There is growing market acceptance of SEO, and it has become an accepted method for ensuring a top-of-page ranking across all search engines.
SEO services for a typical website start at around $5,000 and increase depending on the number of pages on your site and the level of complexity involved. A 10 percent monthly maintenance fee will be charged following the completion of the initial work by the SEO specialist. Ranking on page one of Google takes between three and six months.
Before recommending a strategy, the SEO specialist compares your website to your major competitors and performs keyword research to identify what opportunities exist. To ensure that your site’s PageRank delivers the highest possible ranking, changes are made to sub-domain names, webpage metatags and website copy.
Many companies hire individuals who claim to be able to perform these functions, while others may actually possess the skills and be able to deliver strong SEO results. SEO processes are constantly changing, so unless the person in your organization is an SEO professional and is aware of all the changes occurring in the SEO market, I recommend outsourcing the process to someone who works in the SEO sector on a daily basis.
In section Two, we discussed keyword research. In order to begin asking some serious questions about your own website, you will need to conduct this research and review your competitors’ websites. Does your website meet the following essential criteria, for instance?
1. Are all the keywords you researched in Chapter Two on your website?
2. Is your website constructed so that each page has its own metatag, such as the page title, description, and keywords?
3. Do you include text related to the metatags of each page on your website and the specific products or services you offer?
4. Approximately how many times do you mention these keywords on your webpage copy?
5. Does your website have different metatags for each webpage?
6. Does your website utilize H1 to H6 page heading tags that incorporate the keywords?
7. Do your website images contain alternative text names that use these keywords?
8. Does your website have any inbound links that incorporate the keywords?
9. Does your website contain hyperlinks that use keywords?
10. Does your website include keywords in the page directory names (for example, is the keyword phrase “internet strategies” included in the page URLwww.onthemark.com.au/internet_strategies.htm)?
11. Does your website have a blog?
12. Does your website contain social media links like Facebook, Twitter, etc.?
13. Can your website be found on Google when searching www.yourwebsite.com.au (if not, you have a serious problem).
14. How many listing are shown when you search Google for “www.yourwebsite.com.au” using the “” on either side of the domain name? (The results from this search show how many websites have links to your domain name as well as how many of your pages have been indexed.)
15. Does your website offer access to a regular newsletter?
16. Does your website offer RSS feeds?
17. Does your website offer podcasts and webinars?
18. Have you developed and published articles on the web with links back to your website?
You have a lot to do on your existing website from an SEO perspective if you didn’t score a perfect ten out of ten for the first ten questions. This book outlines an internet strategy that will guarantee you a page-one ranking on Google within two weeks regardless of how many of the points you comply with are checked, but checking the boxes on the list will greatly improve the strategy’s overall effectiveness. Due to this, it is important that you meet as many of the requirements described in this section as possible.
One of the down sides of SEO is that Google constantly changes the rules to ensure they maintain market dominance in the search engine market, and to maintain market dominance they must deliver the most relevant websites to their customers. The changes make it impossible to stop or pause the SEO programs without risking losing rankings.
A number of SEO software programs are available on the Internet for a moderate cost, which can help you make the necessary changes to your website’s metatags and content, which are often necessary for improving its SEO ranking.
I found the following top nine review at http://seo-software-review.toptenreviews.com and, while I don’t want to be drawn into suggesting which product is better, I will say I am a current user of the number three product, iBusiness Promoter.
A basic understanding of HTML programming is required in order to use any of these products effectively. As someone who first encountered the HTML code on our website, I found it difficult to understand and even more challenging to develop code that looked consistent over the entire website from my perspective. I still struggle with a few small technical issues from time to time, despite having improved greatly and doing all the HTML editing for the website.
To all of you who don’t have any knowledge or interest in HTML editing, CSS (cascading style sheets), ASP Net, or Java programming, let me simply state that if you are unable to make changes to your existing website, have it developed by a website developer who will help you convert it to a CMS (content management system).
Here are nine free Content Management System (CMS) applications you can use to make instant changes to your website without knowing any HTML or any programming language. Copying, pasting, and changing content is easy in products like Microsoft Word. The content is styled using CSS, which is integrated into the CMS program. Because content is critical as part of the SEO process, the ability to make changes to the copy and meta tags of the various pages on your website, and publishing these changes to your website quickly, is important.
1. WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
2. Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build websites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease of use and extensibility, have made Joomla one of the most popular website software products available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
3. Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on a website.
4. SilverStripe is a flexible open source content management system that gives everyone involved in a web project the tools they need to do their jobs.
5. CushyCMS is a CMS solution that is truly simple to use. It is free for unlimited users, unlimited changes, unlimited pages, and unlimited sites.
6. Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.
7. MODx helps you take control of your online content. An open source PHP application framework, it frees you to build sites exactly how you want and make them one hundred percent yours. Zero restrictions and fast to build. The solution comes with simple templates in regular HTML/CSS/JS.
8. TYPOlight is a web CMS that uses Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies, has a live update feature for those of us who have multiple blogs, gives multi-language support, and hosts a ton of other great features. The fully functional GPL version of dotCMS continues to forge ahead, providing new features and the latest code to a thriving community of developers and users.
9. ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to manage their websites.