There aren’t many industries that have as many shady professionals as our industry. Some industries that are similar in terms of shady people include pain clinics, casinos, investment bankers, and people on craigslist. Seriously I love what I do and the power of Google but I get discouraged more and more as I see some of the practices or sheer lack of knowledge in our industry. Not to mention blog posts like this. Shit all over SEO if you want. The truth of the matter is that it works. So much so that I have launched a new business in an industry that has been decimated by the housing crisis (Land Surveying) and SEO alone is keeping it slammed. The hardest part for any business owner is finding a good SEO consultant that knows their shit.

One rule to go by is never ever accept help from an SEO company that calls you. The whole point of SEO and organic search is to generate leads from users that are interested in your products or services. If an SEO company can not find leads form themselves they surely cant find any for you. It fact they had to find you somehow. The fact that they found you in the first place means they are looking for low hanging fruit, in other words they are looking for a website that is easy to rank so they can milk you for a monthly fee and with minimal work.

Second I would ask or referrals. A good SEO consultant will be slammed! Why? Because they generate a lot of business for their clients. In turn these clients are happy they made a good decision that directly impacted their bottom line. Especially in this shaky economy when a business owner makes a high impact decision that provides an robust ROI they are going to brag to their fellow business owners and that particular SEO consultant or company will be netting more and more word of mouth business.

Third I would do research to see if a particular company is doing SEO for more than one client within the same vertical. It is an inherent conflict of interest for an SEO company to optimize two different websites for the same keyword. A lawyer doesn’t represent the plaintiff and the defendant.

Secondly there will come a time when a good SEO consultant realizes he can do better for himself optimizing his own websites versus a website for someone else. This will ultimately depend on how entrepreneurial this individual is and if they work for themselves or a large company.

Lastly I would advise against hiring a large company that did not rank well for a large number of competitive keywords such as “SEO Company” “Internet Marketing” “Web Design” etc. The reason I say a large number of competitive terms is the fact that this type of intellectual capital is very hard to amass and scale up effectively. A smart SEO consultant doesn’t give out secrets and has to do a lot of research to stay up and ahead of the game. Recent changes to google’s algorithm a.k.a. Farmer/Panda update means that tactics that were effective a few months ago will now cause your rankings to decrease. An SEO Consultant at a large company with a large workload may not even be aware of these recent changes nor have ample time to adjust tactics.

A lot of hype has been made about Demand Media and it’s IPO since it’s launch. One question everyone has been asking is can they sustain their business model? Personally I think so…they generate content from freelance writers and resell it to websites. If they are producing good, quality, and compelling content than it should be a solid revenue stream. Web owners know that keep up to date fresh content for your demographic can be difficult. So I do not think Google is looking to target anyone company specifically, they want to provide the best result for your search query.

Now Google’s lates algo change dubbed the “Farmer Update” has changes ranking’s for about 12% (11.8%) of websites in Google’s index. The name originated from the idea that Google is targeting content farms. I don’t think they mind you farming good content that is placed appropriately on the web but some notable sites were uprooted in the process. We’ll get to those sites in a moment but one must remember…Google tracks what happens after users click on a result and that information is kept and used as part of google algorithm. They HATE it when users don’t find what they are looking for on the first result. Now have you ever Googled something and landed on one of the following sites?

How did you feel about the information on those websites? Well those are some of the top losers in Google latest algorithmic change. Thanks to Sistrix for providing the chart above. There is only one reason site owners are going to spent time and money to get a a site to rank with shallow content. They want pageviews and clicks for advertisements. So the first clear signal change is in advertising and placement on the website. I have always been against display ads on websites but here is some validation. Second factors that have been looked at in this change is user data like bounce rate and time on site. Lastly authentic user generated social media content seems to play a factor as well. Nothing to new but I would assume this data also is weighted differently based on the query as well.

I am always baffled when I see companies spend huge amount of money reinventing the wheel in .asp or anything that runs on an IIS server. It’s also unfortunate that a lot of these companies have leaders that really don’t understand the dynamic languages that power the internet and web apps. There are many reasons to avoid using any of Microsoft’s technology, and I believe it’s only appeal is name recognition. That was the reason for using it at the last web company I worked for. “The clients know Microsoft” were his exact words.

Reason #1 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
I wouldn’t say you are shooting yourself in the foot by using .asp but more like blowing your leg off. A search for “Tampa Web Design” on Google Jan 29, 2010 reveals 1,890,000 results and only 10 will be on the first page of Google. The top two sites were developed using PHP and only one of the top 5 sites was written in asp and overall only 3 of the top 10 websites were using Microsoft technology to run their websites.

Google has announced that speed is a factor in their algorithm and they have since released mod_pagespeed for apache which is an automation of web cache best practices which you could do manually on a Microsoft server but chances are if your web company is using a Microsoft server in the first place they are not going to have an in depth understanding on the technical issues related to search engine optimization

Apache servers which power PHP, Ruby, CGI, etc. serves up 60 percent of all websites on the internet. Microsoft’s IIS comes in a distant secont with 22 percent. Google’s web server which was built from Apache runs 6 percent of sites, mainly only Google websites.

Search engine optimization is so important because it can account for a large amount of traffic up to 90% or more. Building your website is never the hard part part. Getting relevant visitors is a much more in involved task and you need to set yourself up for success in the beginning.

Blog Blog Blog….once for each year this blog you are currently reading has been in existence. Yep I have been blogging for 3 years now. I don’t consider myself a “blogger” since my income is derived indirectly form my blog. Please keep in mind that there are many successful individuals who make a living from blogging. There are many different reasons for blogging. I blogcast to you this evening in order to push down some content I am tired of looking at on my website. Onsite SEO is only about a third of everything at most that goes into making your website rank higher on Google but I guarantee you will see higher rankings if you being to start blogging. There are some key rules that you need to follow first in order to gain maximum benefit form your digital composition efforts.

First make sure that your blog resides on the same domain as your current website. This mean no blogs hosted on a domain other than yours because you want all of the SEO benefit and potential links to go to your website and not someone else’s like blogspot or wordpress.

Second you want to make sure that you blog on a regular basis. Nothing is worse than a dead blog. Are you going to abandon me as well if I become your customer? It may be true that you become busy but you are never too busy to blog and grow or your business. If you are then you can easily afford to hire a ghost writer as your time is more valuable spent working on tasks related to managing your business than blogging.

Third make sure you write about topics that your customers are interested in.  Having interesting content on your blog will make it go VIRAL!!!  Ha Ha not really but it will mean that people are more likely to link to you, share your content with someone else, or become more involved with your brand. You don’t have to make every post strictly related to your industry but instead use this as an opportunity to provide helpful knowledge as well as give your brand a personality. Use StumbleUpon for blogging ideas if your industry is not that sexy.

Blogging on your website should be as easy as opening you web browser, navigating to you specific URL, logging in and typing. If it is not this easy to edit your website you may consider converting it over to a content management system, or having a web developer install a wordpress blog for you. The more difficult it is to update your website the less likely you are to update it. It will do you no good to leave up old stale content. Blog at least once a month to increase search engine rankings over time and improve your web metrics. Sooner or later you sill notice a payoff from you actions including more business.

1. A good SEO company will not need to seek you out, afterall if they can’t genrate their own leads how will they do it for you?

2. They offer software that can optimize your website. Do you really think they can outsmart Google with their programmers?

3. Google SEO or search engine optmization in their city. Do they appear?

4. Can they show you actual websites that rank well with their link on the bottom?

5. Will they give you your money back if you don’t rank within a certain timeframe? We will.

http://www.idwebdesigntampa.com/images/goseogo.jpg

Still a long way to go to the top!

PART 1 of 5

The buzz that everyone seems to be talking about is SEO. In other words Search Engine Optimization. What is SEO? SEO is the process of making a website the #1 result on Google for a certain search term. Why would you want your website at the number one spot? It’s a sure fire way to boost traffic to your website.

Is SEO for everyone? In my opinion Yes, but only if it’s cost effective.

It is also the final piece in a website.

If your cousin made your website when you first open up back in 2002, maybe you should consider a re-design first. And make sure that developer is creating a web site that is WC3 compliant, with NO Tables. Incept Design will be happy to check your website for you! Email your link to alex [at] inceptdesign.com.

After you site is aesthetically pleasing with nice gradients, shadows, and colors & the code is clean, you are now ready to take the next step.

Ready to decide if SEO is a good choice for your business.

Lets say you own a health SPA. Right now you are nowhere to be found on Google. Your in a back alley of the internet, tucked away.

Now say your average client spends $350.00 per visit.

If your website were in the top 5 results from Google for “Tampa Health Spa”, Chances are during the course of the month you will gain at least at least 2 clients per month due to the increased traffic to your website from people finding you on Google. And with that second client you can more than cover the cost of the SEO process. And any additional clients are increased revenue.

Some other things to consider. You will not jump from nowhere on the web to the first page of Google with a month. It will take anywhere from 2-6 months for the SEO process to begin increasing your rankings. Don’t spend an arm and a leg on SEO either. 95% of all “known” factors involved in Search Engine Optimization are available on the Internet and can be found by anyone who spends some time researching it. How the developer applies these known techniques is what greatly affects rankings.

The experts in this field do NOT agree 100% on which factors affect rankings or how much each factor affect rankings. Honestly the only entity that could know for certain would be Google and the individuals that write the actual search algorithm. And lastly anyone who promises you the #1 spot on Google in a week for any keyword is going to get your site banned from all the search engines. There are some things that you cannot do to search engine optimize your website.

To be continued….

Alex A