Search Engine Optimization Services (SEO)

One of the great things about the web is that people can find your business by using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Live Search from Microsoft, to search for the products and services you offer. However, how this works is often misunderstood by small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and even some larger companies.

To attract website visitors, our search engine optimization specialists help you get listed high up in the search results returned by search engines (ideally in the top 10) for keyword phrases relevant to your business that people are actually searching for. This requires choosing the best keywords, website optimization, and generating links on other high-ranking web pages back to your website.

Choosing Keywords for a Website

Many businesses use their brochures and other existing marketing materials as the basis for their website content and make very few changes to the wording. However, even though your brochure content might make sense to the average customer, it might not be what they type in Google when searching for your products--this means that very few people will find your website to read about what you offer!

Today, there are online tools such as the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool that can be used to determine the number of searches executed per day for keywords and phrases (or at least a relative value). These tools can help you fine tune your website content and phrasing by choosing keywords to attract the most referrals from search engines.

For example, according to Word Tracker, there are 595 searches for "website development" in the major search engines per day, but there are 6,640 searches for "web design" per day. What we call "website development" might be thought of as "web design" to the average consumer. Our SEO consultants can help you choose the best keywords for your website.

Website Optimization for Search Engines

Once you know what keywords and phrases to target, you need to put them in the right places on your website and optimize your HTML code. Many website editing tools make it easy to put up a pretty nice looking website, but do not generate optimized HTML that is easy for search engines to index and see as valuable content. Our web developers can clean up your HTML code and optimize it for being found by search engines.

Writing Good Title Tags

The most important content on your website are the web page title tags--title tags are what appears in the title bar of the browser, are used as the default text for web page bookmarks/favorites, and, most importantly, are what is displayed as the first line of the search result in Google. Many websites have title tags that say simply, "Home" or "About"--this does absolutely nothing to attract website visitors.

Heading Tags, Bold Text, Alternate Text for Images, and More

Beyond writing good title tags, it is important that your top keywords and phrases are used in heading tags such as H1 tags, H2 tags, and H3 tags in the HTML of your web pages. Bolding your target keywords and including them in alt text for images are other ways to convince search engines that your pages are relevant to the people using their services.

Generating Links

Often, the most challenging aspect to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is getting other high ranking websites to link to your website. This is important because it tells search engines that other people think your website is valuable. Once you have determined the right keywords to target and optimized your webpages, getting others to link to your website will help you move up the rankings in the search results (hopefully into the top 10) and increase traffic to your website exponentially.

Web Directory Options

Although web directories have not proven very effective for users of the Internet to find what they are looking for, they do provide low hanging fruit for generating links to your website. Each link you can get in a free link directory such as the Open Directory Project will help you establish an initial presence on the web. The Top Web Directory List from SEO Company is a great place to start for determining who to submit your website to. Also a premium web directory such as the Yahoo Directory may be worth your while (free for non-profit organizations).

Link Exchange, Reciprocal Links, and Link Partners

In addition to exhausting the free/cheap link directories, it is important to establish link partners. Start by exchanging links with other businesses or people you know who might be willing to link to you because of some relationship you have with them. If they can link to you using your top keyword that would be best, but many businesses don't know how to do this. Beyond that, it is a good idea to start a link exchange page where you create reciprocal links with other websites related to your industry who are willing to be your link partners.