Professional Web Consulting

Long lasting first page results get you noticed.
Engaging on-page content wins sales.
The net buzzing about your business builds credibility.

And all those roads to success start here.

What is SEO?

What is SEO

Search Marketing (SEM), or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is a complex, ever changing process.

Search engines constantly change their algorithms, shuffle their indexes, merge results and share content. The only consistent thing about marketing your website to them is that what works really well today probably won't work so well tomorrow.

That's why you need an experienced search marketing professional who keeps two fingers on the pulse of the major search engines. If Google hiccups, we know about it. If Yahoo! gets stubborn, we'll coax those rankings back to the first page.

Working with search engines is a long-term, high maintenance relationship and we're dedicated to managing that relationship so you don't have to, and at an investment you can feel good about.


So How Exactly Does SEO Work?

This is the million dollar question. And we can almost guarantee you that for every person you ask, you'll get a different answer. That's because marketing to the search engines is like any creative endeavor: cooking, painting, carpentry, etc.

If you ask five people to bake a cake, you'll get five unique cakes each with different ingredients. Ask ten people to craft you a chair and you'll get ten distinct pieces each with its own style.

Because the search engines change their ranking algorithms (the equations they use to analyze a website's reputation and rankability) so often, and they each use such widely varying criteria, there are literally hundreds of ways to promote your site to the first page of search results.

However, there are certain universal guidelines regarding what central principles and elements are vital to your search marketing strategy. There are also very clear rules against certain practices that attempt to cheat or trick the search engines.

Fundamental Principles for Successful SEO

1. Content
Content will always be your key ticket to top rankings. Without it, any rankings achieved will be short-lived. For content to help your ranking, however, you need a lot of it and it has to be updated regularly. Most importantly, each page of content must target a specific keyword term.

However, if your site possesses content that is auto-generated or is poorly written, i.e. a human visitor would not find it useful and informative, the search engines will figure it out and demote your site, possibly even blacklisting you and preventing you from showing up in their results at all.

We develop well-written, keyword targeted content for your site that is updated consistently and monitored for rankability. Your business will enjoy the added benefit of an ever-growing resource library of information that your site visitors will enjoy and which will also help with your sales conversions.

2. Links
More specifically, one-way links from authoritative sites in your niche market. You can find out how authoritative a site is by looking at its Page Rank.

Page Rank, or PR, is a ranking system Google devised to show how much weight or authority a particular site has. No one can say the exact methodology Google uses to assign Page Rank, however all SEO experts agree that it largely has to do with the amount of incoming links a site has, how long it's been around, and visitor activity on the site (yes Google even knows how long someone remains on your site after they click through from the search results!).

What this means for you is that you want as many high PR sites linking into your site as possible (without you linking back to them). This is because Google gives these sites a lot of respect and values their "recommendations" signaled by who they choose to link to.

If all this sounds a bit complicated, think of it this way:

Google and the major search engines analyze your website the way scholars judge academic papers. The more journals and other reputable papers cite your research and quote you, the more authoritative and "expert" you become.

We negotiate inbound links on your behalf, concentrating on links from sites related to your market whose reputation thematically relates to the reputation you're trying to build. We also make sure these links deep-link into your website, meaning that they link to various pages in your website, rather than just to your homepage (also a sign that you're highly authoritative).

3. Visitor Behavior
Google knows everything. Other Search Engines like Yahoo! and MSN aren't so far behind. If a visitor clicks from their search engine into your site, and leaves immediately, Google knows that they didn't find what they were looking for. If too many people do this, Google will drop you from their rankings because they assume you're not relevant for that particular term. This is why site design, compelling content, and conversion analysis are important.

We offer Website Conversion Optimization in addition to SEO to help you address this particular issue.

4. Human Idiosyncracies
Google wants to know that a human is running the show. Automated SEO software, or any techniques that add hundreds of pages to your site within a week, or which create content automatically, are a dead giveaway that you're doing something Google doesn't like.

This won't just get you knocked off the top 10 rankings - Google and other search engines will ban your site from ever showing up in their results - even when someone searches your exact domain name. This is why any illegal or unethical techniques will kill your business.

We hand craft every single page of information on your website and upload those pages consistently over several months.

Universally Illegal SEO Practices: Avoid at ALL Costs

Search engines may be vague about what you can do to get top rankings. However, they are not vague about those practices that will get you banned from their rankings. For instance, Google provides Webmaster Guidelines that detail what you are NOT to do when promoting your website.

When you are looking for an SEO professional, be aware of these illegal techniques and the different "pet names" given them by dubious fly-by-night companies. We've provided several of them here for your easy reference. You can also download these tips in an easy-to-read PDF format.

How We Work With You

How we work

Because your goals, experience, and needs will always vary from our other clients, our first step will be to take you through our Marketing Intelligence Assessment.

This questionnaire will give us a holistic and detailed view of not just your traffic or website needs, but more importantly your overall marketing mix and how SEO can enhance it.

Your Marketing Intelligence Assessment will analyze the following areas:

  • » Benchmarks
  • » Overall Online Marketing Approach
  • » Additional Needs
  • » On-Page Optimization
  • » Sales & Lead Conversions
  • » Depth of Engagement
  • » Future Objectives

Once we receive your assessment, we will schedule a free consultation with you to discuss possible approaches to your campaign. However, almost all of our client campaigns include varying combinations of the following strategies.


Common Client Campaign Strategies

1. Keyword Term Analysis
Once you give us a list of keyword terms you'd like to target, we will do additional market research to determine the hundreds-to-thousands of keyword terms your target audience searches to find companies like yours. We will analyze these terms to find those with the best ranking potential (they have a good ratio between amount of searches and amount of competing websites).

However, unlike keyword analysis tools that only analyze the number of websites indexed in a search engine for a particular keyword, we are able to determine the exact number of websites optimized for the keyword. These are the only real competition you will have as you will quickly outrank, even with minimal optimization, any website that isn't optimized for your keyword.

So you'll often find a keyword term that appears highly competitive, with millions of websites listed in a search engine's results, is actually quite easy to rank for! Vice versa, you'll know not to waste your time on a term that may not show many results, but for which all those websites are well optimized - making the term hard to rank for.

Once we've compiled our master list of recommended keyword terms to target, we will provide you the list so you can provide any feedback necessary.

2. Content Creation
As we've mentioned before, content is key to any search marketing campaign. Therefore, there are three content areas that we will target:

  1. On-Site Optimization
    This includes visible content and source code. We will analyze your site code for errors that may prevent search engines from properly spidering your site. We will also analyze your site's code-to-text ratio and other coding elements. Lastly, we will review and edit your visible content for optimal keyword density while maintaining sales effectiveness.

  2. Article Creation
    We will produce one article for every keyword term we, together, choose to promote. Traditionally, this is between 200-400 articles. Each article is well written, informative, and engaging to ensure that they add value to your visitors' experience in addition to winning great rankings.

    Most importantly, we add these pages slowly over several months to ensure your site grows organically. This is a key element Google and other search engines look for when ranking a website - that it is constantly updating and adding new information.

  3. Publicity
    But we're not talking about traditional PR here. We develop additional articles that pay particularly close attention to your target audience's pressure points: the secrets they want to know, the tips they need to hear, the problems and solutions your company addresses.

    These articles will not be placed on your website, but will instead be promoted to hundreds of other websites in search of compelling articles on your particular subject. This achieves two objectives: 1) each article links back to your website, earning you one-way links from authoritative sites, and 2) the more independent websites that discuss your company or publish an article written by your company, the better your reputation will be. Your potential customers will find your company discussed on other websites, or see that other websites have endorsed you by publishing your article.

3. Linking Strategy
In addition to the links earned through article promotion, we will negotiate links on your behalf. We will concentrate on sites with high Page Rank and traffic rankings as links from these are considered powerful "votes."

4. Social Networking
We discuss this in depth on our What is Social Networking page.

5. RSS Feeds
We will implement RSS feeds on your blog and/or article pages to keep visitors apprised of new content. Search engines will also be notified through your RSS feed every time a page is added to your site, resulting in faster indexing.

6. Tracking and Analysis
You will receive detailed reports on your rankings across the major search engines, as well as site traffic and visitor behavior (we can only provide site and visitor data if you place StatCounter code on your website or provide us access to your own statistics program).

7. Traffic Conversion Optimization
Where many SEO campaigns fall short, we excel. Rather than just win you traffic, we ensure that traffic converts into sales and leads. To do this, we employ proprietary software that statistically analyzes your website. We help you develop numerous versions of key elements to your sales process (headlines, offers, colors, layout, intro paragraphs, calls to action, etc.). Each version is systematically tested against the others to not only determine the best version of each element, but more importantly the best combination of elements.

Because this particular service is based on scientific analysis and, in our experience, positively guaranteed to increase any company's sales by at least 30% (more often 50% to 85%!), we provide it for free. You only pay us once we achieve your results. However, your revenue must meet our minimum requirements.

To learn more about Traffic Conversion Optimization, please refer to our special report.


Pricing Models and Our Guarantee

We price each campaign on a per-client basis. Pricing is based on amount of hours you wish us to dedicate to your project each week, as well as which strategies you'd like us to implement. However, we are more than happy to work with your budget and can accommodate a variety of pricing models, including: hourly, per-project, weekly salary with a cap on hours, etc.

Our Guarantee: We cannot guarantee a certain number of rankings or that particular keywords will get ranked with particular search engines. There are simply too many variables to consider and anyone guaranteeing such should be avoided at all costs. However, we do guarantee the quality of our work.

When we tell you that we will reach a milestone within a certain amount of hours, if we fail to reach that milestone, we will complete additional work for free or at a pre-determined reduced fee until said milestone is reached. In addition, if after six months of site optimization, traffic is far below satisfactory, we will re-negotiate a severely reduced fee to continue promotion until a reasonable increase in traffic is reached.

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