Skylab Design & Communication

1. Make sure the SEO firm has great rankings for their own site! Too many “SEO Pirates” claim to know SEO, but in actual fact have no idea how to even rank their own website.

2. Ask for samples of client results. It’s important they can demonstrate experience in SEO and show results for highly competitive key phrase like “skincare” etc. Do not accept long tail key phrases like “buy low cost skincare online” which are very easy to rank.

3. Always ask for references. Make sure references are legitimate, fake testimonials are very common!

4. ALWAYS choose a company that guarantees page 1 positions on Google. Guaranteed page 1 of Yahoo & MSN is useless, Google is what counts – 90% of people choose Google as their preferred search engine. Make sure they guarantee more than 1 keyword. Read the fine print before you sign any contracts.

Web marketing companies who are “anti” guaranteeing page 1 results may produce very little and you’ve wasted thousands of pounds in the process. They need to be held accountable!

4. Ask what offsite optimization methods they use. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what your SEO firm will do before proceeding. Too many companies take clients money and do a few hours work. A few hours here and there, does not work! SEO is a time consuming process, that requires extensive work to see exceptional results.

10 SEO Tips

DIY (Do It Yourself) SEO has become quite popular and if you have the time to learn you can implement your own search engine optimization strategies. Here is our top 10 SEO tips for beginners, whether you choose to try it yourself or hire an SEO company, these steps are essential:

1. Make sure your title tag is not stuffed with keywords but does contain your most important ones. Search engines nowadays, especially Google are becoming very good at detecting lazy tactics and if you stuff your title tags with too many keywords you can get penalized.

2. Large images and fancy flash websites may look pretty but they can be a big turn-off for search engine spiders. Everyone likes their website to be attractive but the price you pay in slow load times can affect your SEO in a negative way.

3. Don’t always focus on major keywords, the most important keywords for your industry will be highly competitive and very difficult to rank highly for. E.g. “car” vs. “car rental”. In the beginning attempt to rank less competitive keywords and longer phrases. As you get more comfortable with SEO you can then optimize for more sought after keywords.

4. Definitely do not use black hat SEO techniques or tactics. When you are struggling for traffic it can be tempting to take a short-cut and use some of the more unscrupulous SEO strategies available but even if you get some positive short-term results you will be at a high risk of being penalized or banned from the search engines index.

5. Read blogs and ask others for advice. Blogs are a great way to learn about what is new and useful in search engine optimization and marketing. Most professional SEO’s spend at least 2 hours a day reading and writing on webmaster related blogs.

6. Consider engaging an SEO company. There are only so many hours in each day and good business owners know their time is better spent delegating rather than doing all the work yourself, leave it to a professional who knows search engine secrets. Nobody can be expected to know (and do it) all, optimizing your website for the search engines is a must do! And the earlier you optimise correctly the better.

7. Don’t hire an SEO if their first language is not the language you are optimizing for. When it comes to keyword research, content writing and tweaking it is important that the person/firm you hire speaks the native language you are optimizing, marketing and analyzing for as a first language.

8. You might have heard this one before but it is worth repeating, content is KING. Great content will make your website a winner and make any SEO goals much easier to accomplish. Sometimes you need to go back to the basics and re-build your site from the ground-up.

9. This one should probably be higher up the list and I know it causes many sleepless nights for those new to the field, Google page rank. Don’t sweat it, visual page rank is not very important. If you build good content and get lots of quality links your page rank will rise naturally over time. Google has recently used page rank as a weapon against 1000’s of sites that it feels is selling paid links. Many large, authority sites have had their page rank cut in half or taken away completely.

10. Don’t put-off SEO any longer. You might be thinking that your website is just costing you a few hundred dollars a year for hosting so no big deal. The real cost is in business opportunities lost and money wasted on more expensive forms of promotion and advertising. SEO does not offer instant traffic or profits but if you have a little patience the payoff down-the-road can be substantial, don’t procrastinate any longer, learn SEO or hire an SEO firm today.

SEO vs PPC – Which is Better?

Pay per click advertising (PPC):
Advantages:
• You get instant results. If you advertise your website through PPC, then you will get traffic now and not several months later.
• PPC ads are perfect for limited offers such as holiday sales.
• You can stop PPC ads at any time.
• PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing pages.
• PPC ads also work with websites that are not very well designed and wouldn’t get good search engine rankings.
• PPC ads allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords, including misspellings and other keyword variations that you cannot put on your web pages.

Disadvantages:
• The price of PPC ads will double in the next 12 months.
• Competitors can click on your ads and waste your daily budget.
• Most searches look in the organic rankings (SEO) NOT in the sponsored ad section (PPC).
• PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don’t calculate the maximum bid price correctly.
• Click fraud can be a problem. Not all clickers are potential customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO):
Advantages:
• Traffic through organic search engine results is almost free if the up-front work has been done.
• After optimizing your website you can use your money for different things and the optimized site will still run.
• A larger number of visitors and search result clickers is not a problem.
• Page 1 position increase the value of your site & business.
• Organic rankings (SEO) has a 4 times higher conversion rate than sponsored ads (PPC).
• SEO delivers long term results that don’t require permanent financial input.

Disadvantages:
• Time is needed to see great results.
SEO delivers long lasting results and it costs considerably less in the long term. However, you must make sure that you optimize your website correctly, if your want to get high search engine rankings.

Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization both contribute to the success of your website. If you use both wisely, you can get many new visitors and customers without spending a fortune.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.