What does an SEO company do?

Before you can decide whether to outsource your SEO tasks, it’s important to know what most SEO companies do. Most search engine optimization companies, whether they’re a one-person show or have several employees, offer the following services:

1. Website audit. The first thing most SEO companies will do is analyze your site as it stands today. Is it being indexed? What is working and what isn’t?

2. Keyword research. The next step many companies will take is to conduct keyword research. That means researching the keywords your customers are using to find you.

3. Recommendations. The third step is typically for a SEO company to provide you with a strategy. They may include manual submission to search engines for indexing as part of the services they provide, or they may not. They will most definitely have outlined a content and link building strategy for you. What happens next is where firms begin to differ.

They’ll almost always provide HTML coding service to tweak your site optimally for the search engines. Then they’ll either provide all of the services to you, including content writing, or they may simply offer to make sure the links are properly inserted and you’ll have someone else write the content. They may tell you how they suggest you build incoming links, or they may offer to handle the process for you. They may also offer tracking and maintenance to ensure the SEO efforts are working.

So one of the ways to evaluate if a service is worth hiring is to compare the services they offer with your needs. Here are a few other factors to compare them by:

* Their reputation in the industry. It’s important to make sure the SEO company has a good reputation, not only for knowing what they’re doing and getting results but also for using legitimate and respected techniques.

* The policies and procedures. When and how will they communicate with you? How long will the processes take? How often do they evaluate their results? These are just some of the questions to consider when evaluating a potential provider.

* Finally, what does it cost to hire them? Remember, you get what you pay for so hiring a dollar store SEO expert will likely not get you the results you’re looking for. The most expensive SEO jobs — costing up to $10,000 to $20,000 a month – are only required if you have hundreds of product pages. Many experts charge by the page and prices average around $100/page but can certainly be higher or lower.

Analyzing ROI

One of the questions you’ll want to ask yourself before outsourcing your SEO is how much it’s worth to you. In this calculation, you’ll want to consider your hourly value. If it takes you four hours to accomplish what an SEO expert can accomplish in an hour and you’re losing $50/hour trying to code your site when it would have cost you $100 to use an SEO expert, then yes – it might be worthwhile to outsource this task.

That being said, SEO is something you can most certainly accomplish yourself. If you do a bit of research and are willing to experiment with the results then it can be quite satisfying, and profitable, to watch your website grow in the page rankings. So, does it pay to outsource your SEO? It depends on where you value your time and money and the SEO expert you hire.

Here are a few reasons why maintaining your website is important:

# Attracting the search engines – Search engines are important to the livelihood of your online business, but they don’t like “dead” websites. Websites which have been left static without updates or fresh content are a no-no in the online world. Another thing search engines don’t like is broken links.

As you build your web pages it’s easy to miss broken links. A good strategy is to double check every link you add to your website. Inevitably you may miss some or some may become broken with time (as web addresses change and so on). Regular maintenance and “check-ups” for your website will help you spot these broken links and keep your customers and search engines happy in the process.

# Updating information may increase your sales – Regularly looking over your website will also help you make changes and adjustments as necessary. For example, you may have started promoting what was a great product two years ago but now that product may be outdated and not so great anymore. By updating your website you may find products and promotions which are a better match for your visitors. This means more money in your pocket and more satisfied visitors.

Look through your old web pages to see if there are any promotions which can be updated or given a little extra “oomph.” Times change and on the internet time moves at a faster speed – keeping up with the times is important and you can do this by simply looking over your pages and tweaking as you go along.

# Keeping track of your stats is important – Another part of your basic web maintenance is keeping on top of all your visitor statistics. It makes sense to regularly go through your website and check how many visitors you have on a monthly basis, where they’re coming from, how they’re finding you, what pages they’re accessing and so on.

A running log of these statistics will help you quickly identify any potential problems such as loss of traffic or reduced income from sources such as Google AdSense and so on.

Regular web maintenance for your website is important. It can help you keep up with changing times, help to attract more visitors and ultimately make you more sales. If you find this task difficult to squeeze in, try scheduling it in for a set time each month or every few weeks. It shouldn’t take long and the time investment may make all the difference to your business. And finally, if you don’t have time to do the web maintenance yourself you can always think about hiring an assistant to help you with this task.

#1 Post back issues on your website. This will help both with your search engine optimization and you’ll give potential subscribers a taste of what you have to offer. Don’t worry too much about people not signing up because they have access to back issues. Most people want and appreciate the convenience of having content delivered to them instead of them having to go and look for it. Additionally, the timeliness of receiving content immediately rather than reading it three months after the fact holds tremendous value.

#2 Offer something really cool in exchange for subscribing. Free reports, online courses, audio and video products are all valued and will motivate prospects to subscribe. And if you’ve been offering something all along, freshen it up. Offer a new and improved product!

#3 Promote your newsletter in your email signature, forum and social networking signatures and profile pages and any other business communications. People are curious and will likely click through to check out your website and newsletter. Once there, your offer will be so compelling they won’t be able to resist signing up!

#4 Cross promote with other relevant businesses. For example if your niche is pet training, cross promoting your newsletter with a website with a pet food niche is perfect. They get the benefit of your website subscribers and vice versa.

#5 Offer coupons and promotions exclusively for newsletter subscribers. Everyone, particularly in the present economy, is looking for ways to save money. Couple that with the fact that people like to belong to exclusive groups. When you offer potential subscribers the opportunity to save money and receive exclusive coupons and promotions, it’ll motivate them to sign up.

#6 Test the location of your sign up form. Generally, sign up forms are located on the right hand side of a website, and always above the fold. However, it’s always important to test. A/B Split testing is the simplest way to test form location. Create two identical landing pages with your newsletter sign up form in two different locations. Test for a week, a month, or six months – test until you have enough data to draw a reasonable conclusion. Consider also testing your call to action.

Your newsletter can be a great business building asset. Make sure people know about it and boost your newsletter subscription rate by using one or more of these suggestions.

You need to:

Discover how to build a website, or know enough to make sure that your web designer builds an effective website for you.

Learn the basics of search engine optimization so that people can actually find your site.

Invest in an auto responder service and learn how to use it effectively. Automated email delivery is a must.

If you want to succeed online, you need to learn the basics and do all the necessary research first. Before you begin building a web presence, you need to do keyword research and identify a profitable niche. Then you need to research your target market and discover what they actually want and need. This is a very important step, don't produce something and then try to find a target market, that is a recipe for failure.

This is all much easier than it seems, you can easily do a Google search and find excellent free step by step how to information.

Resist the temptation to jump in at the deep end, take time to learn about the tools and strategies you need to succeed online. You don't have to learn them all at once, take one step at a time and do as much as you plan.

There are many different ways to get started with Internet marketing and you will see thousands of offers that insist that you must have what they are offering to succeed. Ask yourself whether you really do need them or whether they are simply a distraction. You need to focus.

If you are in a hurry to get started, you could use tools like Squidoo and Hubpages while you are getting your website ready. Squidoo and Hubpages both enable you to create simple focused web pages around a single topic. They are free and very easy to use.

You can easily add products to these pages and weave in affiliate links. It is an effective no cost way to get started with earning money online while you are learning. They are probably the simplest way to get started on online if you are a beginner.

Here are the steps again:

Focus

Do keyword research

Identify a profitable niche

Do market research

Try out your ideas on Squidoo and Hubpages

Learn basic internet marketing skills

Master basic SEO skills

Create an effective web site

You can succeed at Internet marketing if you are prepared to learn the basics and take action. Take your first steps today. Identify what you need to do, make a plan and take focused action every day.

Adverts like these are only partially true. No one can really guarantee you the number 1 spot in Google or any other search engine, and if they can, it may only be for keywords that none of your potential visitors are seeking.

How come? Google's programmers keep the exact basis on which websites are rated and positioned secret. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts have been able to find out many of the factors that Google weighs to determine which position to assign any particular website. However, no one knows exactly how much weight Google attaches to each factor. So even the experts can get it wrong and spending huge amounts of money on SEO can turn out to be futile.

How does this affect you as a business trying to maximize your web site visibility? Can your site rise to the top of Google? Yes. Possibly. You can get into the top 10 positions – with hard work and depending on a number of factors including what you are promoting, your sites domain name, how much competition there is, the number of pages your website has and how well you use keywords on your site – among others.

What can you do to boost your website sales and position?

a) Try to make your website the best one possible for the services and products you offer. If your site appears unprofessional, is difficult to use, unattractive or lacks the products people want – then even if you get to the top search engine positions, you will not be able to make sales.

Add regular features, articles and special offers to your site. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing and to new trends. Research, update and improve constantly, innovate. Capture details of your visitors in website forms and communicate with them.

b) Identify the best keywords for your website. When you surf the Internet, you type in relevant words. The search engines then find and list websites whose content matches those words. Help your website to be found by including the items people are searching for in your site's text. Think about what people seeking your products would type in Google. What words do your competitors emphasize on their websites?

c) Apply standard website optimization techniques to your website. Any good website developer will know the basic technical aspects of SEO (Keyword density, using keywords in page titles, keyword selection, tags etc.) So let us focus on the things you as the site owner can influence directly.

As the content provider, sprinkle your keywords throughout your website (e.g. see how often the words "website" and "position" can be found in this article). But make sure you use your keywords in context. Mix up your phrases, but make sure they don't come across as stilted or un-natural. The last thing you want to do is gain search engine positions and lose customers.

d) Get other websites to link to your website. The links count as votes in your favour.

In summary, while SEO is important and worth paying for if you can afford it, there are many things you can do to optimize your website if you can't. Remember that optimizing your site will take time to yield any results.

Even if your site never gets to be number 1 in Google, doing these things will benefit both your website and your business.