Narrowing the list

Full SEO versus Partial SEO

Web 2.0 and social media integration

Web 2.0 and social media are all about building and fostering a community around your site. This is critical whether you have a local or global business. With the right integration into popular social media sites like, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Youtube, your website will quickly build a loyal following of habitual users/customers. Additionally, as of 2007, search engines began to catalog and include these social outlets in organic search results. RSS feeds allow users to subscribe to your latest updates--continuous updates remind customers and search engines that you are active and relevant. So find out what type of social media packages your prospective SEO company offers.

Blogs and Press Releases

Another way to gain recognition among search engines is to have syndicated articles that link back to your company blog or website. These press releases and blog posts will create backlinks and improve site ranking. But to be effective, these posts must also be optimized for distribution and maximum search impact. These articles should be targeted towards your business without seeming generic. You want quality content that will intrigue readers to find out more about your field of expertise. Because generating this unique content is time consuming, find out whether the SEO company offers content generation or if it will be your responsibility.

Local and directory submissions

If your site targets a specific market, then submission to local directories is a quick way to gain notoriety. Services like Google Maps and Citysearch show local-targeted search results and then link back to your website. And with services like Yelp, (a community of users that review local businesses) customer interaction is more important that ever. Can you remember the last time you actually looked something up in that cumbersome yellow phonebook?

Link building

Backlinks are the holy grail of SEO. These one-way links from one site back to yours are highly weighted by search engine ranking algorithms. This is different from commonly used tactics such as reciprocal linking and link sharing—two-way link building is not nearly as strongly weighted as one-way backlinks. This is one of the most difficult and time consuming SEO tasks. But, it is not always a contest to see who can get the most. Your website's backlink strength is judged on quality and quantity. Because this process requires many hours of labor, find out approximately how many backlinks you should expect to receive and at what cost.

Testimonials and references

Do not be instantly alarmed if the company does not highlight case studies on their website (this may be a privacy issue). However, they should be eager to produce an in depth look at previous campaigns upon request. Hesitation to do this should be cause for concern. Any company who does legitimate full SEO should have an illustrious history of success. Along the same lines, any respectable SEO company should have a lengthy list of satisfied customer references eager to speak on their behalf. Since SEO is universally effective when realistic goals are set, every client should have experienced positive growth. Disregard companies that make outlandish claims at bargain prices. If a deal seems too good to be true, go straight to their customers and find out exactly what they received for their money.

Control and content management

At the beginning of any SEO campaign, many changes to your website will be necessary. This will require code-level access and often reprogramming of your site. Find out whether you will be paying for each tweak to your site, or if that is part of your SEO package. If the company is also doing website design then make sure an easy to use content management system (CMS) will be implemented in order to make updates to your site.

Frequent reports and updates

Quality SEO companies should offer extensive traffic analytics and keyword search query reports about every four weeks. If a company says they offer reports more infrequently then they are probably hiding or stalling on your campaign. It will be obvious when you are dealing with a legitimate company because they will be excited to show you the most current results and share in your cooperative success.

Consider the ROI (return on investment)

Compare the pricing for an SEO campaign with your other marketing endeavors. You should quickly realize how dramatically this could reduce your marketing budget. An SEO campaign offers the highest ROI at the lowest initial cost. Ask each SEO company how many man hours will be going into your campaign. Once you realize the time that is spent creating backlinks and managing your optimized website, investing in SEO marketing will be an easy decision.

Support, Support, Support

As with any business, customer service should be a top priority. If you have difficulty reaching the company at the beginning of your service than it will only get worse. SEO campaigns require open communication between you and the developers. Ideally, a reputable SEO company will offer, email, phone and possibly live web support.

Payment and Pricing

A standard SEO campaign lasts six months. Since a large amount of work is necessary to launch the campaign, a company will usually ask for up to half up front. But, you should never have to pay for the entire campaign to start. Ask about discounts and whether or not they accept monthly payment installments.

How are we different?

1. We do the most keyword research for your business, and most importantly, we do Conversion analysis to determine which keywords will result in clients & increase brand exposure.

2. We take the time to sit down and meet face to face. We are excited to help fellow local business owners and technical management by educating them on how SEO can bring traffic to their site.

3. We are not a quick gimmick service. Our results are the product of full SEO development--starting with the front end coding of your website and deploying FULL link building strategies.

4. We have a proven track record. We have some actual client results to share with you. After starting SEO, your result are reported monthly.

5. We do not work with your competitors. Once you become our client we do not work with your competitors. We work with all industries, unique products, and non competing sites.

6. We are a complete online solutions provider. This puts us in a unique position because we are able to understand both facets of an intertwined process. SEO, PPC, and Development.

7. We offer you complete solutions for quickly updating your website. We often hear two common complaints from businesses. Unreliable hosting and difficulty in quickly & easily updating site.

8. We are the most competitively priced, and are available to help you compare apples-to-apples. We find that most often, if we are outbid, it is because our competitor provides partial SEO.

9. We stay ahead of the latest online trends! Because website ranking algorithms change continuously. Newer practices include social media, 3-way links, W3C, hcard, and thematic coding.

10. NO guesswork. Measure your ROI. SEO services can provide more marketing value than some of your less effective marketing endeavors. Our analytics show your traffic sources.

  In order to begin work on your site we need FTP, hosting, and CMS (if applicable) login information. These logins and passwords were generated when first registering your domain. The domain name is www.yoursitename.com and you can contact your registrar for account information. If you are not responsible for making changes to your site, then your developer should provide you with this information.

  Sometimes hosting and domain registration is handled by different services. So there will usually be several sets of login names and passwords we must have before the campaign can begin.

  We need this information because preliminary SEO tasks are performed to the back-end of your website. We must have code-level access to start optimizing your site.

  CMS is any type of content management system that allows you to make changes to the content or appearance of your site. We will also need your login for this, so that we can quickly add content if necessary.

  The first payment must be made before service will begin.

  Free website analysis. Unlike other companies we will run a complete report on your site without any commitment or charge. This report gives you an idea of where your site currently stands for many common ranking mechanisms: total backlinks, ranking for a sample set of keywords, competitor rankings, and content analysis.

  After comprehensive keyword research we will provide a list of the most relevant terms based on most-commonly searched AND conversion analysis (whether or not a search for that term is likely to turn into a sale). Then you will approve and make the final decision on what keyword terms will be used for your campaign. (These terms will be used throughout your campaign. The addition of new terms mid-campaign will require more hours and an additional charge)

  Link-building: we will build one-way links from other websites to increase traffic and rankings. The building of these backlinks comprises about 50% of all SEO service.

  As your site becomes more prominent on the web, other sites may contact you to exchange links. While sometimes this can be beneficial, other times it can be a detriment to your SEO. Therefore, please forward all link requests to us for evaluation.

  We clearly outline what duties stand to be performed throughout your campaign. The contract provides written assurance that we will complete all SEO tasks outlined.

  As your site gains visibility, there is a possibility of SPAM requests. This can be circumvented adding CAPTCHA code to your submission form (this fall under website development rather than SEO).

  SEO tasks are performed to the back-end of your website. We will ask you to provide relevant and targeted on page content.

Systematic increases in rankings for targeted key phrases/keywords. After two or three months the keywords you selected shopd be gaining traction and respting in across the board ranking increases.

Improvements in relevant traffic, higher conversion, and more leads. While overall traffic increases are expected, our main concern is RELEVANT TRAFFIC. This means that when someone comes to your site, they came on purpose and are likely to become a customer.

We will provide monthly reports that include traffic and ranking information. Refer to sample report below.

Every seo campaign is different, specific rankings respts and overall traffic information is provided

How to Write an Article for your SEO campaign

Professional SEO firms stay up to date with Search Engine trends and changes. One of the recent changes has been the increased importance placed on social content when determining rankings. Social content includes bookmarking sites, blogs, and article/news aggregation sites.

For you site to stay relevant, you must provide original content in the form of articles, blogs and on page content. It is your responsibility to generate this content (we do offer unique content authorship at a flat hourly rate).

On average, we will request one article per month. You will be given a topic pertaining to your business and asked to write approximately 350 to 400 words or COMPLETELY ORIGINAL content. If you copy the content from another site, then search engines will penalize your site for plagiarizing content. Content should be generally informative and objective—avoiding self-promotion.

Contained in the article will be the repeated use of several targeted keywords. These keywords/key phrases should be woven organically into the article without sounding overly contrived.

We will provide you with article examples upon request.

  Our first priority is to ensure that you have complete ownership of your new site. This means that the domain name you choose will be registered to you. Secondly, the hosting account will be in your name and with the service provider of your choosing (some examples are, Godaddy, Network Solutions, and Yahoo).

  We work with you up-front to determine which website package best suits your needs. We offer everything from basic website solutions to fully-featured sites with advanced flash graphics, custom user forums, ecommerce shopping, and any other options you may choose.

  Depending you website package, the site will feature CMS. CMS is an easy to use content manager for your website. This allows for quickly uploading content, pictures, or even changes to the basic appearance of items on your site. Content management is just another way we keep control of the site in your hands.

  Payment is made in one up-front sum or broken down into a staggered payment plan depending on the extent of your website needs.

  Upon receipt of the first payment we will deliver two unique graphic concepts (depending on you package you may receive more). These visual concepts will represent what you can expect your new site to look like. Once we find the concept you are most excited about we will move forward with development. Depending on functionality, your new site should be developed and ready for testing in 2-8 weeks.

  You will be solely responsible for providing content appearing on your new site. We do offer unique content authorship for a flat hourly rate.

  Once your site has finished development it will be temporarily hosted on our developer’s server. Once on the server it will be fully tested for view ability and functionality in all standard internet browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari). After testing is complete we will ask you to preview and try out all site functionality before the domain goes live. After everything is to your satisfaction, the site will go live at the domain name you registered.

  Before we can begin any changes to your site we must have access to your FTP, domain registrar, and hosting accounts. This is a good time to evaluate your hosting choices. If your goal for the new website is to increase traffic or expand your business, then reliable hosting service is critical. In some cases your previous developers will be hosting the site on their servers, which is often not as reliable as larger respected hosting providers. Most importantly, you need to have access to the hosting account. If you elect to have us set up your hosting, then the account will be established in your name through a major registrar: Godaddy, Yahoo, or Network Solutions, with all information provided to you.

  Before beginning on your site redesign we work with you to establish exactly what functionality and design changes you wopd like to appear on the new site. We strive to do as much research as possible so that your site will not require further changes down the road.

  We work with you to maintain a common branding or aesthetic when necessary. You may not want to risk losing customers by radically changing the brand recognition already established with your customer base. We will work carefully to incorporate a particular color scheme, style, or branding into the new site layout.

  We can incorporate advanced functionality to your existing site without disorienting habitual users of your site.

  As with all new sites and redesigns, your updated site will be temporarily hosted on our development server. Once on the server, it will be fully tested for view ability and functionality in all standard internet browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari). After testing is complete we will ask you to preview and try out all site functionality before the domain goes live. After everything is to your satisfaction, the site will go live