What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of getting a website to be listed on the first page of the search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, when someone types in a specific keyword phrase.
Business owners have many big challenges when it comes to search engine optimization. For instance, many times:
- Their sites are not indexed, which means Google does not even know their site exists!
- If the site is indexed, it doesn’t show up for any search terms, so the people looking for their services don’t know they exist!
- If the site shows up in the search results, it’s often times for keyword phrases that don’t matter, or that get very little search volume.
- Most business owners don’t even know what keyword phrases will actually get them the most business!
You cannot trust anyone who “guarantees” to get your site in the number one spot on Google. Often times, people who tell you this will either rank your site for terms that are not relevant, or have no search volume, or they will use what is known as “blackhat” or unethical tricks that may get you the top spot for a little while, but when Google figures it out (and they will), your site could be banned from their index altogether and you cannot get it back. This is not what you want for your business.
As with any business, there are right ways and wrong ways to optimize a website for the search engines. At SEM Surge, we take great care to understand the current trends and best practices when it comes to SEO.
We take our business and your business very seriously.
Search Engine Optimization can be broken down into 3 parts.
1. Keyword Research – This is the most important step. You have to know the right keyword phrases to optimize for. Otherwise, you could be wasting a lot of time and money trying to rank for keywords that will not give you a return on your investment.
We spend a great deal of time researching your market, analyzing data from your Pay Per Click campaigns and traffic logs, and looking at your competitors websites to determine the best keyword phrases to rank for before we ever begin any SEO campaign.
2. On Page Optimization – We will optimize your web pages to make sure that the search engines can look at the page and determine that the content of that page is relevant to the chosen keywords. We can do this for you, or work with your webmaster to get this done.
3. Link Building – The biggest impact you can have on your search engine rankings is to have enough one way back links. Trading reciprocal links with other websites does not work nearly as effectively as it used to. You have to have one way links that point to your site using the appropriate anchor text.
We focus your campaign on 3 main keyword phrases. You may run multiple campaigns at the same time. Each campaign will result in approximately 200-500 links per month. You don’t want to build your links up too quickly as Google will recognize that and may think you are a spammer, which could have a negative impact on your rankings.
Customized Campaigns
At SEM Surge, we don’t have a one size fits all approach to SEO. Every market is different and requires a different strategy. Some businesses have very little competition and are only focusing on a small geographical area. For those we would put more emphasis on local search optimization, which is not going to require nearly as much effort as a business that is trying to compete on a national level in very competitive markets. The efforts required are not the same, and the cost shouldn’t be either.
For this reason, we will analyze your business and give you a unique recommendation based on what is going to bring you the biggest return on your investment.
