What to Look For In a Good SEO Company.

People who are turning into online commerce are steadily increasing. A lot of people are now realizing that having an online store offers an advantage compared to having to rent out office space. Aside from that, a lot of services are now being offered to online clients to maximize their income.

In order to be an effective online merchant, one thing you will need is SEO. However, it'll be pretty hard to start up a web store and start SEO as well, not unless you have enough manpower and resources.

Take note that dominating a very competitive industry is not very easy, especially if you're competing with brands or companies that have existed for more than a decade. That is why you need to avail of SEO services. Instead of training yourself to do SEO or (and most likely starting from scratch), it will be better for you to avail of SEO services. If your business relies heavily on online traffic, you can't afford not to avail of SEO services. SEO companies will certainly help you increase your rankings and increase your revenue.

When hiring an SEO firm, be sure that the following services are being offered.

Keyword Research

This is the basics of SEO. Every activity involved in SEO has everything to do with the keywords you want to rank for. You need to consider the number of searches for your keyword. Trying to rank for a keyword that only gets 5 hits per month isn't exactly what you'd call a lucrative business.

Link Building

Another necessary part of SEO is getting links out in the web. The more links you have, the better your site will rank for certain keywords. Every SEO firm should be able to do as much. However, make sure that they're doing white hat strategy. There are SEO companies that do black hat strategy. Admittedly, it can work for a while. Unfortunately, search engines like Google and Yahoo didn't hire PhD grads just so you can easily cheat them. I'm not saying black hat strategies don't work. In fact they do, but it's something that's short-lived.

Social Media Marketing

Increasing your hits will require you to delve into social media marketing. Almost every user of internet spends at least a few minutes, if not hours, on social media like Facebook, twitter, etc. Tapping into these can certainly expand your potential market.

Linkbuilding Strategies For Increasing Your Website Presence

It is very important to increase your website presence through linkbuilding. Not only does it increase your readers, it also increases your chances of making money in the internet.

In order to increase your website presence, you need to do linkbuilding. Below are some linkbuilding strategies that will certainly be helpful to you.

Submit Articles. Submit articles on your niche topic and submit it to article directories for backlinking. Aside from getting links back to your site, you also get a lot of readers should people stumble on those articles. These articles are good sources of links as well as visitors.

Squidoo Lenses. Similar to submitting articles, create Squidoo lenses with links to your site. It only takes less than 20 minutes to create one. Another site similar to Squidoo is Hubpages.

Social Media Profiles. With Social media running rampant in the internet today, it only makes sense to make use of these opportunities to create links for your site. Places where you can create those links are through your profile pages.

Social Bookmarking. Another way to get your site noticed are social bookmarking sites. These sites are mainly for creating bookmarks across the web for sites that are interest the user.

Blog Creation. Because of the abundance of Web2.0 sites that can have you easily setup your own blog within 20 minutes, that's only short of telling that you can have your links published for free. Though these sites are not exactly created for this purpose, it's certainly one way of taking advantage of this opportunity.

Use signatures in forums. Forums have an option to use signatures when signing into forums. Most would use quotations, sayings, or catch phrases. In this case, instead of using those things, use a link instead to your site. That is if HTML tagging is allowed.

If you really want to improve your website presence, make sure to create links and create a lot of them. After all, you can never get enough links.

Linkbuilding For Website SEO

If you’re wondering if it there’s a better way to increase rankings in the search pages other than linkbuilding, you’ve probably got another thing coming. For the foreseeable future, linkbuilding is currently and going to be Website SEO’s number one method for going at the top of the SERPs.

How To Do Linkbuilding

Depending on the site your building links on, there are sites that automatically convert URLs into links. When posting articles, some sites have plug-ins that allow you to add links automatically. However, for most of the sites, you’ll have to have a little html background in making these links.

Below is the syntax for putting backlinks:

<a href="http://urladdress.com/">anchor text</a>

If you've done it correctly, you can expect to see this:

anchor text

Make sure that if you use this text, you are editing in HTML format, otherwise it will show as is.

As you can see, the html syntax for linkbuilding has two main parts, the URL address and anchor text. The URL address is where you will be redirected in your browser if you click on the anchor text.

Importance of Keyword Research

In Website SEO, the selection of anchor text is very important. Most would agree that the anchor text should contain the keywords that you are trying to target for. If you wish to rank first when searching “medical spa”, then you should use these words in your anchor text.

There are notions that, aside from the keywords you’re trying to get ranked for, it is imperative that you also use what they call “cousin keywords” in the anchor text. Unfortunately, unless google, or any search engine for that matter, discloses their search algorithm, all SEOs will have to hope that this method somehow adds value to the SEO process.

Natural Growth Of Backlinks

Since you’ve already figured out that in order for your site to rank first, you’ll have to have a lot of links. With this in mind, you might consider using black hat SEO wherein links to your site are generated by the thousands. There are software programs that are equipped to do that. Though it may get you at the top for some time, most Website SEO Gurus will agree that it will only be for a temporary basis.

Most search engines have already caught on to this and take this into consideration when ranking your site. Along with the number of backlinks you have for your site, they also take into account the age of your site. This means that it is important to establish a “natural growth” of backlinks for your site.

Do not be afraid that if you do Website SEO it would mean that you ruin your chances of getting ranked first. In fact, Google, as well as other search engines, recommend SEO for proper indexing of your sites. They recommend White Hat SEO techniques that are part of good design. You can never get too much links for your site. However, make sure to control how much they grow otherwise you might have wasted time and money in doing SEO.

Frontdesk SEO: Modifying Your Linkbuilding Action Settings

Frontdesk has some really awesome built-in workflows that include linkbuilding actions for competitive keywords, social bookmarking, directory submissions and the like. Of course you can change your workflow settings at any time as this video shows.

Website SEO Client Q&A

A thread of a recent email exchange from a new client asking questions about how Frondesk's SEO software works.

The Q&A below gives some pretty good answers about why SEO agencies are actually switching their clients over to Frontdesk and oursourcing their work to our experts. I've posted it here since these are exactly the kinds of questions that every business has around their own SEO efforts and how they can actually see what's going on. You can get a lot more insight an information in our website SEO software videos.

I've italicized the questions for clarity.

Laurie,
I will check out the login info later, thanks for setting us up.
Some more info regarding moving forward: Attached you will find some files with more info that is noted below. (Client sent Excel reports from the SEO agency they were using and asked us to take a look at them.)

Question: As to keyword research - You will notice they specialize in pre-existing health insurance coverage, these are the ideal / realistic terms we could target as trying to compete with "health insurance" I'm sure is not realistic.

Answer: Keyword research is of the the utmost importance as we've stated. Since this is time intensive and something of an art, without expending time it's difficult to asses where the 'bang for the buck' is that crosses the line between traffic (good) and competition (bad). However, there are always long-tail keywords that can be found in every niche. You're right that 'health insurance' is not going to be one of them.

If you're a local plumber, restaurant, or medical center the competition locally is probably not too great unless you're in a major metropolitan area, so keywords and phrases like 'plumber 84060' or 'plumber Jackson WY' that are pretty standard should work just fine.

That being said, we have very sophisticated programs that can analyze every competitor, every keyword, and every phrase to find where we can compete and where we should be expending time and resources. If we're asked to generate possible keyword lists we can go into real depth. Each keyword is a completely different campaign though. Getting to the top of the listings for 'pre existing health insurance' does not mean that we will rank for 'pre-existing health insurance'. For each keyword we will need to generate backlinks. That's why keyword selection is so critical, and why the cost to go after everything at once is usually prohibitive.

Note: 'Health insurance' is very deep water. It will take considerable time and cost to become a real player in this area. Since we can see that Yahoo only has something like 164 back links indexed to the site there's a long way to go. The good news is that we can show some real traction within the first few months. That being said this is a race that you have to continually run since all of your competitors are.
 
Question: As at 05-2010 - if you look at this backlink report - curious your opinion on if these can be considered back links in anyway. Also what is your overall opinion on the quality of this work, also compared to what your business plan will / can deliver.
 
Answer: The report provided is a general report in an Excel file. It's the way that most agencies work and they tell you that 'links exist'. Frontdesk differs in that you can see each and every task in real time and track everything that's done, and what the results are. We also offer individual keyword tracking so you can see where you rank for every keyword in real time. (I've included the video above.)

There's really not a comparison with our solution and the generic monthly Excel spreadsheets when it comes to reporting.
 
Question: Regarding the client I already signed up with. If you view - BV Monthly Report as at 04-2010 - these are some good keywords the client wants to target locally. My question is within your system, how do we distinguish these to be targeted local vs national - without including the local (city / county) keywords? Is it done by default with geo-ip - or?
 
Answer: The difference between local and national distribution in Frontdesk takes place on the back end. This is part of the back end special sauce. Frontdesk analyzes a all the competitors and sites and builds a workflow that maximizes both the speed, and efficacy of the campaign.

If you choose 'local', the software feeds different links into the work flow than with a national campaign. For example, if you're 'local' and you're in Dallas, TX, Frontdesk will place special  emphasis to find relevant links (blogs etc) that are also local to that area. This means that the competitive and keyword tasks can be dramatically different. (Frontdesk accounts do not support the ability to be both 'local' and 'national' at the same time, but you can switch between the two easily.)

If the client is outsourcing the work to us, this is all include in the workflow automatically so our team is automatically using the correct settings and not just creating 'generic' links. Every link has the highest possible Google Juice.