Strategic web development

How to Best Choose Your SEO Provider?

Choosing a SEO professional company is not an easy task.

You may have already searched for ‘SEO companies’ and you probably grasped the idea that the competition on the SEO services market is quite intense. What this means for you, a potential customer, is that you need to pick your company wisely.

Here are some questions worth asking before making the final decision as to whom to hire:

1. Is the company I am about to hire well known in the SEO market? Can they prove they are good website optimisers?
2. How long has the company been in the SEO business? Do they have enough expertise and experience?
3. What sort of SEO techniques the company uses? Do they use any ‘black hat’ tricks? – If so, stay away!
4. Does the SEO service include consultation? If so, how often?
5. Does the company guarantee the number one rank? – If it does, you have serious reason to doubt their competences.
6. What do other clients say about this SEO service? Make sure you check forums!
7. Where does the company gather backlinks from? – It is important your backlinks trace back to reputable websites.
8. Do they offer the possibility of subscription? – In order for your website to rank high across the time it is important that the website is serviced by professionals quite regularly. Remember that SEO is a long-term project!
9. How long will it take to see the results of the SEO service? – If the company promises you instantly successful results, this should make your eyebrows raise!
10. How much will it cost? - If the price mentioned to you seems lower than what most of competitors offer, be
    careful!

Hopefully asking these questions will help you make a better judgment of what sort of company you are dealing with. The bottom line is to find somebody who has good reputation in the SEO industry, does not charge too much, but also not too low; uses rightful techniques and does not promise miracles. A valid and good indicator of how good the company is in SEO may be their own website! Check what sort of clients they were working with before, if they have any testimonials and how well they score in the search engine rank. Having asked yourself the questions above surely you will make the right choice for your business!

Keep on reading our Ultimate Search Engine Optimisation series to find out more

The True Cost Of Search Engine Optimisation

As disappointing as it may be, we are not going to provide you with a specific number- when it comes to estimating the price of search engine optimisation service unfortunately there is no singular answer. Different companies charge different fees for what they provide and the service itself depends on various factors. There are three ways to go about the SEO cost.

One of them is doing the entire job on your own, and not pay at all (or relatively small fee for some online tool which is not free). The trade off here is of course one of time versus money- it may seem to you like the better and cheaper solution, but you need to remember that by doing it on your own you are going to spend quite a lot of time in front of the computer, doing the research and analysis. Also, if you are no expert in IT, the results may turn out to be not exactly what you were expecting.

Another way to approach SEO is to do it partially on your own and delegate some of the work to a SEO professional. For example, you may do the keyword research and write the content yourself but have the SEO company take care of the rest (articles, link building, etc.). Once again, this may be time consuming as you will still need to manage the project and make sure your part of the work is done as professionally as possible.

The third possible option is the ‘hands off’ approach where you just hire a SEO specialist/company and they do it all for you. This option is most costly in monetary terms, however makes you save a big amount of time and effort. Still, you do need to do some work- finding a company that will deliver best results for what you pay them is a challenge on its own, as SEO business is very competitive (you will get the idea once you start looking for SEO professional services). The cost of optimising your website will be dependent on:

• How intense the competition is, i.e. number of companies that are competing for the same key phrase
• Number of keywords
• Your own website factors such as – domain age, structure, size, current content
• Quality of SEO: new, small companies will probably charge less than a company who has been in the market for a while, has big customer base and more experience
• Support: many of the companies guarantee 24/7 support
• Geographic location (optimising locally is easier than optimising globally)

Additionally, you can choose among a varied range of SEO packages, SEO can be a once-off service or may be provided monthly or quarterly. The cost is therefore parallel to the effort- if your website requires a lot of work to be properly optimised, then a company promising to do it all for a relatively cheap price may seem a bit fishy and you should question whether they are just as professional as they say.

Ultimately, the decision is yours: depending on your business’ needs you have to make a valid decision of either spending a lot of time and effort and optimising it yourself, or making an investment and hiring a professional SEO company to do it for you.

Read more of our Ultimate SEO series for more of engine optimisation advice!

The Importance of Keeping An Eye On Your Online Competitors

As we all know, competition is everywhere. And probably nowhere else it is more intense than online- hundreds of thousands of websites offering the same range of products and services fight for the virtual crowd. This huge competition is one of the reasons it is so difficult for a website to appear high in the rank, on the first or even second page.

The SEO competitors’ analysis includes researching competing information for three to ten websites ranked for each key phrase. Competitors’ research is important because it establishes the level of competitive difficulty of each keyword: it shows us if the website has been lately optimised, what is its Google index and how many back links it has. This data gives us also insightful information as to what needs to be achieved for your website to be able to compete with the top-ranking sites for each keyword.

To be a little bit more precise, the elements you will be looking into for each analysed competing website are:

• Google PageRank
• Number of back links
• Quality of back links
• Onpage optimisation
• Content
• Age

Closer look into this information will make you understand that to a large extent your SEO strategy is a response to the strategies that your competitors chose, and so it’s important that you carefully analyse the data you have on the rest of players. Keep an eye on them- chances are you are not the only one trying to make your website score higher in the search engine rank and make it more popular!

More on the next part of our Search Engine Optimisation series!

SEO Auditing Secrets

Audit of your website is an integral part of every SEO process. As usual, there are few steps you need to take in order to make sure auditing will be useful and efficient.

First of all, try to figure out when was the last time your website underwent any major changes, like redesign (graphics and content), amendments to the URL and navigation. Ideally URLs need to be as descriptive and brief as possible and where possible include the keywords assigned for the page in question.

If your site’s structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders.

Individual page’s URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor or search engines that see only the URL could have a good idea of what the page is about. In addition to the issues of brevity and clarity, any dynamic parameter (the part of the URL that provides data to a database so the proper records can be retrieved) should be limited to as few as possible. In an ideal site, there should never be more than two.

Of significant importance are also title tag and meta tag. The title tag is the most important bit of text on a web page as far as the search engines are concerned. Additionally, most of the search engines will also use a page’s title tag as the blue link text and headline for a result (see image below) so it is important to make them informative and compelling.

When writing your title tag the rule of thumb is to distill the information into the clearest, most useful snippet, while retaining the primary keyword phrase as the first words in the tag. Make sure your title tag draws attention and draws the visitor in!

Now let’s move on to another part of SEO audit, which is the content of the website. Search engine friendly text is a text that can be read by search engines, e.g. plain text. Search engines cannot “see” text embedded in Flash files, images, so try to limit the use of flash or images to bare minimum, especially in your navigation panel. Try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs and image/file names on the page. Don’t go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same colour as the background or using CSS tricks). Also, update your website regularly- search engines are always in search for some fresh content!

Search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science, and one that can be harnessed to achieve better rankings!

Read more of our Search Engine Optimisation series to find out about the offsite optimisation!

SEO: How Do Search Engines Work & Why Bother with SEO?

People search the web for different reasons. They need to get information, they are interested in something or simply want to entertain themselves (many search the internet because they are simply bored!).

Few, however, actually know how search engines operate and why, while searching for a specific term, they get the particular results and not others. While engaging with SEO it is nevertheless important to understand how for example Google engine comes up with its page results. These are four ways search engines operate:

-  Crawling the Web – Firstly, search engines run automated programs, called “bots” or “spiders” that use the hyperlink structure of the web to “crawl” the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web.

-  Indexing  Documents - Once a page has been crawled, its contents can be “indexed” – stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine’s “index” (like a giant library)

-  Processing  Queries - Then, when a request for information (search) comes into the search engine (hundreds of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the documents that match the query.

-  Ranking  Results – Finally, when the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine’s algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.

Now that you know how search engines work, you can focus on the search engine optimisation process that is crucial for boosting your business!

Read more about SEO in our The Ultimate Search Enging Optimisation Series - there is no better way to understand online marketing!

Ways To Measure Your SEO Campaign

Now that you have optimised your website, for sure you want to know how well you did it and if your efforts paid off. Therefore, you need to measure your success. How to do that?

One of the most valuable sources for data, analysis and refinement in an SEO campaign is in the statistics available via website tracking and measuring programs. A good analytics program can provide an incredible amount of data that can be used to track your visitors and make decisions about who to target in the future and how to do it. Here are our suggestions on what KPIs  & tools you may find useful:

• Campaign Tracking – The ability to put specific URLs or referrer strings onto ads, emails or links and track their success.
• Action Tracking – Adding the ability to track certain actions on a site like form submission, newsletter signups, add to cart buttons, checkout or transaction completions and tying them together with campaigns and keyword tracking so you know what ads, links, terms and campaigns are bringing you the best visitors.
• Search Engine Referral Tracking – Seeing which search engines sent which visitors over time and tracking the terms and phrases they used to reach your site. Combined with action tracking, this can help you determine which terms are most valuable to target.
• Referring URLs & Domain Tracking – This allows you to see what URLs and domains are responsible for sending you traffic. By tracking these individually, you can see where your most valuable links are coming from.
• First-Time vs. Return Visitors – Find out what percentage of your visitors are coming back each day/week/month. This can help you to figure out how “sticky” and consistently interesting your site is.
• Entry Pages – Which pages are attracting the most visitors and which are converting them. You can also see pages that have a very high rate of loss – those pages which don’t do a good job pulling people into the site.
• Visitor Demographics – Where are your visitors coming from, what browsers are they using, what time do they visit? All these questions and many more can be answered with demographics.
• Click Path Analysis – What paths do your visitors follow when they get to your site? This data can help you make more logical streams of pages for visitors to use as they navigate your site, attempting to find information or complete a task.
• Popular Pages – Which pages get the most visitors and which are neglected? Use this data to help improve low popularity pages and emulate highly trafficked ones.
• Page Views per Session – This data can tell you how many pages each visitor to your site is viewing – another metric used to measure “stickiness.”

However, what you need to remember is that these tools provide you only with raw data – you need to apply the information they give you on your own. Experience and common sense should help you to discover which terms, visitors, referrers and demographics are most valuable to your site, enabling you to make the best possible decisions about how, whom and where to target.

What Does SEO Actually Include?

Search Engine Optimisation consists of few steps, and each of them carries equal importance for optimising your website. Some of the steps are more difficult and may require a professional to take care of it; others are relatively easy to be performed on your own.  While optimising your website you need to ask yourself an important question of how much time and effort you are willing to put into this task: it may be much more efficient to get professional SEO service rather than blindly modify the site.

For those who are courageous enough to get involved with SEO, here is it how it goes in general:

Firstly, you need to perform pre- optimisation research and analysis (which after a while may become a bit exhausting, I admit!). This involves keyword research, website analysis and competitors’ analysis. At this stage we are trying to establish which words, when typed into the search engine, will result in your page coming up high in the search engine page rank (SEPR). Since we also need to know who else is out there trying to steal your potential crowd, we are analysing the main competitors. Then we turn to more general website analysis which checks the general condition of the website we are optimising.

Secondly, you need to conduct an onsite optimisation. This task includes changing meta data (I know, just the word ‘meta’ makes you already think of quantum physics, but it’s not as bad!), content, internal linking and website architecture.

Lastly awaits the offsite optimisation. This process covers promotion of your website on the web through acquiring links from other relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites- something professionals gave a fancy name of ‘link building’.

All in all, these are all the steps to follow while optimising your website. Get into more detail by reading our next previous post on keyword research!