As the demand grows for internet marketing services many companies are adding or increasing the amount of budget they spend on optimizing their web sites ranking or results on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Technology has changed and along with it the methodology for implementation has become more streamlined and effective. Below are several tips to follow when optimizing your site or choosing a service provider:
- Let the experts do what they do
You’re not going to hire an electrician and then tell him how to fish wire or install a circuit breaker. Many companies get caught up in their current web site structure or design and often demand that SEO companies provide results without updating or changing the sites. One of the more important elements of search engine optimization is continuos content updating. This means adding or refining web content and images with key word and key phrase rich text that can be crawled effectively.
- Understand Penalization
A bad idea is to get sucked into a company promising results through link farming, duplicate content or meta-tag generation. A general rule is that the more sites you have linking in to your site then the more popular your site is thus making the search engines believe your site is relevant, trustworthy and deserving of top page rank. Many SEO companies may submit your web site to link farms that mass produce links to your site. This practice is well known and will actually hurt your rank.Everybody knows the term “key word” or “key phrase” by now. What you type in to the search engines. It’s a ringer for some companies that promise key word research and development as well as writing proper meta descriptions into each and every page. Meta Tags are at the point of extinction and mostly obsolete and irrelevant to your search results.
- Fontmatching (often referred to as hidden text)
The official term for this bad practice is keyword stuffing or font matching. The process is meant to increase page rank by including a lot of text at the bottom of a web page with all of the key phrases relevant (or sometimes not even so) to the site. The text would be the same color as the background of the web site. Technology is aware of this technique and this process is frowned upon and will have an adverse effect n your results. - Daily Web Submission
The promise or offer to submit your site to all the major search engines out there is preposterous unless you are looking to add your site to mass spam lists. Search engines crawl the web daily to pick up on your content and how it has changed. This is done automatically and the requirement to submit your site is not needed. What is needed are two major files to be added to your site directory. Ask your SEO providor if they will generate sitmap.txt (or sitemap.xml) as well as a robot.txt file. The sitemap is a roadmap of your site that the search engines use to filter through your site. The robot.txt file simply allows your site to be crawled (or in some cases not be crawled). - Fancy Animated Flash Sites
Yeah, they look great but they are not accessible for search results. Although there are some possible techniques to gain results for sites designed in Flash it is in no way recommended as a first choice. Stick with W3C compliant HTML/CSS for your best results.
One of the more important elements of search engine optimization is continuos content updating.
In summary, choose a company that has a good link building strategy in place, is willing to provide monthly, weekly and even daily reports on their results and allow your self some flexibility in providing content as well as time. Understand that your results are a direct result of your content. The SEO process is lengthy and requires continuous updating to achieve the highest organic results you can. The processes in place are making it simpler for small business to grab more market share with a first page search result.
