while but their use ultimately generated very negative outcomes.

Even the manner in which white-hat SEO is applied has changed. The proper ways to manage character counts, partial match, latent semantic indexing, content stucturing and off-page techniques have become substantially different in 2012. Companies that upgrade their SEO in 2013 are going to take a lead in search result rankings.

SEO services, and internet marketing services, have become much more sophisticated and complex. To get the best possible results, and mitigate chances of penalties from bad SEO work, you should abandon the notion that a hiring a local SEO company is necessarily better. If you want top tier results, you need to find top tier practitioners - wherever they are located.

SEO Company Baton Rouge

Local SEO and Organic SEO for Baton Rouge

Published on September 20, 2012 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.