Search Engine Placement

1. What is search engine optimization?
When most people search for something on the Internet, they go to search engines to help them find what they are looking for. Search engine optimization is the process of making your site more accessible to the search engines and surfers looking for your site. You can help control where your site is listed: whether it comes up near the top or near the bottom of a search engine's listings depends on giving the search engines what they are looking for when they catalog your site.

2. Why do I need search engine optimization?
The objective of any search engine optimization is to increase the targeted traffic to your web site. THIS IS POSSIBLE. By understanding how the search engines work, and how web surfers behave, it is possible to provide both the engines and the surfer with what they want to see.

3. Why can't I just submit my web site myself?
You can submit your web site to the search engines yourself. However, submissions are just half the story. If the site is not optimized beforehand, you will most likely wind up on the bottom of the list. It is also important to note that submitting your site to the directories, where you only have one chance to get in, needs to be carefully planned so your site gets maximum exposure.

4. I have meta tags. Isn't that enough?
Meta tags are better than nothing, but they won't get you to the top of the search engine rankings. Keywords, titles, links, headlines, page content, and even your URL can affect your site's ranking. Search engines look at the complete package, which is why it's essential to have professional assistance in this critical phase of your site.

5. What about submitting through a submission service?
Submission services typically charge you anywhere from $20-$100 to submit your home page to up to 400,000 search engines. While this sounds great at first, there are many reasons why this is, in fact, a terrible idea: There aren't 400,000 search engines; there are only a dozen or so engines and directories that matter at all. These services submit your site to so-called "Free-For-All" sites that will simply put your URL on a page for a week or two and sell your information to the highest bidder; you will get floods of spam email for the rest of your email address's life.

You can be banned for over-submitting. Google, for one, looks at link popularity (how many sites link to your site) to help determine how good your site is. A large number of irrelevant links pointing to your site may get your site banned completely from their index.

Submitting your home page is not enough. Web sites typically contain several different pages for particular products and services. Each one of these pages needs to be optimized and submitted individually. Submission services only submit your home page, usually the page with the least information on the whole site.

6. What about monthly fees?
Some services ask for monthly maintenance fees, but if your optimization is done correctly from the start, your search engines rankings won't need to be "pumped up" every month. First, we optimize sites naturally and without using any tricks, and second, the engines don't change their algorithms that often. Your rankings will increase and stay relatively the same, depending on how much your existing competition is doing, any new competition, and drastic changes with the search engines. Many sites that were optimized 3 or 4 years ago are still on top. If, sometime in the future, your ranking starts to slip, we can assess the situation and take care of it as it happens.

7. How long will it take to start getting traffic?
After a site is optimized and submitted to the search engines and directories it takes anywhere from 2 days to several months to get in their indexes (Excite, for example, takes almost 6 months these days, while Open Directory is extremely quick).

8. How long will it take to optimize my site?
This really depends on how big your site is and how aggressively you want to go after certain key phrases. The ballpark answer is about 20-30 hours for a small to medium site, and longer for a large web site. A site can be optimized at any time. However, you can save some time and money by having your site optimization underway concurrently with the design process. Certain submission guidelines actually affect how the site should be designed, so it's best to keep these in mind gong into the development phase.

9. Can you make any guarantees?
Before we make any guarantees, we will need to do a little research. We must determine how many search engines your site is listed in, where your company ranks on the engines right now, what kind of traffic you're getting, and what your competition is doing. After that we will be more able to assess your individual situation and possible expectations.

10. Sounds Great! What's the next step?
Depending on how much analysis and reporting you want, we can look at your present traffic, current rankings, and problems that are impeding your site from getting more traffic. The ideal situation would be to get a web address, a copy of a recent log file, and some key phrases to check current rankings. Minimally, we will need just your web address. A full overview and analysis will be provided, which includes what exactly needs to be done, deliverables, and milestones.

Learn more about our Web Optimization process!