Optimize My Website - SEO - What to Expect

Search Engine Optimization - What to Expect

Rebuilding your site to work with the search engines can require quite a bit of work. Plan on at least a week for the updates to be applied.

When we start the SEP process we first gather information about your site. It helps to know what we are up against, in turn this also allows you to make some further decisions like; should Pay-Per-Click be used at first? If so, which providers should be used? How many phrases can be focused on at first? Is more content needed? These and many other questions can be answered by looking at a few facts concerning your site. Of course we will not know for sure until we see a couple monthly reports, but we can get a very good idea by looking at these things:

URL Life Span - The longer a site has been known by the search engines the better potential ranking it has. The whois servers provide the date that your sites name was registered. You can see this for yourself by going here; betterwhois.com. Of course it may have taken a few months from this point before you had any content associated with the domain name for the search engines to see, but at least this provides a starting point as to how long the site has been active.
Google PageRank - This figure is misunderstood by most people, as it does not represent anything accurately. Though it does indicate if Google looks upon a website favorably. If you do not know about Google's PageRank, it is a number that appears on Google toolbar. You can download this for yourself here; Google Downloads. We are hoping that your site has a PageRank of 1 or better. By the way, it becomes increasingly more difficult to get a PageRank. Sites with a score of 4 are doing very well, and those with a perfect 10 are extremely rare. As of right now, May 2005, even the mighty Microsoft.com has a score of 9. Chances are you will never see anything much above a 5.
Server Logs / Spider Visitors - If you have access to your website server logs then you can see when the different search engine spiders have visited your site. As Google places new sites (they consider a site as new based on when they first spidered it) into an 8 month probationary freeze. We are hoping that Google already knows about your site and has been visiting it for at least eight months. Longer would be better.
Google Cache - Another excellent resource provided by Google can be found by searching for your site on Google, but type in the name.com without the preceding www or use Google's toolbar PageRank tool. This will bring up a page that gives you access to a list of options, including; cache and sites that link to yours. We are hoping these options will display additional information. If so, then Google has known about your site. If not, then they either do not like your site or they have not known about it long enough. NOTE: Google's tools return limited information. Do not be alarmed if not all of your pages are listed.

We focus on finding Google data because Google provides search data for AOL and Netscape too, as well as other lesser engines. Combined, these Google based engines are the source of the most of the searches made on the internet. Google is also the hardest to become listed on. By knowing how your site is viewed by Google we will have a good idea as to what needs to be done for your site and how long of a time frame we are looking at before results will be given by them.

If none of the Google tests above returned positive information then we have a lot of extra work ahead of us, and we need to consider Pay-Per-Click for quicker results. We also need to make sure that there the site has not been black listed. If the site has been black listed it will be quicker to start from scratch with a new site URL, or purchases a suitable URL from someone else that has positive history with Google.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is a good way to be seen early on with an SEP campaign. The two big players currently in PPC are Overture and Google. PPC is a different animal than SEP; it works differently and it costs differently. One of the advantages of PPC is that you can advertise with hundreds of phrases and even target specific areas with generic phrases, where SEP is restricted to working with the actual content of the site (about a dozen phrases in the beginning, depending on your competition). The down side to PPC is that you disappear from the search engine when your budget is used up and there is a lot of click fraud which exhausts your budget faster.

Phrases & the Online Report

Before the actual optimization starts for your website we select phrases to work with and build an SEP report to see where your website stands as of right now with the different search engines. We use several tools in finding decent phrases for your site. Here are some free tools that you can use to find similar information:

Location - When working with generic SEP we choose a list of phrases and add a location to them. For instance; if you offer the service of tooth whitening and you live in Everett Washington then you would used the phrase Everett tooth whitening or Washington tooth whitening or better yet, Seattle tooth whitening. Generally you will want to use the closest cities with the largest population that people would be willing to travel from.
Phrase Popularity - I find that by writing out a list of the phrases works best, and while you are making this list add a couple columns to the right of the list column. At first there is going to be several dozen phrases, but we need to use only the ones that have a fighting chance to work well, and then optimize for them very well. I use Overture's free advertising center, here and click on Keyword Selector Tool, to find which phrases are searched for the most. Write down the displayed number next to the phrase on the list you are keeping. Seattle tooth whitening showed 3302 searches made during the last 30 days with the search engines that Overture works with.
Page Competition - Now lastly, do a Google search to see how many competing pages you have for each phrase. Seattle tooth whitening has 63,200 webpages to compete with. Now perform the search again, but this time search using the allintitle prefix like this; allintitle: seattle tooth whitening. This more accurately shows how many optimized you will have to compete with. 138 in this case.

Now from the list we select the phrases that we have a good chance to do something with. It is better to choose a less searched for phrase if you can get page 1 results than a more popular phrase that you will never position well.

Next we build a report that shows where your site currently stands with the most popular search engines with the phrases we selected above.

You can see the report here by typing your URL followed by /sep/report/, and then click on the links in the center of the page. We provide two ways of viewing the report data;

Engine Summary Report - this will list the most popular search engines alphabetically and show where each of the targeted phrases position appears for each engine and
Keyword Summary Report - this displays mostly the same data, but instead of listing the data in a long list this report shows your phrases running down the left with the search engines across the top and your positioning where the columns and rows meet.

Both reports are pretty self explanatory. They both also have at the top a Visibility Statistics section. This data is a quick overview represented by very generic numbers.

As you can see from the reports, you do not have very much visibility yet.

Along the left side of the report are links that provide additional information about SEP and your website. Several of the links that might be the most interesting right now are; Reading the Reports, How You Can Help & Improving Site Traffic. There is also a link here for your /awstats.

What happens now

The search engines need text that they can look at, and lots of it. We start by extracting all of the text from the flash portion of your website and building html, or text pages. You can see a start of this by click on the page icon within the footer at the bottom of your website. From this webpage we will add more content and place links to additional pages containing more information about you and your practice. As time goes on we will need to add more pages to this part of the site. The next time that a search engine spiders your site they will take the text from these pages and decide from this what each page is about and what your site is trying to accomplish. It used to be that we could tell the search engines with meta tags within the code what your site was about and what keyword phrases best represented the site. The problem was that people lied and exaggerated, so now the search engines decide for themselves. All we can do is suggest phrases to them and let them make the final call.

Monthly Reports

search engine positioning Monthly Reports Now starts the hardest part, waiting. Each month we build a new SEP report and send you an email letting you know where your current result standings are. The search engines typically look at a site about once a month, so it might take up to two months before they see the changes we make. The engines also regularly change the way they rank a site. What we do is try and get the engines to give you top ranking, but they may not agree with us and will add algorithms to their ranking process in order to eliminate any loopholes that we take advantage of. This is in reality an all out war. Expect your sites ranking to fluctuate each month. Because the search engines do not tell us how they rank a site we have to analyze the SEP reports from dozens of sites and figure out what they are looking at this month and combat their current schemes. Unfortunately this sometimes takes us a couple months to figure out, and then it might take a couple months before they display results for the changes we make. You get the idea. When you see negative numbers for a couple months in a row, know that we are frantically making changes. Typically, we have to fully redo a website about every eight months.

Conclusion

The actual changes to your site will not be updated till the latter part of next week at the earliest. If you have any questions or comments, please contact me.

Written by Administrator
Wednesday, 01 August 2007
Search Engine Optimization - What to Expect Rebuilding your site to work with the search engines can require quite a bit of work. Plan on at least a week for the updates to be applied. When we start the SEP process we first gather information about your site. It helps to know what we are up against, in turn this also allows you to make some further decisions like; should Pay-Per-Click be used at first? If so, which providers should be used? How many phrases can be focused on at first? Is more content needed? These and many other questions can be answered by looking at a few facts concerning your site. Of course we will not know for sure until we see a couple monthly reports, but we can get a very good idea by looking at these things: URL Life Span - The longer a site has been known by the search engines the better potential ranking it has. The whois servers provide the date that your sites name was registered. You can see this for yourself by going here; betterwhois.com. Of course it may have taken a few months from this point before you had any content associated with the domain name for the search engines to see, but at least this provides a starting point as to how long the site has been active. Google PageRank - This figure is misunderstood by most people, as it does not represent anything accurately. Though it does indicate if Google looks upon a website favorably. If you do not know about Google's PageRank, it is a number that appears on Google toolbar. You can download this for yourself here; Google Downloads. We are hoping that your site has a PageRank of 1 or better. By the way, it becomes increasingly more difficult to get a PageRank. Sites with a score of 4 are doing very well, and those with a perfect 10 are extremely rare. As of right now, May 2005, even the mighty Microsoft.com has a score of 9. Chances are you will never see anything much above a 5. Server Logs / Spider Visitors - If you have access to your website server logs then you can see when the different search engine spiders have visited your site. As Google places new sites (they consider a site as new based on when they first spidered it) into an 8 month probationary freeze. We are hoping that Google already knows about your site and has been visiting it for at least eight months. Longer would be better. Google Cache - Another excellent resource provided by Google can be found by searching for your site on Google, but type in the name.com without the preceding www or use Google's toolbar PageRank tool. This will bring up a page that gives you access to a list of options, including; cache and sites that link to yours. We are hoping these options will display additional information. If so, then Google has known about your site. If not, then they either do not like your site or they have not known about it long enough. NOTE: Google's tools return limited information. Do not be alarmed if not all of your pages are listed. We focus on finding Google data because Google provides search data for AOL and Netscape too, as well as other lesser engines. Combined, these Google based engines are the source of the most of the searches made on the internet. Google is also the hardest to become listed on. By knowing how your site is viewed by Google we will have a good idea as to what needs to be done for your site and how long of a time frame we are looking at before results will be given by them. If none of the Google tests above returned positive information then we have a lot of extra work ahead of us, and we need to consider Pay-Per-Click for quicker results. We also need to make sure that there the site has not been black listed. If the site has been black listed it will be quicker to start from scratch with a new site URL, or purchases a suitable URL from someone else that has positive history with Google. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) PPC is a good way to be seen early on with an SEP campaign. The two big players currently in PPC are Overture and Google. PPC is a different animal than SEP; it works differently and it costs differently. One of the advantages of PPC is that you can advertise with hundreds of phrases and even target specific areas with generic phrases, where SEP is restricted to working with the actual content of the site (about a dozen phrases in the beginning, depending on your competition). The down side to PPC is that you disappear from the search engine when your budget is used up and there is a lot of click fraud which exhausts your budget faster. Phrases & the Online Report Before the actual optimization starts for your website we select phrases to work with and build an SEP report to see where your website stands as of right now with the different search engines. We use several tools in finding decent phrases for your site. Here are some free tools that you can use to find similar information: Location - When working with generic SEP we choose a list of phrases and add a location to them. For instance; if you offer the service of tooth whitening and you live in Everett Washington then you would used the phrase Everett tooth whitening or Washington tooth whitening or better yet, Seattle tooth whitening. Generally you will want to use the closest cities with the largest population that people would be willing to travel from. Phrase Popularity - I find that by writing out a list of the phrases works best, and while you are making this list add a couple columns to the right of the list column. At first there is going to be several dozen phrases, but we need to use only the ones that have a fighting chance to work well, and then optimize for them very well. I use Overture's free advertising center, here and click on Keyword Selector Tool, to find which phrases are searched for the most. Write down the displayed number next to the phrase on the list you are keeping. Seattle tooth whitening showed 3302 searches made during the last 30 days with the search engines that Overture works with. Page Competition - Now lastly, do a Google search to see how many competing pages you have for each phrase. Seattle tooth whitening has 63,200 webpages to compete with. Now perform the search again, but this time search using the allintitle prefix like this; allintitle: seattle tooth whitening. This more accurately shows how many optimized you will have to compete with. 138 in this case. Now from the list we select the phrases that we have a good chance to do something with. It is better to choose a less searched for phrase if you can get page 1 results than a more popular phrase that you will never position well. Next we build a report that shows where your site currently stands with the most popular search engines with the phrases we selected above. You can see the report here by typing your URL followed by /sep/report/, and then click on the links in the center of the page. We provide two ways of viewing the report data; Engine Summary Report - this will list the most popular search engines alphabetically and show where each of the targeted phrases position appears for each engine and Keyword Summary Report - this displays mostly the same data, but instead of listing the data in a long list this report shows your phrases running down the left with the search engines across the top and your positioning where the columns and rows meet. Both reports are pretty self explanatory. They both also have at the top a Visibility Statistics section. This data is a quick overview represented by very generic numbers. As you can see from the reports, you do not have very much visibility yet. Along the left side of the report are links that provide additional information about SEP and your website. Several of the links that might be the most interesting right now are; Reading the Reports, How You Can Help & Improving Site Traffic. There is also a link here for your /awstats. What happens now The search engines need text that they can look at, and lots of it. We start by extracting all of the text from the flash portion of your website and building html, or text pages. You can see a start of this by click on the page icon within the footer at the bottom of your website. From this webpage we will add more content and place links to additional pages containing more information about you and your practice. As time goes on we will need to add more pages to this part of the site. The next time that a search engine spiders your site they will take the text from these pages and decide from this what each page is about and what your site is trying to accomplish. It used to be that we could tell the search engines with meta tags within the code what your site was about and what keyword phrases best represented the site. The problem was that people lied and exaggerated, so now the search engines decide for themselves. All we can do is suggest phrases to them and let them make the final call. Monthly Reports Now starts the hardest part, waiting. Each month we build a new SEP report and send you an email letting you know where your current result standings are. The search engines typically look at a site about once a month, so it might take up to two months before they see the changes we make. The engines also regularly change the way they rank a site. What we do is try and get the engines to give you top ranking, but they may not agree with us and will add algorithms to their ranking process in order to eliminate any loopholes that we take advantage of. This is in reality an all out war. Expect your sites ranking to fluctuate each month. Because the search engines do not tell us how they rank a site we have to analyze the SEP reports from dozens of sites and figure out what they are looking at this month and combat their current schemes. Unfortunately this sometimes takes us a couple months to figure out, and then it might take a couple months before they display results for the changes we make. You get the idea. When you see negative numbers for a couple months in a row, know that we are frantically making changes. Typically, we have to fully redo a website about every eight months. Conclusion The actual changes to your site will not be updated till the latter part of next week at the earliest. If you have any questions or comments, please contact me.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 August 2007 )