Check your site
Everyone needs SEO.
Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use complex algorithms for ranking sites. Google, for example, compares more than 200 factors for each site. Websites once listed on the first page or two of Google may be buried many pages deep in the results, or not listed at all. Even worse, search engines have many serious penalties in place for improper site optimization.
What are the chances of coming up on page one of Google?
There are millions of websites and probably thousands of websites in your topic area. Google lists only 15 of them on the first page of results (fewer if there are ads at the top). What are your chances of being in the top 15? Sadly, if you are a small site (under 10-20 pages), it is not likely you will be on page 1. If you don’t get a lot of individual visitors (at least 1500-2000 per month), it is not likely you will be on page 1. If your site has not been online for several years, it’s not likely you’ll show up on page 1.
The odds are not in your favour, especially if your site is on a topic of high competition. For example, according to CanPages, there are 1017 dentists listing in Greater Vancouver and they obviously won’t all fit into the top 15 spaces. Dentists spend thousands of dollars every month competing for these spaces.
Companies that guarantee results on page 1 of Google generally use link-mining methods that Google does not approve of. “Guranteed SEO” people sell monthly accounts. You pay them to create hundreds of back links to your site every month (link farming). This can temporarily put you on page 1. Google will gradually drop your site in their ranking – or remove it – and the back links will have to be re-submitted. You’re paying for the same work over and over.
What’s involved in proper search engine optimization?
SEO should be done while the site is being built. Some templates make this very difficult, and it is not possible to do on free hosting sites like iWeb and wordpress.org. You will need to have your site on a commercial server if you want to set up properly for SEO.
SEO has several important parts. First the site must be designed with the appropriate site architecture and usability. The pages must have the right text, heads, types of links, tags and verifications codes. And there must be numerous sites linking one-way to yours, and numerous one-way sites linking out from your site. The process is continuous and needs to be updated regularly. Analytics are used to measure the success of the coding.
Our SEO services include:
∙ determining your external links
∙ measuring your traffic
∙ checking your search engine rankings
∙ adding or checking meta tags, alt tags and page titles
∙ creating sitemaps and submitting them to search engines
∙ adding verification code for Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines
∙ installing Google Analytics scripts
∙ making links to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
∙ submitting your site to search engine directories
∙ listing your site on public and private directory websites (creating backlinks)
How well is your website working for you?
Try our online quiz to learn more about your site’s performance.
If you are interested in learning more about SEO, please see our resources for SEO tools.
