It goes without saying that you should fix any broken links reported to you by your visitors. Which brings me to the next point: visitor feedback is golden. It can lead to a form with a text box for the visitor to fill in. However you decide to do it, it's important to have an obvious way for your site visitors to communicate with you.“…if you are a local plumber, does it help you make any sales to talk about that one clogged toilet that took six hours to fix, flooded the house, and has reached legendary status amongst your peers?” One of the most brazen attacks I’ve heard of involved social engineering. Lenny de Rooy, an SEO specialist at Tribal IM, reported this attack back in March of 2007. The email went on to threaten that if the link was not removed, “I will write an ABUSE MESSAGE to your Internet Service Provider and your hosting company and will complain that your site gives a harmful traffic to my site!” When a mechanic tunes a car, he makes sure it is functioning to factory specs, and measures it against certain standards. You can do the same thing with your web site. For instance, does the HTML code on your site validate to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards? You can run it through the W3C's own validator to find out. Presumably your site is not static; in that case, you'll have to validate your site's HTML regularly. You should also find out whether your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Choosing an SEO firm is a very difficult experience for some, especially since there is absolutely no industry standard in what makes for a good cocktail of great SEO systems or techniques, nor are there any guarantees in this business, no matter what any of them might lead you to believe. With good reason, outsourcing SEO can be an emotional decision for a webmaster, especially if the site is one’s baby, so to speak, that has been hand-fed and raised from a small seed of an idea. Relinquishing the “power” of success or failure to a stranger at a sometimes staggering cost can bring a myriad of feelings, some of which may include panic, optimism, fear, anxiety, or even relief. How about the links on your web site? I'm talking not just about the links that lead to internal pages of your web site, but the ones that go off-site. If you have any broken links, you can bet a site visitor will click them and be annoyed that they don't go anywhere. You don't want annoyed visitors. Therefore, it's a good idea to set up a regular schedule for checking for and fixing broken links.Basic SEO: What Search Engines Hate In my last article, I went over a few of the things that search engines love. Now, I'll finish up the discussion with an article on what they absolutely hate, which includes everything from clutter to cookies. So if you're in the mood to build a website, grab your pen and paper and start taking notes, because this article will offer some of the most important tricks of the trade. There are many reasons someone would want to outsource to an SEO professional for help with their website. They may not have the type of knowledge, tools, or know where to even start. For most, simply the amount of time that SEO takes, including all the research and trend-watching, is something a website owner may not have. For whatever reason a website owner decides to hire an SEO firm to help their website reach top positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages), how does once know where to begin? Tuning Up Your Web Site - Tuning Up Are you still hearing an unpleasant "knocking" coming from your web site? Then you tune-up isn't finished. There are a few more parts you need to look at. For example, are you getting errors in your site statistics? Then you need to track them down and fix them.Hiring Writers If creating SEO-friendly content sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. The Internet is constantly reinventing itself and there’s always something new being added. From bookings of flights to hotel reservations, it is estimated that 70% of all flights are booked online through websites. SEO Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - What You Need First and foremost, you’ll need to know ahead of time what your SEO needs are. Ask for a site analysis so that you know just where your site strengths and weaknesses are. This way, you won’t feel like you don’t know where the SEO firm or consultant is headed with your project, and you’ll be better able to gauge what you need from a package, or whether you’ll need to heavily customize your SEO project. It isn’t necessary for you to understand all of the aspects of what goes into your SEO project, as long as you understand what the end results should be. When a site is easy to understand and navigate, visitors will feel welcome. They'll want to stay for a while. They'll also want to come back. This is why you should track how many repeat visitors you get, and how many visitors stay for more than 60 seconds on your web site. If more than 50 percent of your visitors are staying that long, and a significant percentage are repeat visitors, you're on the right track. From time to time I’ve visited Searchles and bookmarked articles from SEO Chat. They have several groups devoted to search engines and SEO, so when we publish an article I think they’ll find of particular interest, I bookmark it there. Sometimes another member of their community has even visited SEO Chat and independently bookmarked an article for which I didn’t post the link to Searchles. Other social bookmarking communities you should consider include del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon, and Furl; there are many more. Be very wary of any company that offers you guarantees, especially guarantees that state they’ll get you into the top ten results or your money back, or a certain percentage of the keywords you choose will end up number one or two in Google. Find out what a firm’s code of ethics or standards are. Also find out what type of contract you’ll need to get started. If a company doesn’t offer a contract, then you need to get one of your own. It seems these days that contracts lately are only as good as the company behind them, but it does help to have a plan of action on paper to which you can legally hold the company. Make sure it covers any extra fees, what happens if you’re not satisfied with the work, what your responsibilities are as a client, and so on. There are a few SEO agreement templates on the Internet. In this case, it helps to remember that sometimes simplest is best. When considering user navigation, visitors benefit greatly from a visible, text-based site map. Ideally, they should be able to get to it from anywhere on your site in just one click.Spamming works; if the numbers don't add up, then spammers would stop spamming and try something else. If your website gets high rankings because of your link network, and not because you offer relevant content, then I call you a spammer (a link spammer perhaps), but if I write an article and get a piece of software to send it to a hundred directories, you call me a spammer. SEO Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - The SEO Firm or Individual Consultant? There are advantages and disadvantages between choosing a large firm or a small company or individual SEO consultant. There may be different priorities you have regarding your website, such as customer service, longevity of the company, experience, full range of services, price, and even ultimate results. Here I’ll outline some of the pros and cons of both, and depending upon your priorities, it may help you decide which type of service to choose. Keep in mind that these are generalities that I put together based upon the collective experience of clients, webmasters, and other SEOs. They certainly don’t take into account every type of SEO firm out there, and sometimes you get very lucky and find one that doesn’t fit the mold at all while still meeting every one of your needs. Tracking what your visitors do after they arrive at your site can give you valuable information about whether your site design really works as intended. You may think your site navigation is "intuitive," but the paths your visitors take once they're on your site may prove otherwise. While you should never "force" your visitors to follow one particular path, web sites should be designed with some idea of the way visitors will navigate through the web site. If your visitors are veering from the paths you've planned, you need to figure out why. There might be a few advantages to considering a large firm rather than going with a smaller company. For example, they will probably have a well-rounded group of people with different areas of expertise. Search engine optimization is not just about marketing, but it is also about search engine friendly design, page structure, coding and programming. If you go with a larger firm, the better your chances are of finding people who can help you in any area of SEO, no matter what your specific issues may be. They will employ not only marketers and optimization consultants, but programmers and website designers for consultation. In general, you should be tracking visitor statistics on a regular basis. Measure visitor sign-ups and conversions - not just once, but regularly, so you can see how your site performs over time. You can use this information to improve your site; for example, you can make changes to the content on your landing pages and track how that affects the length of visits and how many of your visitors convert. You might get lucky with a small SEO firm that is well rounded in this area, but it’s difficult to find an individual consultant that will have the technical experience you might need. In my case, not only do I have the marketing experience and education, but I do have a solid coding background, even though I am not a programmer; and many times I will have to get a programmer to help with the really hard stuff. But if you find an SEO consultant you like, it would be extremely helpful to you to find one with website design experience, at least. Many times, however, the SEO consultant may contract outside services for your programming needs, and that will be fine for you. All you need to do is ask them, and if you’re okay with your SEO contracting another service, then make sure you mention it. Tuning Up Your Web Site - Tracking Traffic The number of search engine referrals you get is only one aspect of the traffic that you need to be tracking. Which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Knowledge is power, and you can use this information to increase your traffic further. For example, if you're getting a lot of visitors from certain blogs or social sites, maybe it's time to browse those sites and see why. Larger SEO firms tend to have set packages for SEO, and while usually reasonable in price, any customization of your SEO project may cost you much more than you intended. This is because custom work veers from what the SEO does day in and day out, and takes more of the SEOs' time. Smaller SEO firms, in general, have better customization options overall, since they tend to look at a client as an individual, not just an account. If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at his great set of SEO tools can do to grow your business!You must optimize the file size of your images. As search engines like to read text, you should consider avoiding the use of graphics near top of your website, whenever it is possible. And while we're on the topic of being seen, how does your web site do among those who physically can't see it? The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers standards, guidelines, and support for those who wish to make their web sites accessible to blind and visually-impaired visitors. Don't immediately assume that blind people won't be interested in what you have to offer; they have many of the same interests as sighted people, and most have sighted friends for whom they purchase gifts. However, if not, then you need some advice. You need to understand the basics of search engine optimization. Incidentally, what the basics are to you may not be basics to others. Basics to some are the correct use of LSI (latent semantic indexing), of internal linking strategies and of other techniques designed to lead search engine spiders by the hand and convince them that their site is the tops. Can you do that? Even companies like eBay don’t offer anything but online support or email. This will obviously be more of a concern with a larger firm than a small company or individual SEO.SEO – Lets make some new trends Search engine optimization is not so simple and easy task now for search engine optimisers and web experts. And any piece of text can be turned into a link, even punctuation marks. Basically, links can be hidden in the same way as ordinary text.Now coming to an important aspect or rather the negative part of SEO , generally known as black hat SEO. You should know which search terms are most popular with your target audience today, and optimize your site accordingly. Make sure you use and integrate these terms into the most logical places: page titles, meta tags, and visible page text. You may say you did this once already, but if you look at the site with fresh eyes, you may find that you can now do a better job than you did a few months ago. Another disadvantage of a larger SEO firm will be their company expenses, which may ultimately affect your price. It costs a company more to maintain a large batch of employees, equipment, and of course the building costs will be higher. We refer to this in business as "overhead." If a large SEO firm has a lower price, then this could mean they have to take on far more accounts than they should probably handle. This could adversely affect your customer service. We’ll look at price differences a little later in the article. Getting indexed is only part of the battle though. You want to make sure you're indexed for the right keywords. You probably did your keyword research when you first designed your site. The popularity of terms used to describe a thing can change, though. Your target market may have used one word to search for something six months ago, but is now using a different word more frequently.More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content. Many large SEO firms will have multiple contacts for your account, depending upon the type of question or need you have. So if you have a marketing or SERPs question, then you may get one person, but if you have a question regarding your site structure, you’ll get another person. If you have copywriting issues, you may even get a completely different individual entirely. Sometimes it's just too hard for an SEO consultant with too many accounts to keep track of your needs, in which case your account may end up with several consultants, which makes it more frustrating for you. If you want to make sure you're getting indexed in the search engines, it helps to create and submit an XML site map to Google Sitemaps. You can also submit a site map to Yahoo Site Explorer. But your best bet is to check out Sitemaps.org for more information about a protocol that is being adopted by all three major search engines (and possibly more).Naturally, if you shouldn’t waste time submitting your URL to the search engines, you also shouldn’t waste money on having someone else submit your web site to the search engines. You will also run into the risk of a conflict of interest in a particular field or industry regarding keywords. This is because of the sheer number of clients the large SEO firm maintains. The more clients they have, the more likely there is that someone on their staff is working for one of your competitors for the same keywords. A good SEO firm will let you know if you’ll be working with them against a competitor, and either they will decline your offer for service, or they may make you sign a waiver of liability, stating that you are aware that your competitor also contracted this firm. It may be in your best interest, however, to find another firm who doesn’t have a competitor for a client. Tuning Up Your Web Site - Being Seen Not every web site gets the majority of its traffic from the major search engines, but you can't afford to ignore them. Therefore, you need to make sure that your site is being fully indexed by the engines - or at least as fully indexed as you want it to be. If you have content that is for subscribers only, you should already know how to keep it out of the indexes. Just don't block anything more. And certain things are still hard for search engine spiders to read or get past (JavaScript, flash, etc). SEO Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - When to Think Small Small SEO firms or even individual consultants will be the choice for you if you are not happy with dealing with the disadvantages that larger firms create, like customer service. A smaller firm or individual will not have as many clients, and will be able to focus more upon your service, and probably will be far more available to you if you have questions or concerns. Further, if you go with a smaller company, there is a good chance you’ll have a single representative for your account, rather than many different contacts to deal with as you would with a larger company. It's good to have a checklist, because it's easy to miss certain things. Beyond that, though, you might need to be prepared to rethink certain aspects of your web site, especially if you simply built it and left it in a state of benign neglect for several months, figuring it will do its job. I compared a web site to a car in the introduction, but really, it's more like a pet: you need to feed it, water it, take it for walks, be alert to when it's not feeling well...the list goes on and on. So how do you know if your site really needs an overhaul? Start by checking your search engine referral and site traffic figures. You want to get several months' worth of figures. Chart your progress. Are these figures growing? And just as importantly, are site visitors doing what you want them to do (i.e. converting, buying products, ordering newsletters)? If not, it's time to get your site up on jacks, break out the tool kit, open the hood, and get to work. I saved the pricing aspect for last, not because it’s the least important (in fact it may be the most important factor for you), but because it’s not the easiest element to define. There is no set rate that is right or wrong for an SEO project. A few companies offer standard packages in tiers that are the same for every client that firm has, but even sol, every website is different, and every project has its own issues that may need to be dealt with. SEO companies or consultants can charge for a initial analysis or consultation, or it can be free. They may have a set price, or they may need to provide you with a custom quote. Prices for SEO have ranged from as little as $5.00 per hour, which you may see from countries outside of the United States and the United Kingdom, to as much as thousands of dollars for a project. Is your page W3C Compliant? Some have suspected that Google prefers pages that are compliant, but no one has been able to prove it. On the other hand, it’s easy to check; W3C makes its own tool available. And validating helps ensure that your page will appear similarly in all browsers that follow the standard without having to rely on error correction. This means your visitors won’t receive unpleasant surprises. Now obviously an SEO wants your business, and wants to do the work for you, so they aren't going to reveal all of the little secrets they have about your site, but there should still be a good portion of step by step instructions for you to work with. If there is a consultation included, it's even better. Maintain the balance between graphics and content. Ensure that there is not an overload of graphical imagery splattered across the pages even if it is an artistically driven site like a gallery. The content and its ability to grab the interest of the visitor must be paramount.
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