Springboard SEO Services
The construction of your particular site will determine the methods and priority of SEO services best suited to achieve top placement in the natural search engine listings.
Every website on the Internet has been developed using different methods, and with varying degrees of expertise and foresight. The search engine optimization mandate perfectly suited to your particular site requirements will depend on some key points:
- The structure of your website, including site architecture, navigation and internal linking.
- The accessibility of your site's content to search engine spiders as well as various user devices; from the major browsers to mobile phones.
- The quality of your site's source code, from semantics to web standard mark up. Semantic, web standard markup not only helps with proper indexing, but also reduces costs of future site management and is future-proof.
- Site Usability - Yet another consideration that can affect both the human and search engine robot experience on your site.
- Crawlability pitfalls, including duplicate content, url structure, and url canonicalization.
- Your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your most profitable, targeted keywords and keyphrases.
- The quality of your inbound link profile.
Search Engine Optimization Services - Step by Step
The following services are part of a sequential, comprehensive optimization process that focuses mainly on:
- Site analysis.
- Keyword research.
- Competitive intelligence.
- SEO Copywriting
- Web standard mark-up
- Linking campaigns
SEO Strategy
1.Site analysis
First impressions on the world wide web are exceptionally important; if things don't quickly measure up to visitor expectations, the back button is only a click away.
At first glance, a site's strengths and weaknesses are often obvious. Usability, architecture, and content shortcomings typically surface without too much effort.
Digging deeper into what makes a particular website tick - or not tick - reveals factors that influence web visibility - as well as the entire SEO campaign.
Important considerations of an SEO analysis include:
- Domain age/health.
- Backlink popularity/authority. And to a lesser extent, Google PageRank.
- Content.
- Competitive intelligence.
- Site architecture (Static vs dynamic pages, url structure, navigation, etc).
- Pages currently indexed in Google.
- Broad (Short Tail) keyword research.
- Search engine spider roadblocks.
On completion of a site analysis, clients are provided with a report outlining appropriate optimization services for the healthiest, most profitable, and long-term web presence - and a price estimate.
Keyword Research
Having performed initial, broad keyword research for your niche's most relevant terms in the preceding site analysis, the following step is to dig deeper into the data mining results for long-tail keywords relevant to your market.
Custom keyword research & Internet traffic reports, tailored to your site, allow us to monitor your progress as your Internet presence grows stronger.
In addition to setting the foundation for an optimal, overall keyword strategy, the results of keyword research will expose strengths and weaknesses of the competition.
The key members of our SEO team use a variety of the best data mining tools in the search marketing industry, and have extensive experience providing keyword research services in a wide spectrum of broad and niche markets.
Keyword and traffic reports are emailed to clients before any work is begun, and follow-up reports 8 weeks after completion. Reports are available in .pdf format sent by email, and in 8 x 11 booklet form, sent by mail or available for pick up.
On-page SEO
3.SEO Copywriting
Some say that content is king - others say it is the kingdom; either way, it's the driving force behind the search visibilty of your site.
Professionally written web copy engages visitors with compelling, usable content, and pleases search engines aswell, greatly benefiting both traffic and conversions.
Copywriting is copy that sells. SEO copywriting is copy that sells and pleases the search engines. All on-page, and many off-page search engine optimization methods are built upon the foundation of optimized content.
In many cases, the SEO copywriting process involves simply editing a site's content and structure, while in others, it involves writing or rewriting multiple pages of content.
Several factors play into a site's copywriting requirements; here are a few to take into consideration:
- Completeness: Does your site offer value to visitors, or is it mostly hype? "We're the best" isn't going to help anyone's decision making process, including - you guessed it - search engine ranking algorithms.
- Uniqueness: Find a hook. How are you setting yourself apart from the competition? Offer something of value that nobody in your industry has. This one could be your trump card...
- Writing quality: Are your visitors greeted with compelling content, or are words merely strung together to form coherent sentences, at best?
- Keyword targeting: Is the site written and organized in such a way that content has the best chances of being properly indexed for optimal ranking potential? Using valued keywords appropriately will also add to the usability of a site.
- Grammar & spelling: First impressions go a long way. Being overly "cashewal" isn't part of a cohesive plan of action in gaining visitor trust or loyalty.
- Calls to action: According to Wikipedia, the definition of copywriting is
"...the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea"
. You don't need to turn your website into an online infomercial, but take note of the word promote, and think marketing.
Short-head and long-tail keyword data supplied by keyword research has a marked influence on the copywriting of a site; however, sacrificing readability in favor of attempting to spam search engines with overly optimized copy is usually a bad idea on many levels. Hiring an experienced copywriter is often the difference between traffic and traffic plus conversions.
Web standard mark-up
Visually, two sites might be identical; however, when "looking under the hood", it's often quickly apparent why one of them outperforms the other in search, in accessibility, and a multitude of other ways.
What your web site's visitors see when they land at your URL is important, without a doubt, but what do the search engine robots see when they arrive? Are your navigation menus accessible to these bots, or do they impede them from crawling your site? Are your site's pages bloated with nested HTML tables for layout purposes? Useless Internal Javascript? Inaccessible image maps? Content embedded within improper HTML elements? Yuck. This is what Googlebot might say if it could speak, and your site's indexing on the search engines will reflect this algorithmic reaction.
Once the optimized content of your site has been written and organized according to a fine tuned hierarchy of information architecture, it will be time to properly code the HTML and CSS that will:
- Display your site's information to visitors in an attractive and usable fashion
- Help the search engines index your content with highly semantic markup (HTML)
- Separate the content that the search engines are interested in (your text embedded within HTML elements) from the presentational data (Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS) that contain the visual attributes of your Site - This does not affect your site visually, instead benefits it's performance in terms of search engine friendliness, maintainability, accessibility, and usability.
- Pass strict HTML 4.01 validation with no errors
- Display identically on all modern browsers, including but not limited to: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Netscape Navigator, Konqueror, K-Meleon, Safari, and Opera
- Be future-proof due to our compliance with W3C web standard recommendations
If content is king, then web standards compliant, semantic markup is the castle.
Off-page SEO
5.Linking Campaigns
In the meantime, browse through the various pages detailing each service in the Search Engine Optimization process:
