Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a complicated and ever more difficult process that you either need training to do, or better yet, you should leave to experts. It involves several things...from good title and meta-tags to a good navigation system. You need text and content on every page, and you need the right amount of key phrases on the pages. A professional SEO company will research the keywords for your business and explain the ones that will benefit you the most. Ideally, your website should wrap around those phrases, so building it for this up front is the best way to do it. Of course, if you've already spent several thousand dollars on a great looking website, you've got to work with what you already have.
If you have a web presence but can't seem to ever get placed
in the engines, we also offer Optimization Consultation to find out
what may have been done wrong and how to correct it. Real Estate and resort businesses have their own problems and needs, especially.
We'll find your most beneficial key phrases and advise as to the
do's and don'ts for helping your site to be found.
If we build your website for you, it will be perfectly optimized from the beginning, and will always rank better than one we have to re-do or try to change around. But we can work with either option.
One thing we have to emphasize is that you MUST have good content. The search engines are concerned with offering up relevant results. If you have an affiliate site, or it exists solely for advertising and offers little or no information, then we can't help...no search engine wants results like that.
If you are thinking about hiring a search engine optimization company, please be very careful. Read some of the forums such as Webmaster World SEO Forum or Google's own representative's blog, Matt Cutts' Blog to inform yourself of the dangers and rogue companies that will take your money and possibly get your website banned for using tricks that the search engines frown on. Do your homework BEFORE you dive into hiring any SEO company!
There are many companies now that offer search engine and advertising advice, and know nothing about it at all. Several websites are also deliberately using domain names similar to ours in
order to confuse and potential clients that might be considering
hiring a Myrtle Beach SEO company to promote their website. You can get your website penalized by the search engines for innocent
actions that are flagged as spam as well. Here are a few things that you might
hear from some of these marketing companies that are dead wrong:
It's ok to buy a bunch of domain names about my business and point them all at my main website.
(WRONG!) This is taken directly from Google's Webmaster Information:
"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as
affiliate programs with little or no original content. "
Using multiple domain names, multiple websites with nearly identical content, to trying to capture traffic from mis-spelled and commonly typed in names, can get all the domain names penalized or banned when a competitor reports these to the search engines as spam.
Don't fool yourself, if you are concerned with your website's search presence, so are most of your competitors.
All it takes is a couple of spam reports showing violations of this type, and you've lost any money you've paid for advertising as well as being able to use the domain names later on without a problem. Do NOT point or link multiple domain names to one website.
I can make my site rank by building a link directory or page, and hiring a company to get reciprocal links for me. Yes, this worked back about 2004-2005, but it hasn't worked for a long time since then. In fact, you can be penalized for doing it. Yahoo in particular HATES link exchanges. If you want to exchange links with a couple of good authority websites, do it on a regular page or even your homepage...and keep it to a maximum of 4-5 links. See more about link exchanges below.
A company can affect your search engine rankings by "SUBMITTING" your site monthly to Google and Yahoo. (TOTALLY WRONG!) Not only should you not have to submit to the search engines at all, but sometimes repeated submissions could get you in
trouble! The best way to have your site found the first time is from a LINK from another site or blog. This can happen in as little as three days from obtaining that link, and you should never have to submit it again. As you gain more links from other useful sites, blogs, or directories, your site (if updated regularly) will usually be spidered about once a week or so.
It is also not necessary to have a metatag telling them to "spider your site every 7 days".
The search engines won't pay any attention to that. They work on their own schedule. In fact, many so-called SEO's will put a lot of spammy things in your metatags that can hurt more than help.
It is past time to accept the fact that reciprocal linking has been ruled ineffective. If you install a Google Toolbar and activate the Pagerank option, you will almost always find that no matter what the pagerank of a site's homepage may be, any pages that are lists of links have been zeroed out. Wasting your time and money on building these link pages is just foolishness now.
It's fine to have a few links to friends and other business associates, or some that your visitors will find useful. But using this tactic to increase your site's Pagerank or to rank better does NOT work.
There are still SEO companies that are charging monthly fees to set up and populate internal reciprocal link pages. If Yahoo sees a link directory on your site, you are likely to be removed from their search results because of it. Incoming inks are still just as necessary as ever to rank in Google, but you've got to do it as naturally as possible - through content - blogs, press releases, social sites, and by providing some kind of information that people appreciate and link to.
If you want to exchange links with a few good authority sites, it can help. If you try to buy links, or you allow others to buy a link on your site, you're setting yourself up for trouble. Just say "No" to buying or selling links, and work on social media profiles, blog your fingers off and link from your articles, or give us a call!
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