Search Engine Optimization
It’s tough enough to run a small business. You’re the visionary, sales person, marketer, accountant, customer support person and so on.
Maybe you’re lucky enough to have some staff to help... doesn’t matter because the time you freed up was quickly eaten up by another priority. Does any of this sound familiar?
We want you to stay focused on the business at hand. Keep your eye on the ball... don’t spread your self thin. Let our team handle SEO for you.
Fact: If you want high keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo and other search engines you need to accept that SEO is an ongoing strategy. Please don’t think that when you reach your goal of a number one ranking for one or a series of keywords that your job is complete.
Without ongoing maintenance your highly valuable rankings will begin to slip... sometimes the decline is slow and sometimes it happens over night.
There are so many different strategies and techniques that help influence your web sites search engine rankings and new ones keep popping up all the time. At the same time there are beginner type mistakes that can negatively impact your rankings. Some such mistakes can be hard to avoid when you’re just starting out.
The last nine years has been a trial and error process for our team. We have made mistakes, some even intentionally to see what would happen. The conclusion we have come to is simple and is true of everything in life that is worth doing...
“You can’t cut corners.” and secondly “Expect hard work.”
Being in the position you are, this hardly comes as an enlightening surprise. We only mention it because it has been our experience that business owners think search engine optimization should be an easy process... it’s not.
You don’t need another major responsibility on your shoulders. What you need is piece of mind that your SEO campaign is in great hands with a company that cares about your success.
Online Marketing Steps team will work their buts off to make sure your expectations are surpassed.
We approach SEO in a two step process each of which has many sub steps. We won’t zoom into every single technique here, but at a high level...
Internal Website Optimization
Before a home is built what does the lot need? It needs a solid and well planned foundation correct. The same couldn’t be more true when in comes to your website.
Your greatest return on invest depends very much on how well planned your website foundation or structure is. If you cut corners you will pay for it sooner and later. That’s right, short term gain in the SEO world is tough to come by these days.
Search engine companies are not stupid... they spend millions of dollars every year improving their ranking systems to detect sites not following best practice SEO.
At Online Marketing Steps we do it by the book and it all starts with your website structure. Here are the high level steps we follow:
- Niche Keyword Analysis: Discover which keywords people are searching in Google and Yahoo for the solutions you provide.
- Website Content: Using the results from the keyword analysis we will create unique, relevant and compelling content for both search engines and visitors. This step includes writing well thought out title and description tags that include the most important keywords you wish to be ranked high on.
- Website structure: The cleaner the HTML code on your website the easier and faster search engine ranking software can read your site. We can take existing or non existing website and build you a website structure your SEO campaign can grow from and for years to come.
- Website Content Optimization: At this point the content is written, but now we have to optimize if for the search engines. Inserting special HTML tags around the keywords we want to rank high on is part of this process. Clean HTML code with keywords that stand out it is loved dearly by the search engines. If you’re familiar with SEO, this is the part where we build a CSS for:
- H1, H2, H3, headline tags
- Special text like italicised and bolded keywords
- Hyperlinks and fonts
- Etc...
- Internal Linking Structure: We comb through all your web pages looking for opportunities to link to one of your other pages. The key here is to use anchor text in the link itself. So instead of a “click here to learn more” link on your page you would have something like “learn more about Niche Keyword Analysis ”.
- Blog Implementation: Search engines adore new content. The more often new web content is posted the better and the more often you post, the more frequently search engines will visit your site and index new content. It's a fantastic strategy for internal linking; every post is an opportunity to link to a page within your site. SEO benefits aside for a second, a blog will help you maintain a connection with your visitors and build the trust they have in you.
External Website Optimization
Now that you web site has the structure needed to best accommodate the Google, Yahoo and other search engine spiders (tools they use to analyse the content of you site) the SEO focus shifts from internal to external.
Search engines love one way inbound links that lead to multiple pages on your site. A one way link can be defined as another website that links to your site without requesting a link back to their site in return.
Sounds pretty simple right? Wait, there is more.
Remember this word because it is the single most important element in an external website optimization campaign. The word is “Relevancy”.
It can’t be just any old site that links to you. The site and specifically the page that links to your website must share relevancy with the page it’s linking to.
The content and the keywords on the page linking to your site must share similarities with the page that loads upon clicking. Plus, the more important the search engines regard the page linking to yours, the better off your keyword rankings will be.
Why would another website link to yours with nothing in return? Well unless you’re really lucky they won’t. Strong motivators for another website linking to yours as follows:
- Content and value... your site offers real value for the visitors of the web site linking to yours. Maybe you have free information that others would sell.
- You provide content (an article) that the site linking to yours can use for their website. In return they provide a one way link to your site.
- Money... be very careful when paying for links. Done incorrectly you can do more damage to your rankings than good.
This is the primary external SEO strategies we focus on here at Online Marketing Steps.
Also, remember this...
“When it comes to one way links more is often not better”
Your search engine rankings will be in better hands with just five highly relevant inbound, one way links from sites regarded by the search engines as important than 50 links from sites that have low content importance and just so-so relevant content to yours.
A quality over quantity approach will help ensure high search engine rankings remain high for a long time.
This process is a time consuming one even if you have all the experience and knowledge on how to do it correctly. As a small business owner, it would be very challenging for you to take on this responsibility, plus maintain all your others.
- We will source out the best websites what share relevancy with yours and figure out what they want in return for a link to yours.
- We will make sure the content on their page is extremely relevant to the page that it links to and that it shares keywords we chose to optimize on your website.
- We will grow your web inbound links on a monthly basis and monitor performance from past ones.