Hiring an SEO Company

Posted: Sunday, August 14th, 2011 by | Filed under: , , ,

When hiring an SEO company for any long-term SEO services, it’s important to know what is involved and what to expect. Our previous post, “Five Questions to Ask Your SEO Agency Before You Hire Them” gave you an introduction to important questions to ask during the “shopping” process. We’ve added five more important questions to keep in mind when looking to hire an SEO company.

Are you using link building and what mythology?

The answer should, without hesitation, be yes. Link building is a large portion of SEO and should be coming from different sources and platforms: Quality content, quality articles, blogs, public relations, authorized directories and authorizes sites. No link farms should be involved.

Are you using hidden text, links or anything that the user cannot see for SEO?

This is something all business website owners should be aware of. Cloaking is a known technique where content changes when spiders visit the website. This is a big no-no for any website and should not be part of the SEO services your agency is providing. Aside from cloaking, there should be no hidden text or links built into your website.

Do you perform analysis on competitors and keywords? Read more …

Tags: , , ,

Analyzing Keywords for Best SEO

Posted: Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 by | Filed under: , , ,

In our last post, we mentioned that there are two things to consider when identifying your SEO keywords. In today’s update, we cover the second half of the keyword identification process: competition analysis.

Competition for the keyword: When dealing with search engine marketing, you’ll want to ask yourself how many other sites are competing to be noticed for your target keyword. It’s not surprising that is a lot more competition for the keywords “bakery nyc” than there are for “bakery union square nyc.” If at all possible, you should target the smaller market because you will have a better chance of standing out among the crowd of listings. It’s the equivalent of holding up a sign at a rally of 300 people versus holding up a sign at a rally of only 30 people. In the first scenario, you are exerting a lot of energy to be heard, but the sheer mass of people you are competing has the power of diluting even your mightiest efforts. On the other hand, in the second scenario, you don’t have to exert as much energy, yet you will still have a better chance of being noticed.

The best SEO keywords are the ones that are popular and have a low rate of competition. As a result, doing prior research before embedding keywords into the various pages of your website is critical and can save you a lot of time/resources. Read more …

Tags: , , ,

Importance of Analytics for SEO

Posted: Friday, May 20th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

Once you have finished inserting keywords in the individual pages of your website, you will need to keep track of your web marketing progress. Search engines routinely index and re-index web pages as a way to keep their search results up with the times. This results in a time delay that explains why it may take a few months before you can actually see an increased ranking in search engine listings.

The next step in the SEO process is to look at web analytics. Now that you have optimized your web pages, you will need to collect and analyze data about your various optimized web pages. Thanks to web analytics, you can view how many people go to your site, where they are coming from, how long they stay on your site, and what pages they are viewing. All of this information is incredibly helpful in understanding what your viewers are interested in. For example, if you see that most people are clicking on your “mini cupcakes gift sets” page, then it’s a good indicator that you should continue putting a lot of focus on that area, both on the website and in the actual bakery. And if you see that the “festive pies” page isn’t getting as many hits as the other pages, then you should evaluate the situation and determine whether this is because the page itself is not appealing or if perhaps customers are just not that interested in festive pies (in which case you could then apply your web analytics findings to the real world by reducing your ordering of pie ingredients).

One of the gems of analytics is that you can view a lot of information about the success of your content marketing. For example, you can look at your bounce rate, which tells you how many people go to your site and leave without looking through any of your other pages. High bounce rates are obviously unfavorable, but if you find that you have a high bounce rate, then most likely your viewers do not feel that your site is relevant to their needs. In that case, you should probably work on changing your content so that your keywords make it clear that your site has something that will interest them. Read more …

Tags: , ,