Lots of companies will pretend that they offer SEO services. Many of these companies do it because clients are asking about it. SEO has become a business buzz word. Since many SEO practices are seemingly behind the scenes, it’s easy for a web developer to claim to offer SEO services, but lack knowledge of true SEO practices.
Here are some basic things to look for on your website. If these are non-existent, there’s a good chance that your SEO provider is blowing smoke.
Spock.com is a people search engine. It really goes the next step in making peoples personal information available online for all to see. It is set up in a wiki fashion, until you take claim of your profile. Once you claim your profile (still a bit unsure how you prove it) you can restrict the information. It appears to spider the web and make connections between myspace, personal websites and other such sites. Its really a rather impressive aggregated/social media/web 2.0 website.
Chasing the Head keywords in your vertical is a great goal. However, clients want to see traffic and fast. I’ve found a great way to do that is to chase the long tail. A favorite strategy of mine is to use FAQ pages to add quality pages to your site for the long tail.
Most people don’t know that we here at Frye / Wiles do quite a number of purely Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects - that is, taking existing sites (often sites that we didn’t even design), and making them rank on Google / Yahoo / Etc. This is an important and very valuable service, for a number of reasons.
With that introduction out of the way, we’re happy to announce our latest happy SEO customer. As a California Real Estate Investment resource, The Norris Group benefits immensely from search returns. They came to Frye / Wiles when the site they built internally was not returning on their desired search terms. We streamlined their code, brought them into conformity with standard SEO practices, and worked with them to flesh out valuable parts of their site and content. SEO is a long process, so it’s too early to start giving you statistics, but if history is any indicator of success, the Norris Group will now begin the glorious process in increasing natural search traffic! We wish them the best, and will report back with new information as it becomes available.
How much content do you want me to write?
LOTS!
Google only indexed 15% of my site, why?
Because Google is like that.
I have probably typed site:www.fryewiles 10 times today alone (Site:www.yoururl.com returns every page indexed of your site). Reason? We just launched a large amount of new content last week, and It’s my job to keep track of the search progress. Truth is that it’s become a nervous tick of sorts. Why is it taking so long to index? Well the best answer I have, is the same one I tell all our clients. It can take a long time for new content to index, that’s just how it is.
If a link is appearing more than once on a page, it will not pass PageRank value after the first time it appears. Use rel=”nofollow” to pass value with only your most valuable link.
I was on Google Finance today and noticed that they are using rel=”nofollow” on their aggregated news items. This bothers me to no end! I understand that nofollow was originally used to keep spammers from milking blogs and forums, but it also controls pagerank flow.
What good is a website if users can’t get from page to page? Even worse, what if search engines can’t get from page to page? It’s useless, and that’s the last thing you want. Essentially, if you want your website to be usable by everyday people, then it needs to be navigable by computers, and here are a few steps to do just that.
Search visibility is key to getting your site to index with google. KPI Ultrasound is a client of ours which we launched a month ago who sells used ultrasound medical equipment. We setup the SEO to tackle “used ultrasound” as the main keyword, and the different ultrasound machine brands and names as the long-tail keywords.
The site launch was great. Traffic boosted right away, and the long-tail keyword were landing in days. At the one month mark, 40% of the site was indexed leaving me very pleased. Next step? Get Google/Yahoo to index more of the deep links.
