SEO Friendly Domain Names.
Often when businesses are registering their domain names, they think very little about what they choose. The obvious choice is that the name of your business will also be the domain name of your website. While it does make perfect sense to register your business name as a domain, before someone else [...]
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troy on August 14th, 2008
I think it is important that people who are new to SEO realise what results they can expect from a good SEO campaign and what would be considered normal throughout a dedicated SEO effort.
Firstly i would like to point out that SEO is a long term strategy. It is not usually responsible to be told or think that more traffic will come to your website quickly, there are other online strategies if that is your goal.
It is generally considered best practice for the on page optimisation to take place on your website at the beginning of an optimisation campaign. The goal with this is to make it clear to Google what it is you want to be found for or what it is you are offering. Depending on if you have a new site, how old your existing site is or the program it has been built by, this will take between a few hours or a few weeks. If your SEO consultant is familiar with your system it will be faster. And if there is a lot of work to be done, like seo copy writing or restructuring from an seo friendly system it will take longer.
But often within the first month or so you should have seen some initial improvement to your rankings. This might not be true if your site already ranks quite highly, or has had some elements to it Google considers unethical. A slight slip in rankings can also be normal in these cases.
When the onpage work has been done the emphasis switches to link building. The more other websites that have an inbound link to yours, the better. Creating these links is an ongoing process for your seo consultant and they should be submitting maybe twenty links a day at least a few days per week.
The majority of sites SEO experts submit links to are not intended to increase your rankings and will often not even be intended to receive much traffic themselves. So don not count on this inbound linking to open up new avenues for clients to find you.
Usually month two is the hardest from an SEO clients point of view. After an initial rise in rankings from the onpage work and a few good links, it is common to get excited and expect contiuous improvements. Sometimes you can be lucky and this will happen but more often than not the second month will not generate big improvements.
The reason for this is that first a link request is submitted. Then it has to be reviewed by the website owner, which can take minutes or months and is beyond your seo persons control. Unless you ant to pay for links which guarantees a quicker approval of your link. So then your link is up and you have to wait for Google to discover that link exists and add it to your websites index. And this has to happen over and over again.
After a month or two the link building 'gains traction' and more consistent ranking improvements will likely follow. Other ways to encourage more links include article submissions, forum and blog marketing and press releases. All of which can be time consuming but a dedicated SEO person will do this, much more likely if you supply articles for them.
If your SEO person is good, you can expect to be pushing the top ten within some months, depending on how competitive your industry is on search engines. The strength of your competition will then be the main factor for how long it takes to get a good traffic generating position at or near the top.
What i think if you are suspicous if your SEO person is busy or not, is to ask them questions. What have they done for your site this week? can they show you anything about where links are being built? What are their plans for the next weeks? Why do they think the rankings are not rising?
Good answers should be provided if they take your result personally and are dedicated to seeing your site rank very well.
Finally, I recommend trying to stay upbeat about what is going on. If your SEO consultant has to build links for you on a daily basis, you want them to have a positive image of you in their mind. If they like you, they will be much more likely to have passion for your project. If you have not met them before and you think they are going stale on your project, why not organise to meet up with them and show them your face. Buy them a coffee, help them understand your business more. I have seen this reignite passion in SEO projects many times before.
Hope that all makes sense and is not to much of a mish mash of ideas.
Troy
troy on July 29th, 2008
Selling your products online is an excellent way to reach a much wider audience than you can from a traditional shop. With the huge amount of search online and the ever increasing trust associated with online shopping, more and more gift shops are also releasing online stores. And SEO for gift shops is becoming more competitive.
As this continues to increase, the competition to get more visitors to your website becomes more and more fierce. On Australian search engines, Google now completely dominates with over 80% or search traffic turning to Google. This is not a new realisation, so many people have made a dedicated effort to be found in prominent positions on Google when someone searches for the type of gifts they sell.
To come to the top of Google for generic phrases such as 'gifts' or 'gift ideas' has become very difficult. It will be time consuming to do this yourself or expensive to hire a professional. To tell you the truth though, there is a much better way to get good traffic to your site from Google faster.
Every store has the gifts they specialise in. Whether it is 'kids gifts', 'AFL gifts', 'wine gifts' or whatever. By narrowing down your target market into such niche gift types you will not only greatly increase the likeliness of success from an seo campaign but also shorten that amount of time waiting to get a return on your investment.
Another benefit is that if someone is searching for say an 'AFL Gift', they are much further through their buying process and more likely to make a purchase, or at least find what they are looking for.
Of course Google Adwords is another option but it is even more risky. You could spend huge amounts of money to have a sponsored link for a term like 'Gifts' and make very few sales. It is too broad a term for any gift shop. You will surely be paying for many people to come to your website who are totally not interested in what you are selling. I am actually suprised that so many people bid for such a term.
The benefit that can be gained from a very high organic ranking on Google is huge. I have seen different online retail stores grow from home based businesses to very large companies in a short space of time. Most of them have realised their target market, done indepth 'keyphrase research' and attacked the niche keywords relevant to what they sell.
SEO for gift shops is very exciting. Once you get to the first page you almost always see an increase in visitors and sales, more with every position you climb. As with every market though the competition will continue to increase. So the longer people wait the more difficult it will get. Clever online gift store owners are already making a lot of money through quality SEO.
To ask any questions or leave a comment, feel free to do so here.
troy on July 25th, 2008
We get lots of questions regarding SEO Design or SEO friendly web development. People are more and more interested in getting things right from the start and want to know what good seo design means.
There are a few key points when making a Google friendly website. What does Google want? Firstly Google needs to be able to read what everything is on your website quickly and in an organised fashion. There is a process that Google follows when they come to a site and the easier it is for Google to navigate your website and find as much of this information as possible the better.
There are two halves to seo friendly web design, like yin and yang, and you need to balance the two for a site to deliver maximum benefit. On one side you have Google who you want to keep happy so you get lots of the other side, visitors. You need to satisfy them to make make from your site.
So your website needs to be easy for Google to navigate but not look weird for the user. Lots of keywords stuffed in somewhere for example will look dodgey for someone looking for your serviceor product. Often the best result is achieved by keeping it simple. Give the visitor clear concise information in a clean easy to read format. They come, they find what they want to know quickly and they are happy. The same can be said for Google. When Google arrives you want it to be obvious to Google what it is you do.
The content on the website is one of the most important things. Google is costantly searching for what it thinks is informative, fresh (up to date) content. The phrases you want to be found for must be mentioned here and there throughout your copy and in places where Google will want to see them.
One important thing is to keep Google on your site as long as possible. With so many squillions of websites outthere, when a Google spider is at your site, you want to keep its attention as long as possible. It is the same as any time you want to convince someone of something, the more time you have to explain to them your point of view, the better chance they will side with your point of view. Internel linking helps to keep Google busy on your site and getting as many of your pages indexed as possible. Footers that link to other pages, anchor text, and other methods help with this.
Of course the tas and titles also need to be precise. These are your chances to explain directly what it is you do, and to show what all your photos and other things Google can't read actually are.
If you want to get a website built and you phone any web development company and ask them if their websites are Google friendly, one hundred percent they are going to say yes. If they say no, you will hang up and they will lose the sale. It is not possible for them to say no. I know, i used to say it to people years ago too.
The fact is, they are more interested in the visitor than Google. Which is fine. That is their job really. There is so much they can do onpage to make it Google friendly, but unless you are going to pay them to be responsible for your ranking, it is not possible for them to invest all of the extra time required.
There are companies of course that offer web design and dedicated seo, these guys should be proactive in every part of your seo from the beginning of your project. There are only a handful of companies in Australia that I would trust to build me a great website and also bring it to the top of Google. And most of them are very expensive, overpriced actually. Having said that i am sure there are smaller companies out there who do that consistantly, I just have not met them.
A good Seo company will overhaul your website to suit the latest SEO design requirements as best as possible. So if your designer has made your site and it looks nice and everything works you should be happy. It is then up to the SEO company to deliver the rankings.
My advice depends on your budget. If you can afford an expensive website, get a pro company with good graphic design skills and pay them to make the site, just avoiding to much flash. thell them you will get SEO done on it after so they know your goals. When it is done, thank them and move on to the SEO company of your choice.
With a smaller budget, see if an SEO comapny will design a website for you. Making a simple to navigate, modern clean website is not very difficult and they will give you the best possible chance to rank highly on Google quickly. Many of the small websites we build in the finance or utility industries for example find their way to the top few pages within weeks for targetted phrases.
Last but not least, if it is the traffic that is important, register a domain name that contains your most important keyphrase, or one suggested by and seo that will help achieve your goals. It helps speed up the ranking process a lot and your site will have a higher resale value when you sell or close your business.
I hope this post on seo design has been helpful. There is way too much advice or info to fit into one post so if you want to know more just ask any questions here and i will try to answer them in more detail for you.
troy on July 22nd, 2008
SEO (search engine optimisation) for any business can be a vital step for ensuring longevity of either leads or sales. There are many obvious benefits such as exposure and credibility that help capture more new customers. But there are other less pronounced benefits from a good SEO campaign that make good SEO a positive move for the companies financial future.
A key benefit of ranking highly on Google is that it is a long term sales or lead generation tool. Once you have a high natural ranking, you will become less reliable on other forms of advertising that require an ongoing spend, such as Adwords or print advertising. Of course you may wish to continue with other marketing to get the most profit possible. The thing is once you have a high Google ranking, it should last for a long time. We compare it to the Australian cricket team, it often seems harder to get out of the team once you are in, than it is to get in the team in the first place.
Another benefit is in your exit strategy. When it comes time to sell your business, ranking very highly for important phrases will add a lot of value to your website. Everyone interested in buying a business or even just your website/domain name, knows that one already ranking highly is going to generate them more business adn profit. So this is another definite long term benefit that itself will normally more than cover the cost of your initial SEO investment.
SEO also requires only a small amount of time invested by the business owner when compared to other forms of marketing. Your SEO company should be doing most of the work for you. It does not require new graphics, slogans, colour choices, logos, printing and all that sort of thing. You just choose the phrases you want to appear for and they should do the work. The only exception might be copywriting. However a good SEO will have an experienced SEO copywriter as part of their team and these costs should be included in the price they quote to you.
So these are just some of the benefits of SEO that are not as obvious as, more inline visitors, more sales, etc. I hope you have learned something that you did not already think of and if you have other benefits you would like to add, please feel free to leave a comment.
