Search Engine Optimization

Over time a website is deemed as more credible, and ascribed more value. Where possible it is best to keep the same domain name, and the same page names. It is also a good practice to register a domain name for a long period of time since this is also known to improve a website ranking potential.

Traffic increases your website ranking, the more visitors the better. It is important to have links back to your website (Inbound or Back-links). Blogs, professional articles, banner advertisements, and respectful opt-out newsletters can be effective for this.

The proper use of Meta-tags, specifically the description, index, and title tags are very important. For each of these it is necessary to ensure that your targeted keywords (those likely to be used in a search to find you) are in place.

The heading tags h1 Tag to h5 Tag should be used for the page titles since heading titles are viewed as important, and are more likely to be indexed.

This refers to the text content (which should be ample and keyword rich) placed in the top 1/3 of the page; it is well known that content near the bottom of a page is often not indexed. In this regard be wary of using Banner Ads at the top of your pages.

Defined by a websites content matching the keywords submitted in a query. Rewrite page text to reflect more commonly searched terms, and ensure that the text on your pages match the keywords in your page Meta-tags.

Accessible navigation and site-maps are needed for a website to be fully indexed. One option is to create/upload an XML file; for pages that need to be hidden you can create a text file called robots.txt and have it placed in the root directory of the site.

It is important that your design and content keeps a visitor browsing, where possible provide free resources, and be sure your design is engaging. It is important to note that when your content is fresh it is perceived as having ongoing value so it is a good idea to change up content periodically.

Where possible convert your graphics with text to HTML text, and remove or reduce the use of Flash (flash cannot be indexed by the engines). This is important both for ADA and SEO.

Social Media efforts, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are now more important than ever, especially since Googles new ranking algorithm highly ranks shared social media content.

Black hat techniques are practices that are viewed as a deceptive means to get a high ranking, vs. organic (approved) methods. Black hat practices can get a website banned for life so be wary of the many self-title SEO experts.

As part of the evaluation process we will link up the website to Google Webmaster and Developer Tools for its effective assessment and tracking options.

Initially we will set URLs to display as http://www. to avoid duplicate URL penalties, and we then create and upload an XML Site-map (an index of all your pages).

In Webmaster and Developer Tools we evaluate:
potential crawl errors and stats potential blocked URLs and broken links top search queries and pages inbound links to your site internal linking to key pages the number of web pages indexed duplicate meta descriptions duplicate title tags missing title tags non-index-able content page content keywords page speed mobile-friendly status

Note: If site security improvements are needed we can also provide a professional firewall and virus scanner, remove Trojans and other malware, and add additional measures to prevent hacker exploits.

From our website evaluation and what we discovered through Webmaster Tools we will make initial keyword corrections to the text copy and headings of all of your pages. We will rewrite the meta titles and descriptions (SEO tags in header source) to ensure that they are keyword optimized, of optimal length, and both unique and specific to the page content (important). We will edit the “alt” (images) and “title” (links) tags of all pages for effective indexing and to ensure ADA compliance, and for product pages we will rename images to ensure that they can be found from image searches.

If page speed is a concern we will minify JavaScript and CSS files, optimize image file sizes for web, utilize a high speed cache system, add far future expiration, GZIP compression, etc.

Once all of the initial corrections have been made we will link your website up to Google Analytics. This will provide us detailed reports on all facets of your website traffic patterns. The primary reports in Analytics include: Audience, Traffic Sources, and Content.

The Audience section is a great place to get an overview of your website’s visitor needs, practices, and experience on your website. Here you’ll get stats on visits, page views, page duration and depth, duration, and bounce rate. You’ll get the language, country, and city of your visitors, the browser, operating system, and ISP being used, and mobile visitor info (operating system, service provide, screen resolution).

The Traffic Sources section is the place to get the needed SEO information for site optimization and submission targeting, and is one of the areas we rely on often to assist clients in achieving a prominent ranking. This section includes the percentage of search traffic, referral traffic (and the referring domain name), and direct traffic, the keywords provided to locate your website, organic vs. paid search statistics, and AdWords campaigns if applicable. It also includes landing pages (page visitor initially arrives at), a geographical summary of visitor location, and a Social section wherein you create custom goals, view social referrals, social plug-ins, and social visitor flow.

The Content section provides much of the above content, yet with a bit more detailed information. Here we have a listing of the pages visited by frequency (content drill-down), including page views, unique page views, avg. time on page, entrances, bounce rate, exit percentage, and page value (if AdSense is applied). We also have landing and exit pages which helps us understand user behavior.

For our advanced SEO clients we also we will also link your Analytics account to Google Webmaster tools, your primary Social Media pages, and add Analytics to your jQuery Mobile website as applicable.

Once your website tracking is in place we will further evaluate the success of your pages. After a few weeks we will have a clear idea of your website’s improvement, and from this we will make additional changes, as needed. We also utilize Google AdWords keyword monitoring to get a current listing of the most popular queried words/phrases for your specific business/industry since these may change over time. After these final changes have been made we typically like to wait a couple of months before making additional changes so as to ensure that the website placement has had time to move.

We email our clients PDF reports weekly that are tailored to their specific website tracking needs. A client will typically receive in the range of 10-15 reports that will cover all of the aforementioned. For clients with a GMail account we will provide them online access to their accounts for their own evaluation.

In most cases our optimization and marketing clients will achieve a top search engine ranking within a few months, if not sooner. Yet it is important to note that the heart of any good SEO plan is the recognition that periodic changes need to be made to the website to ensure that search trend changes are provided for, and that the website is updated as well since changeable content is needed for the best SEO benefit. We encourage our clients to utilize blogs and social media where possible to augment their online web presence.