10 Things You
Need to Know about SEO
By Ken O’Donnell (c) 2010
This article was originally written by Gavin Messenger of Australia (Australia SEO companies) in 2009. I thought it was so good, that I updated it with my own thoughts and experience on SEO and am sharing it with you.
Before choosing an SEO company, consider the following so you don’t waist your money and your time.
 1. Strategy
Please, don't ask for an SEO proposal from SEO Company until you have set your strategy, or be ready to invest in a strategy to be developed for you. Too often, SEO companies will respond with a full proposal, including lots of articles to be created, sites to be built and links to be implemented without a clear strategy and a lot of assumptions. Know who your market is and what people you want to come to your website.
Some website markets are straight forward, but others are more complex and would benefit from asking a couple of marketing firms to get involved at the SEO research stage - ask them about the strengths and weaknesses of your site, the call to action, what they think of your competitors, and what strategic approach they would take with your site. Can’t afford a marketing company? Ask your friends and clients. Most people are happy to share their opinions and you may get some really good feedback. Do not act on one persons advise. Consider it, but only act if your feel it’s right, or if you hear it over and over. By the way, this does require you to listen; not always easy for a business owner.
Nothing is for free and you get what you pay for- To get the best advice from this process, expect to pay the marketing companies involved and or maybe offer a free-be to your client who takes the time to help you. A small percentage of your online budget spent on a good strategy could save you huge dollars in the long term. Even better, pay two marketing companies for strategy recommendations and then choose the best one for your business or a combination of the two! Again…you have to listen to this feedback to gain anything from it.
2. Choosing an SEO company or consultant
You need to work with someone who can communicate about SEO in plain English, someone who can take complicated ideas and techniques and turn them into something you can understand, then help you make an informed decision - especially as there are often many possible solutions to choose from.
Someone with experience in your vertical - such as real estate, retail, construction, religion, schools, communities, nonprofits, etc. An SEO company with experience across multiple types of business, as well as experience that is directly relevant to you will have better problem solving skills and more exposure to technologies and solutions. Experience in your sector will mean the SEO company will be very helpful in defining your strategy, understanding terminology, and knowing what your competitors are doing and most importantly, know whay your potential clients are thinking and looking for.
3. Expectations
What are realistic expectations from your investment in SEO?
 Too often, we see marketers defining their keyword set or crazy goals for their site without any basis in how SEO really works. If you are a law firm, for example, and you want to rank highly for terms such as "lawyer", or "attorney." Then you have to take into account that these are extremely popular and competitive terms. It might not be achievable, and even if it is, it's probably a very hard and expensive road to get there. Besides that, you’re in San Francisco or maybe Boston…do you really want a DUI client from the UK? Be specific when listing your goals and expectations.
Be open to advice when setting the goals for your website (which should be a part of the keyword research period of your SEO project). If you have a PPC campaign running first, you can use the keyword data from that campaign to gain an understanding of what is important for your website.
4. Using the Right Language
Optimizing begins with keyword research that helps you understand the language your customers are using to find your products and services. Be realistic. It may seem obvious, but if the words your customers are using to search are not on your website pages, then you won't be found in the search engines for those words. Similarly, brand words and buzz words are all very nice in marketing, but if people aren't using those words to search, then again you won't be found. But…maybe they are being used…and that’s why the research is so important. Don’t skimp on the research!
Be open to changing and adding language and wording on your website. Search engines read words, not pictures or graphics, so be open to the idea of changing your website to the language people use and are searching for and adding some extra text. Everyone wants a website with “no scroll bar,” but unless you have about a zillion dollars for a PPC marketing plan, forget it. Optimization is about including those words in the right areas of your pages (such as navigation, links, headings, meta tags and content) so the search engine sees all the right signals and understand where your site's pages should be ranked for.
5. Measurement
Rankings are not the only measure of success! For many years, SEO firms have measured everything on rankings. They kind of had to. Traditionally, their attitude was- we get you the rankings and bring you the traffic, what you and your web design team do with that traffic, is your problem.
 However, the SEOPRO’s realize you won’t stick around paying our fees if you’re not getting the ROI. That being said, we tend to bend over backwards, making website changes and more to make sure your online marketing campaign is successful.
More on Measurement- We recommend using analytics similar to a PPC (Pay Per Click) search campaign for a more comprehensive measure of success. SEOPRO’s offers this via a hosted ‘stats package’ if you are hosted on our KO servers or you can get it for free at Google. Here is a simple description of how to do that: Take what you are spending on SEO and divide it by the cost per conversion. For some of our clients, they only need one new client per year to make the cost worth while. For others, they need 10 new warm leads or 20 new sales per week. This needs to be disclosed upfront, so your SEO team understands their goals and how to best guild you.
An accurate snapshot of where your website is before starting is very important, so insist on this. If your SEO company does not do this and supply you with a copy, you may want to rethink about using them. It's best to analyze these stats over a period of six months to allow for any changes in SEO rankings to come into effect. SEO may take a few months for a new domain/website, rather than days like PPC. But the results will last longer and tend to get more “usable traffic.” See our Pro’s and Cons about PPC.
6. Moving Variables
There are so many moving variables in SEO that it would be impossible to find one person or company who knows everything! Anyone who claims they know it all should be immediately disregarded! A good SEO company is busy with work, but yet has to dedicate themselves to research and education regularly as the search engine change their algorithms regularly, and the technology is ever changing. A good SEO finds a balance with both these companies are worth their weight in gold. Their value is in their experience to find the right SEO balance and implementation. One tiny piece of SEO advice from a good SEO company which may take 10 minutes to explain, could be worth more than five weeks of a web designer’s fee, so listen carefully.
7. One Agency or Two? Does 1 + 1 really = 3?
Some agencies have two separate teams working on SEO and PPC. Some marketers choose two completely different agencies to handle their SEO and PPC campaigns.
However, the two are related and the results from one can be useful to the other. For instance, the keyword data from your PPC campaign can help with your SEO keyword research. When PPC and SEO listings are seen together on a search engine, some believe they improve the click-through and conversion rates for both campaigns. This is a concept that SEOPRO’s is still exploring and testing at the expense of a few clients we have that insist on using both organic SEO and PPC. The jury is still out at the time of writing this.
Note: We did hear one interesting thing from one person that we surveyed- “I only click on paid for ads, because I know they are for real.” Hi comment was shocking to us, but did make us open our eyes to PPC. Do people searching the web use them to weed out bad companies? Stay tuned…we’ll let you know when we know.
Web Developers are not SEO Experts- SEO people design for Google and web designers design for people.
Finally, a word on expertise. Most web developers say they are experts in SEO. There is no doubting that many of them do a reasonable job, but they are not truly specialists in the area of SEO. In the same way, I wouldn't recommend that an SEO specialist designs your website. They are specialist skills, which both contribute to the success of your business. As much as we hate to admit it, this is very true. That’s why KO Websites spun off a separate division called the SEOPRO’s. Designers and SEO people just don’t think the same and their objectives are different, even though for you they are the same. SEO people design for Google and web designers design for people.
9. Use of Java Script
Those pesky robots that the major search engines rely on to rank web pages have until recently imposed some limitations for web development. While useful code such as Java Script can make your website really functional - a simple example is a loan calculator, and many websites' navigation and links - and thus attractive to users, the robots often couldn't follow the code properly, and thus skipped over it. The major problem was that commonly, web developers didn't know that Java Script wasn't being read or followed by the robots.
That has changed recently, with Google updating its technology so that the robots can read and follow Java Script. When the robots can follow a website's navigation and links properly, the SEO rankings are greatly influenced.
10. Flash
Adobe and Google got together a few years ago and decided on a strategy to make flash more compatible and readable by SEO bots/spiders. Basically it involves a java script that shows the search engines what the files used names are, and the text use. An all flash site is still a looser for strong SEO, but using some flash is ok if done right. We highly recommend using flash to keep visitor attention and a better user experience and we use it on this website too. However, how the flash is done does matter, so consult with your SEO company before building the flash presentation.
About SEOPRO
Ken O’Donnell is owner of KO Websites, a small but powerful web design, SEO and web hosting firm, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ken’s claim to fame is getting RCS.edu ranked #1 one on Yahoo for “Christian Schools” and Turnkeyinstitute.com (a very small local Bay Area vocational school) ranked #3 on Google for “Dubai construction schools,” and winning the SBCA and ICAS awards for online marketing in 2009.
To contact the SEOPRO’s, KO Websites or Ken himself, please click here or call toll free 1-866-797-KOKO.
Thank you for reading this article and we hope it serves you well. |
