by Stoney deGeyter
Many businesses owners focusing on SEO for the first time, especially those with limited budgets, can often find themselves caught like a deer in the headlights wondering just where and how to begin. SEO, even for smaller sites, can often be a big project, especially if you’re trying to run the business at the same time.
The question becomes, how many hours a week can you afford to invest (or pay for,) and what should you do first with the limited time on hand? There are several aspects to the SEO process and each one is important in it’s own right. It’s not always easy to say “do this first” until a site evaluation has been performed, as each site’s needs are different. But you have to start somewhere, right?
While I can’t put together a definitive path that you can use to work through your own SEO process, I will provide a general order of importance of different areas. This can be used as a guideline for analysis to determine where you do need to begin the optimization campaign.
If the architecture if your website is messed up or has significant issues, then the overall performance of your site will be limited. You can focus on links, keyword targeting, content, etc, but if the architecture isn’t right then all of those efforts will be far less effective than they otherwise would be. Think of architecture as the foundation that the rest of the site needs to be built upon. If the foundation is crumbling, it’ll create a whole mess of other problems, despite how much effort is put into other areas of performance.
The primary focus of the initial architectural check should be on search engine spiderability of the site. Can the engines navigate properly from page to page? Are the right pages given correct level of importance via hierarchy? Is there anything preventing the search engines from getting to all of the content? These are important questions that must be asked and answered.
Once you know your site is “search engine friendly” and the ability of your site to perform is in check, you can then focus on other areas to help improve actual performance.
It’s hard to say if keyword research should come before or after you address certain site architectural needs. For the most part, keyword research should come first because you will use what you uncover to build a proper architectural platform. However, there are many architectural issues that can and should be fixed immediately so your site can get properly indexed by the search engines. Keyword research can take a bit of time so fixing the most important architectural issues first will be to your benefit.
Once the most important architectural issues are addressed, start digging into your keyword research. Before you can do any focused optimization or marketing of your site, you really do have to know what keywords are most important, and how they should be implemented across your site. While the actual keyword optimization process can, and usually does, take time, the research will help you define a clear path in moving forward.
Usability is often overlooked in the implementation of the SEO campaign, mostly because SEO can often conflict with the site’s overall usability performance. That doesn’t need to be so and usability and SEO can, and should, work hand in hand. In fact, usability should trump SEO in nearly all cases. While it’s important to get people to your site via search engines, the engines are not the only way visitors find you. So when usability takes a back seat to SEO you’re forcing your visitors who come to your site through other means to view your site through optimization eyes.
When usability trumps SEO, every visitor that comes to your site, regardless of how they got there, has the best experience possible. Instead of finding a site that’s clunky, they find a site that gives them what they need as seamlessly as possible. Any usability improvements will help you increase conversion rates and the number of value of each sale made. As traffic increases, via on-page optimization and other marketing efforts, your sales numbers will rise at a rate greater than if usability wasn’t factored in, making your optimization efforts far more valuable.
It seems somewhat odd that an article about SEO shows actual keyword optimization as the second to least important. That’s not to say that the on-page optimization isn’t important; it is! But it’s only valuable once the issues above have been properly addressed. Focusing on optimization before you have fully researched your keywords leads to improper targeting and poorer performing campaigns. Same with usability and site architecture, these things must come first if you want the optimization to be effective.
There are a number of ways you can go about optimizing your site: 1) You can focus on one page at a time, starting with your most important pages and keywords first. 2) you can do a quick run-through of the entire site hitting key elements first, then go through again hitting the secondary and then tertiary elements, 3) you can focus on product pages hitting very specific keywords, then working your way back to the broader, more highly searched but less targeted keywords.
It doesn’t matter how you move forward, so long as you are aware of the short and long-term success potential of any approach.
Link building should not be overlooked, or considered less important. Often sites can perform strongly on link building campaigns alone. However, such campaigns are far more effective once the keyword strategy has been laid out (if not yet fully implemented). This aligns the keyword targeting efforts both on and off the page, making both far more successful overall.
Also keep in mind that generic link building campaigns can begin in the very early stages of the SEO process, but you’ll do better saving the more specific keyword targeting efforts for once you have a solid idea where keywords will be targeted on the site.
As each site is different and has different needs, so the path above needs to be flexible. Many of these areas overlap and can be performed simultaneously. Some can be done in stages leaving room to begin stages of another area as needed. But overall, this is a good framework allowing you to see where you can begin with your optimization and analyzation efforts, and help you get a better feel for how to progress with your optimization campaign.
Check out our small business news site.
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Big Project/Small Budget: Where to Begin Your SEO Campaign
by Stoney deGeyter
Choosing a SEO to manage your website marketing has never been easy, but during these tough economic times it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. No one wants to be the guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who chose the wrong chalice. You’re site will be nothing but a shell of it’s old self with the Knights of SEO standing over you saying, “He chose… poorly.” Uh, yeah… “Information that would have been helpful yesterday!” (to mix my movie quotes.)
If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.
Not all SEO providers are the same and not all sites require the same type of SEO service. All thing must be taken into proper consideration. Here are five things that are relevant to the overall pricing and success of your optimization campaign.
Size of your site
The size of your site will be a significant factor in how much work will be necessary to optimize. The smaller the site the easier the overall optimization will be. But if you’re dealing with a site with lots of pages or products then the optimization becomes much more complex. Even the pre-optimization work on larger site’s is more time consuming.
The difference between optimizing small and larger sites can literally be thousands of dollars per month. As you start shopping around and getting quotes for SEO, you need to be aware of the size of the task that you’re being quoted on.
Condition of site
While size of the site has an effect, so does the site’s overall condition. I’ve run across many smaller sites that were so completely screwed up that nothing short of a complete re-development was in order. This sucks for the small business owner, but when you didn’t invest in developing the site properly the first time, it means you either have to do it again correctly or simply suffer through ineffective SEO. Of course, you’re still paying for that SEO so you’re better off going for the re-development.
If your site is in relatively stable condition, from an architectural standpoint, then that will cut down the cost significantly. This is especially true for larger site’s where one change can be implemented across thousands of pages instantly.
There are a lot of factors that are considered when looking at the site’s condition. Things such as the architecture, usability, design appeal, usage and customization of title and description tags, page content, site navigation and internal linkage, all need to be considered when analyzing the condition of the site and what needs to be done to get it into proper order..
Keyword options
There is a huge difference in optimizing a site for a few dozen keywords, versus optimizing a site for several thousand. There are many sites in niche industries where keywords are pretty limited. Usually we can still come up with a list of a few hundred, but sometimes it’s even fewer than that. But in other industries the keyword variables are wide open and there can literally be an unlimited number of keywords that can be targeted.
The more keyword options there are for your site, and how quickly you want to get any and all of those keywords optimized and performing in the search results, will be a contributing factor in the cost of your campaign. If you are fine with a slower approach then costs can be reduced significantly. But if you want to be more aggressive, optimizing more keywords more quickly, then the cost will go up significantly.
Experience/Skill of SEO
Some SEOs charge $25/hour while others charge several hundred, and there is every shade in between. Not all SEO firms charge by the hour, but the quote for services is based on the number of hours of work estimated and how much the SEO believes they are worth for that amount of time, so essentially, everything is hourly based.
While you may not want to pay $200/hour for services when you can get it for $50, there is a skill factor involved in each pricing structure. Not everybody who charges a lot is worth it, but very few are worth more than they charge. Selecting a SEO with the skill level necessary to do the job and do it effectively is essential to your long-term success. Keep in mind, also, that more skilled SEOs will not only charge more per hour, but they will likely get more done in less time. At the same time, they are more likely to find and fix problems that would be left unaddressed by the lesser skilled providers.
Another factor to consider is the difference between hiring a solo-SEO consultant and a SEO firm. While firms tend to have more overhead that needs to be paid for, they often have a wider skill range to work from. It’s often difficult for one person to be an expert in SEO, architecture, copywriting, usability, link building, and social media all at the same time. In such cases these jobs will often be farmed out at a profit for both individuals/companies doing and managing the work, or simply performed less effectively.
Services offered
The amount of services offered in a SEO contract can vary from company to company. It’s not too difficult to reduce costs of the SEO service by cutting out non-essential services. But frequently enough, essential services are cut as well, in order to get costs down. Cutting costs by cutting essential services is bad for everybody. Not only will you not be performing but then you’ll blame the SEO who will in turn point out that you may need to purchase additional services in order to perform.
While not every service is necessary for every kind of SEO contract, you need to make sure that the essential services are in place. And from there, you still need to keep an open mind if other services may need to be added to give your campaign an added boost.
All of these factors weigh heavily in the overall cost of any SEO and online marketing campaign. If your funds are limited then you may be tempted to go with a budget SEO provider. But keep in mind that SEO is an investment. If you invest little, you’ll likely get little. But as you increase your investment then your return usually becomes exponentially greater.
Everybody needs to budget and you don’t want to get into a contract that you simply cannot afford to pay. Considering each of the areas above carefully will ensure you’re selecting an SEO provider that will provide you the best service, giving you the most value for your invested dollar. The last thing you want is to be budgeted out of success.
Check out our small business news site.
Here is the original post:
SEO Pricing: 5 Things to Consider When Shoping for a SEO
by Stoney deGeyter
Choosing a SEO to manage your website marketing has never been easy, but during these tough economic times it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. No one wants to be the guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who chose the wrong chalice. You’re site will be nothing but a shell of it’s old self with the Knights of SEO standing over you saying, “He chose… poorly.” Uh, yeah… “Information that would have been helpful yesterday!” (to mix my movie quotes.)
If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.
Not all SEO providers are the same and not all sites require the same type of SEO service. All thing must be taken into proper consideration. Here are five things that are relevant to the overall pricing and success of your optimization campaign.
Size of your site
The size of your site will be a significant factor in how much work will be necessary to optimize. The smaller the site the easier the overall optimization will be. But if you’re dealing with a site with lots of pages or products then the optimization becomes much more complex. Even the pre-optimization work on larger site’s is more time consuming.
The difference between optimizing small and larger sites can literally be thousands of dollars per month. As you start shopping around and getting quotes for SEO, you need to be aware of the size of the task that you’re being quoted on.
Condition of site
While size of the site has an effect, so does the site’s overall condition. I’ve run across many smaller sites that were so completely screwed up that nothing short of a complete re-development was in order. This sucks for the small business owner, but when you didn’t invest in developing the site properly the first time, it means you either have to do it again correctly or simply suffer through ineffective SEO. Of course, you’re still paying for that SEO so you’re better off going for the re-development.
If your site is in relatively stable condition, from an architectural standpoint, then that will cut down the cost significantly. This is especially true for larger site’s where one change can be implemented across thousands of pages instantly.
There are a lot of factors that are considered when looking at the site’s condition. Things such as the architecture, usability, design appeal, usage and customization of title and description tags, page content, site navigation and internal linkage, all need to be considered when analyzing the condition of the site and what needs to be done to get it into proper order..
Keyword options
There is a huge difference in optimizing a site for a few dozen keywords, versus optimizing a site for several thousand. There are many sites in niche industries where keywords are pretty limited. Usually we can still come up with a list of a few hundred, but sometimes it’s even fewer than that. But in other industries the keyword variables are wide open and there can literally be an unlimited number of keywords that can be targeted.
The more keyword options there are for your site, and how quickly you want to get any and all of those keywords optimized and performing in the search results, will be a contributing factor in the cost of your campaign. If you are fine with a slower approach then costs can be reduced significantly. But if you want to be more aggressive, optimizing more keywords more quickly, then the cost will go up significantly.
Experience/Skill of SEO
Some SEOs charge $25/hour while others charge several hundred, and there is every shade in between. Not all SEO firms charge by the hour, but the quote for services is based on the number of hours of work estimated and how much the SEO believes they are worth for that amount of time, so essentially, everything is hourly based.
While you may not want to pay $200/hour for services when you can get it for $50, there is a skill factor involved in each pricing structure. Not everybody who charges a lot is worth it, but very few are worth more than they charge. Selecting a SEO with the skill level necessary to do the job and do it effectively is essential to your long-term success. Keep in mind, also, that more skilled SEOs will not only charge more per hour, but they will likely get more done in less time. At the same time, they are more likely to find and fix problems that would be left unaddressed by the lesser skilled providers.
Another factor to consider is the difference between hiring a solo-SEO consultant and a SEO firm. While firms tend to have more overhead that needs to be paid for, they often have a wider skill range to work from. It’s often difficult for one person to be an expert in SEO, architecture, copywriting, usability, link building, and social media all at the same time. In such cases these jobs will often be farmed out at a profit for both individuals/companies doing and managing the work, or simply performed less effectively.
Services offered
The amount of services offered in a SEO contract can vary from company to company. It’s not too difficult to reduce costs of the SEO service by cutting out non-essential services. But frequently enough, essential services are cut as well, in order to get costs down. Cutting costs by cutting essential services is bad for everybody. Not only will you not be performing but then you’ll blame the SEO who will in turn point out that you may need to purchase additional services in order to perform.
While not every service is necessary for every kind of SEO contract, you need to make sure that the essential services are in place. And from there, you still need to keep an open mind if other services may need to be added to give your campaign an added boost.
All of these factors weigh heavily in the overall cost of any SEO and online marketing campaign. If your funds are limited then you may be tempted to go with a budget SEO provider. But keep in mind that SEO is an investment. If you invest little, you’ll likely get little. But as you increase your investment then your return usually becomes exponentially greater.
Everybody needs to budget and you don’t want to get into a contract that you simply cannot afford to pay. Considering each of the areas above carefully will ensure you’re selecting an SEO provider that will provide you the best service, giving you the most value for your invested dollar. The last thing you want is to be budgeted out of success.
Check out our small business news site.
Read more:
SEO Pricing: 5 Things to Consider When Shopping for a SEO
by Stoney deGeyter
Over the last few months I’ve become a convert to Google. I’ve always used Google as my primary search engine but only recently have I started using a few other Google products such as Gmail, calendar and documents. I’m a fan.
But when it comes to search, I’m fed up with Google’s dominance. We could use a little competition in search.
Of course, it’s really not Google’s fault that they run between 50-70% market share, depending on who you ask. It’s really the fault of all of us searchers. We use Google because we like the results. We don’t use Yahoo or MSN because for whatever reason we feel the results are inferior.
Google got to where it is because it earned it. None of the other engines seem to be able to dent that and are losing market share to Google each month. However, I’d be surprised if anybody would notice if Google’s results were swapped with MSN’s for a week. Psychologically I feel that I’ll get better results from Google, but I don’t know if its true or not because I really don’t use any other engine frequently enough. Heck, even using Google I often don’t find what I’m looking for anyway.
While each engine has to do it’s part to find ways to produce better search results, what makes any search engine competitive is the user. As long as users don’t feel the need to switch to Yahoo or MSN, Google will always dominate. I have some problems with that as a searcher and as a business that makes a living by being found in the search results.
Cons of having one dominant search engine
- Rankings in other engines mean little in terms of traffic.
- Losing positions in the dominant engine can create a noticeable drop in traffic.
- Competition for top positions can be extremely fierce lowing the ROI of the investment of achieving such rankings.
- Algorithm changes on one engine, causing loss of top rankings, can devastate a business.
Pro’s of having multiple dominant search engines
- Multiple engines create additional opportunities for site branding in search results as searchers move from one engine to the next.
- Searchers have more opportunities to find quality sites, if each engine produces differing results.
- Many businesses will focus on one or two engines only creating more availability and less competition for top positions, and therefore increasing the ROI value.
- Ranking losses one engine will be far less noticeable when a multi-engine strategy is employed.
Of course there are also drawbacks to having multiple competitive engines as well:
- Optimization for many engines can be more difficult than a single engine, though competition will be more spread out.
- It’ll be unlikely that one site will dominate the top spots of all competitive engines. This can be a pro for you against fierce competition, but a con if you are the fierce competition.
- A top ranking on a single search engine will produce less traffic and revenue overall. This means a multi-engine strategy will need to be employed OR that your site must be the Destination Website for your industry.
Personally, I believe that the more competing search engines there are, the better we’ll all be. But because Google is so entrenched as the dominant engine its going to take more than another engine simply being as good as Google. I think that some of other engines have surpassed Google in some key areas, such as user experience, quality of results, result segmentation, but none have beat Google in all areas simultaneously. And it’s not been enough to attract an growing audience. It’ll come down to the average searcher to start using other engines for their web searches.
If you’re a searcher, you have to ask yourself if you really do get superior results from Google or if you just think you do. Even if you do, are the results on the other engines that much inferior that you can’t find what you want?
If you’re a business owner you need to think about what you can do to increase your competitive arena. If you already achieved top spots in Google or not, start to transfer some market share to Yahoo or MSN and soon others will follow. And as they do you are opening up new opportunities to compete and drive traffic to your site.
This next year I’m replacing Google as my default search engine. I may use MSN or Yahoo or perhaps both, depending on the circumstances. If I go to Google it’ll only as a last resort, if the other engines don’t give me what I’m looking for. I’m willing to bet that will happen far less than I suspect. Not only that it will show me that there is life beyond Google. And maybe, just maybe, we can start seeing some competition in search start to happen.
Check out our small business news site.
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I’m a Google Convert But I Still Want to See Competition in Search
by Stoney deGeyter
Many SEO newbies, or new businesses starting out online, come to SEO blogs such as this looking for some quick and easy solution that will vault them to the top in the results. Unfortunately, there are very few hard and fast rules in SEO, and no step by step solutions that, if implemented, guarantees you top search engine rankings. If there were, then it would quickly become obsolete because everybody would be doing it.
Instead, SEO is more of a set of guidelines that can be implemented in a way that allows for individual site customization. Most of it is fluid based on each site’s needs for their audience. However within that there are also some basic dos and don’ts that need to be adhered to.
SEO Dos:
- Customize your title tags. Each page should have a title unique to that page alone.
- Research your keywords thoroughly. You really cannot start optimizing until you have researched out your keywords and know how the optimization will play out.
- Use keyword relevant filenames for each web page. If the page is about women’s brown boots then your file name should be womens-brown-boots.xxx. Such as: yourdoman.com/womens-brown-boots.html.
- Organize your directory structure. Don’t throw all your pages into the root folder and don’t use too many directories/sub directories. Keep it simple yet organized.
- Plan out your internal links. Develop your navigation effectively, implement no follows sparingly, link content to other pages liberally and use absolute links.
- Use content effectively. Make sure your content does the job of selling to your visitors but is also keyword rich. Don’t go overboard on keyword usage, but only as it functions best for the visitors.
SEO Don’ts:
- Don’t junk up your code. Get rid of junk code such as on-page styles, JavaScripts and excessive tables. Keep your code lean and clean and validate if at all possible.
- Don’t add a bunch of junk links to the bottom of your pages. Footer links are great, but don’t just add junk links to pages that serve no value to your visitors strictly for the SEO benefit.
- Don’t settle for stock content. Take the time to develop custom content for your site. Don’t use manufacture descriptions unless you add your own descriptive content as well.
- Don’t junk up your URLs. Keep your URLs clean and tidy without a lot of excess variables or session IDs.
These are just a few decent starting points for beginners in what they should and should not do with their site pages. Implementing these few tips won’t suddenly shoot your site to the top of the search results, but it can begin the process of making your site much more search engine friendly and in a better place to be noticed by the engines.
Check out our small business news site.
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Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Quickie Dos and Don’ts