Nature of the SEO Work
While there is a wealth of information on the internet about SEO, there is also alot of misinformation. Rumors run rampid and people and companies do things that actually hurt their search engine rankings. Then there are the "johnny come lately's" that simply read a $47 ebook, and think they are a SEO expert. Don't invest your time and money unless you know you are dealing with an SEO expert. Interview a few people and ask them to explain exactly what they will do for you. There are no secrets or special tricks that anyone has. Look for an honest expert that can explain to you exactly what they are doing. There should be no smoke and mirrors, just work layed out step by step. Look for samples that they can provide. Ask to speak to satisfied customers. Know what you are getting into, and what you are paying for. Build long term value.
What should an SEO do for you
An SEO should spend time with you understanding your business. This will help you achieve your goals in the most timely fashion. They should work with you to target keywords for your business. A keyword analysis will provide you with most value. Keywords that are related to your business that you may not be using are the easiest way to get more visitors to your site. A good description must be used for your site so once you achieve a top ranking, someone will click on your site to find out more. Be careful when using Metawords, as you may give your competition an x-ray of what you terms you are targeting. As far as I know they play a significant part of only one major search engines algorithm.
You will need highly targeted links pointing to your site, to let the search engines know your site is an "authority" on the subject. A SEO expert will handle this tedious task for you. If this critical step is done wrong you will find it extremely difficult to be ranked high in the search engines. If you link to the wrong sites you will be penalized. High quality link partners are the key to success. Don't trade links with just anyone who asks for a link, this is dangerous. Is reciprocal linking a thing of the past?
The best way to grow your business is to find an SEO expert than can get you to the top of the search engine listings. If an expert guarantees you a number one position for a search term that is a tip off that they are not really an expert. A more realistic guarantee would be a top 10 listing in one of the search engines. Ask them for references, and call the references. If they are happy chances are you will be happy too. Be careful who you choose to work with.
How much are you leaving on the table?
If your competitors have hired a professional SEO expert and you have not, how much money are you leaving on the table. How many top ten positions does your company occupy compared to your competitors? Are you also dominating the keywords you are targeting in the pay-per-click arena? Is your company showing up in all the major search engines? Are you using more than one website. If so don't duplicate content, since you will be penalized. Is there a strategy to get around this? You need to get a good keyword strategy so you don't waste money on terms that won't convert. Some people are only doing research, while others are buyers. Track who is coming to your site.
Are all the search engines using the same algorithm?
No, each company uses its' own proprietary algorithm. Therefore a site may rank high in one search engine and lower in another. The key is to find a good search engine expert to make sure your site is ranking high in all the search engines. While some search engines "borrow" results from other search engines the big 3 include google, MSN, and yahoo. Others pull from the DMOZ directory and the Yahoo directory. Some other start ups such as Ice Rocket are starting to build momentum. The reason being the amount of spam in the other search engines. Yahoo is doing a index update right now. We'll see how the results pan out. Looks like a little bit of a purge.
Whats the deal with Page Rank?
It has been suggested that page rank is not important as it once was. The evidence for this include less frequent updating of the PR in the google toolbar, as well as more SE results that don't have a high PR. Latent semantic indexing has become much more important, and will continue to make an impact on the search engine results. Google continues to evolve as search engine optimizers crack the code to their algorithm. SEO's can see the links and PR and get a good idea where a page will rank. With LSI it will allow those pages that are more on target to show up in the SERP's. Will Google continue with a quarterly update of page rank? We will soon see in a few days. The toolbar will start showing inconsistant results, until the final update is over. It is interesting to see this phase take place. Apparently page rank isn't being even being updated quarterly anymore. I guess this is good since people can no longer just buy page rank. However, it would be nice to let people know where their websites stand in relation to others. Pagerank was even down for a period of 4 days in May 2004. Now google is using what is known a "trust-rank". Certain sites are "trusted" more than others.
Anyway who is Doug Cortese? A Basing Ridge NJ SEO expert. Located in New Jersey 07920. If you need a little bit of work done or alot, I can help. You don't know what you are missing until you've had a top search engine ranking. It could explode your business with results that you can't even imagine. You may recoup your investment in as little as a week. Start small and increase at the pace you want. Once you start seeing some results for a few keyword terms, you will want to start targeting other keywords. Build momentum, and then move on to more aggresive targets. The most important thing is to get started. Search engine optimization is one of the most important steps any online business can take. Otherwise you are fighting an uphill battle. But make sure you have multiple domains. But don't duplicate content.
Page rank update: It appears google is updating the PR shown in its toolbar on April 22. Looking at various datacenters page rank is varying, thus indicating a PR update. Google seems to be on a modified schedule of updating page rank. You can't even count on the quarterly updates. They also show a random pattern of backinks. Keeping users offgaurd. Or are those links more important?
Google has introduced more targeted ads for their adsense network. This will allow publishers to choose which websites they want their ads to appear on. This way they can choose quality sites, and skip those that don't target the audience that they want. They have also introduced a new bidding system for page impressions for specific sites. Again this will reward the best sites with the best content. They have also indicated they will allow animated ads. This should be interesting to see, as they could be quite annoying. It feels like things are reverting back to the way they were five years ago. Banners everywhere, blinking, flashing, ugly! As Google just reported record earnings, I am sure they will be quick to remove this feature if it annoys anyone. Another new feature they have added are links by Google. Where the user can click a link and it will open a screen of paid search resutls. The page opens on a blank page, so it doesn't retain the original sites look and feel. Is this type of page useful to visitors? I'm sure they will test the results, and decide to keep these links or get rid of them. They keep reporting record earnings and obviously are doing the right thing. With all the PHD's on staff they are bound to get a few thing right. But can the record growth continue or will it bust like the internet boom in the late 1990's. What will happen when other competitors enter.
Believe it or not Googles site was down today for about 15 minutes. They say due to a DNS issue. Even the giants can have problems, showing how fragile the internet can be. Imagine the revenue they lost in that period of time. They sure were dancing. They have now introduced advertisements in RSS feeds. But you must have 100 subscribers. Hopefully you do have 100 subscribers. And you can test out this new tool. The question is what will they payout be? Clearly this is the trend of the future. RSS has great advantages. From what I have heard the rate of pay is significantly lower when ads are displayed through RSS feeds.
This page will be changed shortly to a blog format. This will make updating easier. It will also keep ideas better organized. Well this hasn't happened as quickly as I had hoped, but should be getting closer. Should be using Movable Type shortly to manage things. Although wordpress has merit as well. Especially with the plugins available. Plus there are nice layouts. This way it will look nicer as well. Sorry I was busy with other projects, but this should get rolling soon. Not too soon though. As I get older, I am thinking more and more about tanning indoors as opposed to risking myself in the sun..