“What is Search Engine Optimisation?”
SEO is the black art of achieving a higher position for your site in search results, but nobody can honestly guarantee a top 10 listing. There are only 10 spots available, not everybody can be in them.
What you need are results for what your potential customers are actually searching for, not top results for words and phrases that nobody uses. SEO scammers find search terms that hardly any sites return results for and then customise your site to do so. That’s the only way they can fulfil their promise of first page search listings within a week, by ignoring reality.
Another suspect SEO practice is Link Farming. They cross link everyone’s sites and write blogs and articles specifically for the purpose of creating links. This can help your results short term, until the articles get downgraded for being bogus and you not only lose the brownie points your site was awarded for having so many links to it, you get downgraded for cheating.
There are many genuine SEO companies who will put in a lot of time and effort tweaking your site to help it crawl up the rankings. The rules are always changing as Google and the rest change their algorythms and it’s a specialised field of expertise. Unfortunately, for every dedicated expert there are 100 scammers who see an easy way to achieve regular income by signing people up to endless contracts.
For the majority of site owners, the best advice I can offer is to make sure the basics are in place and then regularly update your content to keep it useful and relevant to your market. And then don’t neglect to promote your website every opportunity you get, both online and via conventional media and print.
I do not offer an ongoing monthly contract SEO package
There are commonsense things I do automatically when I build a new site which fall under the heading of SEO, such as using search-engine-friendly URLs and making sure all pages and images have description tags. I install Google Analytics, submit a site map and install a “robot.txt” file on the server to make sure indexing happens quickly.
Plus there’s a lot more I can do if you’re happy to pay a little extra. This includes setting domain preferences (all “http://www…” redirect to “http://…”), a more thorough search into, and application of, keywords for your industry and competitors, making suggestions for relevant under-exploited content that could help your site to be more useful and therefore more popular. I get a bit more creative with links both within and to your site and make suggestions for linking to others.
I also advocate using Google Adwords, even if only for a few months, just to kick start traffic until the search engines get around to ranking your site.
I don’t claim to be a dedicated SEO expert but I will make sure your website has a better chance of success than the majority which don’t even attempt to get the basics right.
If your website could use a boost, I can certainly help you. The cost depends on the size and complexity of the task but starts at $360 for a one-off service on a basic site under 10 pages.