Tri-Cities Web Solutions
Tri-Cities Web Solutions

 

Search Engines

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) -- including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. It's a process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.

 

We are not an SEO "selling" company but we do your basic SEO as we build your website.  We only list this page so you will see that there's really no need to hire an SEO firm and pay hundreds or thousands of dollars when your web tech should be doing this for you for FREE as they build.  Tri-Cities Web Solutions does extended SEM services for you as a separate optional consulting service.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.

We would like you to beware of SEO ripoffs and then decide on who to use.  Read below.

You can read a lot of SEO Rip Off warnings in this underlined link.  (The link will open a new browser window outside of our website, so we don't lose you.)

We're listing a table (below) of how our customers benefit from our SEO & SEM optimized consulting service.  We don't promise anything, and you're always welcome to hire a "real" firm, if you actually find one you can trust.  Be sure to ask us to investigate them before hiring.  We've found plenty to really try to rip off our clients and it's one of our biggest irritations.  We will only work with them if we have investigated them and if we think they are honorable and can prove themselves.  A back up will be taken of your website and restored if they're not cracked up to what they say they are.  (most won't be....read above link) 

But for now we can at least try to get you up there as we've done with ourselves and our clients.  We feel that there's no need for you to build a website, if you don't try to land on the first few pages of the search engines when you're counting on your website to gain you exposure to your products or services.

Website builders / SEO's will promise to do such, but have no proof of their skills - that we've found from many of the spam emails that some of our clients have received.  We are offering you our proof here inside of the links below of how our clients benefit from our skills.  You can definitely call them for references.

We do this!

SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.  As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

We do NOT do this!

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines.  Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques  in order to remove them from their indices.

DO NOT PAY EXTRA FOR THIS !!

Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design after your website is built, but isn't that what you were paying for in the first place? The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.  If you're being quoted EXTRA for this.....RUN! This should be done as part of building your pages; otherwise, you can just build your own website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for higher ranks must be considered when building a Professional Website Design. A well designed website drives traffic as you become visible to billions of consumers, as a Search Engine Optimized Website is crutial to your website traffic and sales. Let us put our know how to work. NO ADDITIONAL FEES!

We do these extras as optional extended services as part of SEM!

We research your competitors and report to you what you can be doing to improve your search engine ranking.  As we watch, we'll develop a strategy for our department to recode pages that are getting less hits than others that didn't do so well within the basic SEO services done while building your website.  We'll lead you to the right places to do your advertising.  We'll teach you how to best write your content, and even if you tell us to put it in a certain spot, we'll give advice on better placement.  Advice and training on Social networking and distributing your products on not only your own shopping cart but others avenues as well, are all the benefits that business owners such as yourself should take advantage and is highly advised.

Our own rankings Don't be swayed

How to SEO, by Tina

Why Google for SEO?
I do not optimize for any particular search engine, as you really can't do that.  But since Google is still the major player today and all of the other search engines try to compete with them, your website will get indexed by them all and they all have different algorithms.  It’s a waste of time tracking your results in other engines, since all search engines will follow what Google does and they all work basically the same way. If anyone tells you that you need to, they’re wrong. First, you cannot optimize a website for any particular search engine really, so we go by what the major player tells us and that’s Google.

Keywords
Keywords inside the meta data have long since been abandoned by the search engines because they were once used to trick the engines.  I do use keywords in the meta tags for the old small search engines that may still use them. Each search engine has its own algorithms and they are secrets, so we make pages informational and informative.  Here are some things we do:

  1. They should be in the title of each page.
  2. Your pages should contain your keywords and key phrases within the content area and be informational and informative.
  3. Try not to make the major key phrase compete with other key phrases on the page to not confuse the engines as to what the page is about.
  4. Be a little redundant with the key phrases on the page but not too overwhelming or the engines will pick it up as “trickery”.
  5. Be sure if you sell the same product or same service, that the entire website reflects that and isn't confusing the search engines when they look at your entire website rather than just one page.  For instance, if you sell Flags, Flagpoles and Installation of Flagpoles, you'll want each page to state so, so that the search engines will know overall what you do.  But if you ONLY sell flags, try not to mention flagpoles or installation.  Or if you only install them, then be sure to always use the installation term and try not to use the word flag by itself.

Location Results

You cannot just view your own results as being the results the world will see. Searches are first based on location of the user’s IP address or their chosen location in the search tool drop down, and the location of your business.

On my Google searches that I do, I have my search tool location as a city in which my clients would also be using.  Since Google checks a user's IP address, so they can serve up results close to them, this tool allows me to change that and be more precise in each of my clients' locales for testing purposes.  So now you know why a visitor local to you will get different results than someone further from you and how you can view various results. 

Please note that not all users in each locale will get the same results.  There could be many reasons why Google will serve up different results for me and you, not just based on location. If I were logged into a Google account, I would get results based on what Google has decided I might like to see based on my past searches. So if I searched out a lot of recipes for cooking and you sold an American Flag and put a recipe on your page for American Apple Pie Recipe, then I might see your website’s page higher in my rankings than someone else’s flag website that didn’t have a recipe on it. (This is an extreme exaggeration for obvious reasons)

Year Ranges or Cities, etc.
If you sold car parts and sold a hydraulic clutch actuator for Corvettes you would come up number one (if low competition for the term) but if I put on the website’s page the years, the user would not see your page because they didn’t type in a year or model when a lot of competition doesn’t. But if the user typed in 1999 Hydraulic Clutch Actuator and very few competition listed years, then you would be number one for THAT user. This goes to say that when we add cities or states to your pages, this may have a negative impact on searches. So you'll want to add a generic page that doesn't mention years or cities, etc. and then build pages that are year or city specific.

Stuffing Pages
Stuffing pages with more key phrases than just your basic ones adds confusion to the search engines. Let's say that all of your pages say flags and flagpoles, so Google knows it’s a big website about flags and flagpoles. That’s fine. We want them to know that. Having only flags and flagpoles wording on only three pages and the other 300 pages not having those words, Google may not know as well that the entire website is about flags and flagpoles, but it does free up the other pages to concentrate on “windsocks” etc. But having one page about windsocks, saying nothing about flags or flagpoles, Google may look at the page as not being a windsock flag for a user who searched “windsock flag” but will serve up the page even if it didn’t say flag on it due to the overall website being about flags. But let’s say you added other parts to the windsock page (like accessories), then Google is more confused on what the page is about as a majority or if they should even show it since it’s about a lot of other things as well. Considering you only have one title tag to work with on the page, you can’t stuff your title with a bunch of “accessory” key terms that cover everything on the page, because this is going way too far and simply won't work out well for you. This is when you may want to separate accessories onto their own individual pages. However, to be picked up on, we have to go back to “informational and informative”.

What do you write about?
The dilemma is what the heck Google and the others expect these days from people who simply cannot write stories about "Flagpoles" – I mean just how much can one say about a pole?  You may notice when doing your own searches that there are a heck of a lot more wiki’s and directories, amazons and ebays that are coming up first rather than regular old websites. It’s like Google wants “a book” written about one product and it’ll be happy to serve it up along with some obvious sites that are “selling” that part. Wikis and Amazon???  We don’t know what the heck Google and the rest are doing these days, but we do know it’s now all about content being informational and informative. What I am telling my clients these days, is to not worry about search engines, write good content, pay attention to the bullet points above and you’re really at the search engine’s mercy.

Growth

  1. Write content for each page, it has to be at the top of the page (above the fold)
  2. Write content for Facebook and Twitter with some kind of shock-and-awe so it’s shared
  3. Get a small Google Adwords budget going to test those waters
  4. Buy some Ads on Facebook for the right hand Ad pane and mid-feed Ads
  5. Create some YouTube videos on "how to" do something
  6. Stop concentrating on your rankings; there are more important things to do which will ultimately raise those
  7. Get a newsletter sign up form and give out incentives to buy product by using some discount coupon codes in your shopping cart
  8. Give out discounts for buyers who will write you up a testimonial review to publish on your website.  If they'll do so without having to be given something, that's great.
  9. Get listed in directories within your market that are reputible

Social Networking
The only other thing is to start using social networking of Facebook and Twitter and to write things and post pictures that will get you noticed and link back to your website each time; I don’t care if it’s about animal abuse or a stupid joke – if it’s shared to two million people that’s two million who wonder who wrote the article. The other thing is to find like-minded forums to go blog on to be an authoritative voice in your market.