Joel Katona asked:


How can SEO firms guarantee top 10 rankings while others bulk at even the notion that the SEO client should get anything in return other than a statement of work and at the end of the month some fancy reporting about hours spent on link building, article submission and other seemingly important search engine optimization tasks. The truth as always is between the two different camps of SEO firms who either guarantee top 10 ranking or don’t. So, why some SEO companies offer performance guarantee, while other SEO companies don’t?

Before start our investigation, we have to set some ground rules here of course to make sure we compare only reputable SEO companies with at least 3 plus years in business and a customer portfolio of at least 2-3 dozen clients a year. Oh, and of course the SEO companies we compare have all achieved decent rankings results for their clients and their clients would not hesitate in recommending them to their friend, business partners or family members.   Now that we got these important benchmark out of the way, let’s examine what is at the heart of the SEO guarantee and the sometimes very heated discussions surrounding it.  

The issue is quite simply trust.   The trust by the clients placed into the hands of the SEO companies to do the best they can to achieve the first page ranking results they were hired to deliver. So, it comes down to which company can sound more convincing on their website touting their SEO services with fancy graphics, customer case studies, testimonials, badges of affiliations with SEO organizations and being member of better business bureau. But does this really make a difference in how competent a SEO company is?  

If the company can’t convey enough trust to the potential SEO client on their website, they might as well close the shop, but sadly even when a potential clients feel in their gut there is something inherently wrong with forking money over for services that don’t have a tangible outcome, they still sign on the dotted line. How sad, but it doesn’t have to be this way. You have the right to demand to know what your hard earned dollars buy.   So, here is where the guaranteed SEO services can truly make or break a deal from a reputable SEO company, but there is more to a SEO guarantee, than simply writing a few over used slogans on a webpage and hope visitors will listen. These are the criterias you should use to hire an SEO firms who guarantees results in writing.  

Get references from as many previous SEO clients as you can. The SEO company should give you a list of previous clients’ contact information cheerfully and with lots of pride. After all they are going to be only as good as the last client they have dealt with. The most important questions to ask previous clients is, how long it took the SEO company to achieve the results and were they able to hold onto those rankings long term. No money up front. You should not pay a dime for any type of setup costs or other silly administration costs. It takes nothing more than 1 hour for seasoned SEO to come up with a thorough analysis of your site and to create a proposal for you. The cost of this should be not be coming out of your pocket, so never every pay for any type of site review or report up front. Specific ranking results for Google. Google is still the king of the online searches with over 60% of the total worldwide search market and you should not accept a guarantee that includes any mention of Yahoo or Bing (MSN,Live) in the contract. You should simply say you are only interested in Google natural results. Verify rankings independently. Always find out what type of ranking report generation tool the SEO company will use. The rankings have to be checked daily and a history of the rankings must be available to you at any time. What constitutes a SEO guarantee being fulfilled? In other words how many days of the month do the rankings have to in the top 10 or top 5 for the ranking guarantee to be fulfilled. Ask for a minimum of 15 days of each calendar month for the site to be in the top 10 or top 5. Don’t pay for all the SEO fees when the rankings are achieved in the first month. Once you agree on the total SEO fees, you should demand that you pay over a minimum of 6 months as long as the site remains on the first page of Google during that period. If the site drops from Google’s first page for more than 15 days in the previous calendar month you should not have to pay and roll the contract term forward another month. Ask them how much their maintenance plan will cost you, once they achieved the top rankings and the contract expired. Be careful if the SEO company wants to charge you the same rates they charged to get you on the first page of Google in the first place. The link building and optimization effort needed will be substantially costly and you should get a decent break on the SEO fees, if you choose to extend it. Transparency of what they plan to do to get you on the first page of Google. Ask very direct questions if it’s not spelled out already in their statement of work or contract, what methods will be used to get you in the top 10 on Google. If all you see in the contract is optimizing page content and some directory submissions, it’s most likely not going to get you what you want. You want to see in the contract specific references to one-way permanent link building, not rented, permanent links only. Ask them for a sample of links they have acquired for other SEO clients.
SEO can be extremely effective to increase leads, sales, whatever you objective may be, but too many times decision makers in businesses blindly accept SEO contract terms put in front of them simply because they don’t know the questions they should ask. It’s your duty to exercise due diligence and part of your research when choosing a SEO provider is to know what you get in return for your money, and what are your options if the promised results are not achieved.

Keith Mallinson asked:


We all know that in order to get customers to your site, you need to market it. You need to get the word out that your site is there and it’s got the products or information for your customers. Here I am, come and get me! But, how to do this is the question. One of the most effective ways is to use a search engine as a tool. More and more search engines are the ways people find websites that they visit. Once they are there, your products or information will sell itself!

Search engine submission software can help you do this. By submitting your site to search engines, you will be there when someone does a search using the keywords you set up for that website or webpage. Again, the goal is to get the customer to the site. Some of these software programs can help while others may prove to be useless. Here’s a reason why. When you, yourself want to search for something on the net, where do you go? Do you use Google? Yahoo? More than likely you do. The question is, does the software you plan to spend your hard earned money on include these popular search engines?

The website software submission software claims to submit your site to many different sites. Often some of these are free for all sites or sites that generally generate no traffic besides submissions like these. So, what good does that do you? When you decide to purchase this type of software ensure that it will submit your site to useful search engines, ones that will be used and will generate traffic to your site.

By all means, having your website automatically submitted to hundreds of search engines is a great thing. But, make sure that where your site is going is actually something that will increase your hits. Do this by researching just where it is being submitted to.

Mark Cijo asked:


Whether you are starting an online business or just want to exploit the power of the Internet to advertise your existing company, getting your name out into the public can be a very difficult task. One of the best ways to introduce your company to potential consumers is through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com as they are used by millions of people everyday, looking for information, advice, and potentially the products and services your company can supply.

More and more business organizations are turning to search engine optimization companies to do the job for them. But as there are so many companies to choose from, most new businesses are left with the question of how to choose a good search engine optimization company, one that will deliver the results.

One factor to look for when choosing a search engine optimization company is experience of the company. Internet companies that are not competitive generally fold within first one or two years, so look for a company that has been around in the business for longer period of time.

Another factor to look for when choosing a Search Engine Optimization company is how they deal with customers. It is always good to choose a business that puts your profits first, and not their own and hence make sure that the company you choose offers completely free consultations. Good companies start by simply asking you about your business and your goals, and with that information they put their years of experience to create solutions to help you attain those goals.

The most important aspect for you to look is expertise of the SEO company. The Internet has been hyped as a way for business organizations to earn more revenue than ever before, and it’s true that the potential is there. A small company simply can’t compete, and can’t afford to spend time and capital on training in-house employees to perform similar services. Now it is your chance to get your company to the top of the search results of major search engines, or to get that brand new, professional website. You don’t need to spend millions of dollars like major corporations but have to make the wise decision after contemplating all these above mentioned factors.

Negi Kapil asked:


Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a subset of internet marketing, which uses a combination of free and paid techniques to ensure the achievement of the client’s objectives. The central idea behind any search engine marketing campaign is to ensure a high ranking for a website in search engine result pages. The need for Search Engine marketing arose because users wanted faster results.

Organic SEO techniques are time consuming and results usually take many months or weeks to show up. Clients who want instant results often resort to search engine-marketing campaigns, which include sponsored listings, pay per click campaigns and similar such paid techniques to obtain high ranking on search engines.

Sponsored listings are a sure shot way of achieving high ranks on search engines. Depending on the kind of money, a customer is ready to pay; search engines alter the ranks of companies in search results for certain defined keywords. Another way to achieve high ranking on search engines is to bid for certain keywords in search engines . Most search engines allow users to customize their ad campaigns in line with their advertizing and marketing budgets. By bidding for certain keywords, users can improve their rankings in search engine result pages. However, this method can prove to be quite expensive, as users need to increase the bids if their ranking does not improve in search engines.

Other paid methods of improving your website’s ranking are CPM and CPC. Cost per (thousand) Impression (CPM) technique enables users to pay for their advertisements only when the page has been rendered at least a thousand times on the browser of each unique visitor. A customer’s account is debited only after thousand impressions have been rendered. Such methods are however prone to fraud and require proper management through web analytical software’s.

Cost per Click campaigns on the other hand require user s to pay for each validated click made by web surfers. Users can set the lower and upper limits for the payments they are going to make to their advertisers on a daily basis. If users want, they can choose to pay for only those visitors who end up filling an online query form. This method will ensure that they end up paying for only genuine queries. However, this method is also vulnerable to fraud and requires web analytical software’s for effective management and execution.

Search Engine marketing has become immensely popular as it provides a measurable method for advertisers to evaluate the return on their advertising spend. Other mediums like print, TV, radio, although effective, do not possess the capability to inform advertisers about the direction of their marketing spend.

Bryan Super asked:


Having a good seo copywriter is very important in getting good search engine rankings. The best thing to do in my opinion would be to find an reputable seo copywriter. If you don’t have the money for that then here are some simple ways to optimize your website.

First you should be designing your webpages using css, cascading style sheets. The search engines love this. It also looks very professional to anyone who will visit your site.

The next thing you can do to improve your seo copywriting is to check out what other sites are doing for your keyword. Go to google and enter your keyword. Go to the first result and see how their page is set up. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

At the top of your page you should use your keyword in the title tags and then on your page you should use the keyword in a h1 tag near the top of the page. Finally you should use the keyword in an h2 tag right before your on page content starts. A good seo copywriter will know exactly how to do this which is why I suggest finding someone who knows their stuff.

Throughout your paragraphs you should sprinkle the keyword and make it sound readable. A good rule is that if you read it out loud and it sounds funny, then you probably used your keyword too much.

The next thing you will want to work on is inbound linking. You will want to link with sites that are similiar to yours. A great way to do this is again go to google and lookup your keyword. Take the top couple of sites, copy the url of the site. Then go back to google and put link:www.whateverthesiteis.com. This will bring up a list of sites that are linking to that number 1 site in google. Next you simply should visit all of those sites and request a link, or a link exchange. Yes it sounds time consuming, but it is worth it.

A good seo copywriter system will explain all of these steps in detail. You will also learn how to get your website to the top of the search engine for just about any keyword you want. If you have a website and are not getting much traffic you need an seo copywriter to beef up your site. Once your site is optimized you will notice the difference in the amout of traffic you will be getting and the jump in sales.

Farazdak Nasrulla asked:


One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build their database. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. If ranking on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for you, then it is important you understand the basics of creating a search engine friendly website.

Below it is explained in detail as to how a search engine works.

Crawling
Firstly, search engines crawl the web to gather information and build their database. This is done by an automated software called a search engine crawler or spider or a bot. These spiders crawl through a site and look at the content (mainly text) to know what the site is about and then start collecting, parsing and storing the data so that it can be easily be retrieved from its database.

However, since there are over billion pages on the web, it is practically impossible for a spider to revisit a site on a daily basis only to see if a new page has been added or an existing page has gone through any modification. Many times the spider may not visit your website for a month or more also, therefore, the true impact of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately.

It is also good to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, java script, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not be crawled and indexed for further processing.

Search Engine Indexing
Once a page is crawled, the next step involves indexing the content. This process entails finding those words that can best describe the webpage content and then assigning the webpage to specific keywords. The indexed page is then stored in the huge database for retrieval later. At times, the search engine may not be able to correctly identify the meaning of the page and in such a case optimization of the page can help it classify it rightly and achieve a better ranking for you.

Processing
This is done when a user enters a search query – in simple terms, the search engine analyses the information it has indexed in relation to the search request. Since there will be millions of pages containing the same search term, the search engine calculates the relevance of each page in its database to the search query.

The relevancy of a page is calculated based on various algorithms. These algorithms assign different weights for general aspects like Meta Tags, Keyword Density, and Links. However, one basic truth that you need to know is that all major search engines regularly change their algorithms and if you want to continue to appear on the top of the search results, you need to keep your pages up to date. Also, it would be a wise decision to think about SEO to rank on the top and also gain an edge over your competitors.

Retrieving
This is the last step in the process where the search engine retrieves the results, that is, it throws up all the relevant results before the user. The uses can see a vast pool of information related to their search query.

There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. However, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks:

* Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user.

* Maintaining an index of all the information that gather from various pages.

* Permit users to search for words available in that index.

Kin Lee Say asked:


Optimizing a website so as to improve the search ranking requires a lot of patience and effort. Here is a list that I’ve summarized as a guide for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Tip 1 – Content is King

In any content-driven website, rich authorative content is key to drawing traffic. It is important to select a topic which interest you most, because passion drives everything. Search Engine Optimization journey starts with a topic. And it has to be rich and authorative along the way.

Tip 2 – Keywords

Once the content has been drafted out, it is important to identify important keywords for the Internet keyword search. Wordtracker, at www.wordtracker.com, is an excellent tool which calculates the search frequency of keywords on the web. Remember to choose keywords that your segment market will use, not technical terms which they are not familiar with.

Tip 3 – Spice up your LINK Popularity

Having both quantity and quality inbound links surpass most SEO techniques. If you could establish just 5 in-bound links from sites which have at least a PageRank of 4 (PR4), your site’s Google PageRank will improve. Another good way to improve the link popularity is to sumit your site to directories of a least a PR4 and submit your articles to EzineArticles. Install Google toolbar and you will be able to determine the PR value for all websites and pages.

Tip 4 – Meta Tags

Two of the most important meta-tag are the Title tag and the Description tag. Set the values of these tags which correspond well to the content information in the page. Keep all Title tag values unique for each individual page.

There are many FREE tag analytical tools on the web which you can test your settings. You can try such tool at www.seomoz.org and www.submitexpress.com.

It will also be helpful to insert the ALT tag for images and photos. Structure the titles and sub-titles using H1-H6 tags so as to assist the spider to have a clearer understanding about your site.

Tip 5 – Things to AVOID

Spider cannot interpret Flash and Javascript. To your best ability, avoid the following:

heavy Flash codes
heavy Javascripting
Content Management Solution, as most refrain user from changing the tag values
two different pages with exactly the same content
Setting same colour to fonts and it’s background, spider may intepret as spam
html frame
image map
associating your site with bad neighbours


Tip 6 – Marketing

Marketing is really an art and there are 101 ways of doing it. Popular ones include:

advertisements & classifieds eNewsletter (Mailing list) blogging forum participations article submissions business networking Press Releases

Again, it is important to offer rich and authorative content in all marketing strategies.

Tip 7 – Traffic Monitoring

Google Analytics tool is an excellent tool to monitor all traffic information and conversion rates.

Mark Tawney asked:


There are lots of tips available on the Internet regarding ways to improve your SEO articles and to make profit in the online business. New SEO software and SEO tools are available in the online market nowadays. Several SEO consultants and SEO companies are extending their hands to provide SEO services to the webmasters. However, you will hardly find anyone who is aware about the common mistakes that are often made while working with search engine optimization.

We often make some petty mistakes in web development as a result of which our websites cannot attain a high rank in the search engine lists inspite of our hard work. If you just take a casual look at several SEO forums available on the Internet you will be amazed to find that there are hundreds and thousands of posts from the webmasters who have become frustrated for not getting the proper Page Rank in the search engine list. All of them have tried very hard to promote their websites as best as they can and yet they fail to attain the top search engine ranks.

The search engines, definitely, bear no personal grudge against them or their websites. So, what is actually preventing them from achieving their desired position in the Internet search engine index? In most cases, webmasters are unaware of the reason. However, you need not have to worry about this as we are here to help you regarding this aspect of Internet marketing.

In all probabilities, you must have made one or more of the blunders listed below. If you can identify your mistake then you can fix it up yourself and your work will be done. The best thing about the SEO mistakes is that it can be corrected easily.

So, here goes the common errors made in SEO: -

Use of frames: – Although a few years ago, frames were being used to allow scrolling of various portions of a web page independently, however, it has been recently discovered that search engines do not prefer websites that uses frames. The best remedy against this is to redesign your web page all over again without the use of frames.

Use of Flash: – Flash is a technology that is widely used by many web designers to promote a website. As Flash makes a website very attractive and appealing to the online visitors so it has achieved lot of popularity in online business. However, the search engine spiders cannot interpret a Flash content so it cannot fetch you a good position in the search engine index. The problem will become even more complicated if you use the Flash technology for your menus because in that case your entire content will remain indecipherable to the search engine spiders.

Use of Broken Links: – You should examine your website regularly in order to ensure that it is completely free of any broken links. Websites that contain broken links often escape the notice of the search engine spiders. You can use the software Xenu Link Sleuth in order to check your website for any broken links.

Use of JavaScript: – JavaScript are imperceptible to the spiders of search engines and so use it only if you have a good text link arrangement on which search engine spiders can crawl upon.

Menno Spijkstra asked:


Optimizing websites is one of the main concerns of many web site owners or online marketers. With optimized web sites, you’ll be guaranteed of higher page rankings due to your site’s accuracy and relevance. SEO marketing is a very important tool that helps online marketers achieve an optimized web site. Many people have realized the importance of SEO marketing especially that it has proven its purpose in generating more traffic to a website. If you employ the correct SEO strategy then you can get a better response from internet users who will visit your website. SEO marketing service will help you in increasing traffic and eventually convert this traffic into sales.

With effective SEO marketing, you will be able to get the coveted attention of big search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Take note that most internet users rely on search engines when they want to get information on the net. It is a common knowledge among internet marketers that keyword relevance and accuracy is a major criterion in getting higher search engine rankings. If you avail of SEO internet marketing service, you will be able to use this tool in order to capture your target customers. You are guaranteed of better product visibility. In addition to this, you will have explosive traffic to your web page by using an elite SEO software to further back-up your search engine marketing efforts.

This type of software is designed to assist you in coming up with methods to further optimize your web page. Furthermore, SEO internet marketing is said to be a process of correctly advertising a web site in a cost effective and efficient manner. This type of online marketing tool is getting more in demand nowadays since various researches proved that search engines can drive more traffic to a web site. This finding turned website owners to dig up ways and techniques to gain visibility in popular search engines. The more visible you are the more people will click on your website.

The appropriate SEO internet marketing technique will assist you in making your site easily accessible to your target audience. Grab the most ideal position for your online business by using SEO online marketing tools. The first three pages of search results are the most coveted positions. If you are included in the top ten pages, then perhaps you’ll be assured of good internet traffic for your site. Maximize the chance of getting a cheap SEO service for your online business. There are many quality online marketing tools to choose from in the market.

With the increasing demand for search engine optimization, companies have come up with innovative softwares to meet the needs of online marketers. Only be keen at choosing the most suitable one for your marketing needs. You might stumble upon products that will turn out to be money-grabbers only. Do your research well. Also, it pays to listen to the advice of other experienced marketers. You can get tidbits of information to enhance your SEO campaign. You could have a better advantage against your competitors if you stay updated with the latest methods in optimizing your web pages. Don’t fear to take the risk of trying new ways for better search engine rankings.

Stephen Ahlfeld asked:


Blogging has become increasingly popular over the past few years due to the fact that it is much easier than making a normal website. Blogs are great for people who just want to make money with little cost as they are easy to build and have the ability to obtain decent rankings in a shorter space of time than normal websites. Below I will briefly touch on some SEO techniques which can be used to help increase the link popularity and ranking of a blog.

The first aspect is content. Having a good amount of unique and targeted content on your blog is always very important and is just as important for blogs as it is for websites, so be sure to have as much content as possible. There are loads of content generator software programs which allow you to make different unique versions of an original article which can help save time.

The second aspect is building quality backlinks. Try to exchange links with people who have websites or blogs in the same niche as you. Alternatively another good option is to try and purchase links on blogs or websites related to your niche which have a great number of backlinks and high page rank as this help your rankings. You can also make use of submitting your blog feeds to blog directories which will notify them to publish your content on their blogs which can bring you more visitors.

The third important aspect is blog pinging. It is essential that every time you write a new post for your blog or simply update old content that you utilise a service to ping your blog. There are many places like pingoat, pingomatic etc. What this does is it notify blog directories and other popular bookmarking sites that they need to crawl your site for your any newly posted content. This will ultimately get more pages indexed in the search engines quickly and will hopefully result in a bit more traffic too.

I trust these few tips helped you in optimising your newly made blogs.

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