Search engines play an important role in letting users find your website. The search engines are constantly changing how they get their results to keep shady and disreputable search engine optimizers from improperly profiting from the “black hat” ways.
There are two main ways a website can optimize for Search engines. The first is they can optimize for the “Organic” listings. These are the normal listings which do not charge you when a user clicks. They can be difficult to optimize for based upon the hundreds of criteria which is used. The second method is “Pay Per Click” (technically called Search Engine Marketing) optimization. Pay Per Click allows a person, or company, to bid on terms to rank higher in the “sponsored” or ad links section of a search engine.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The Pay Per Click method, where you can pay a small fee for each visitor that a search engine sends you, while it may seem to be simple, it can be anything but. There is a lot more that goes into it than simply bidding higher on the keywords you want to rank well for.
There are hundreds of factors which will affect not only your placement, in Google and other search engines, but also what you pay for your ads. To be most effective, you must have someone who can optimize both your ad, as well as the page that the ad sends users to, which is called the landing page.
By optimizing your ads and the landing page, you can get both a higher placement for your ad, and reduce the cost for the higher placement. Further optimization can increase the number of people who click on your ad and then convert into customers.
Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We can analyze your site to provide the best results possible, telling you what needs to change both within your pages, and outside of your site.
Other SEO companies will be able to get you optimized for keywords or phrases that have little or no relevancy to your business, so the likelihood of that phrase being used and delivering users to your website is very low. Getting listed for the name of your company is easy. What is important is getting listed for keywords and phrases that people will use to search for companies like yours.
Adding keywords and meta tags will not get you high rankings. Neither will using some special software. In fact search engines, like Google, regularly recommend not using certain, but common, search engine optimization tools. Proper HTML coding, internal linking, and value shown not only between your pages, but also from external sources matter. With time and effort one can usually rank well.
Consider These Clients
Any Occasion Photography
This client has her company name listed first in Google for her company name, out of the 1.4 million pages returned. The company name describes what the client does, so it must compete for other photographers who do not share the name, but perform the same function. When we started optimizing this wedding photographer’s site, she only had two terms that were listed in Google, and one was listed at past the 100th position. After the first month of updates, the website had nine searchable terms according to Google, of which eight were on the first two pages, thus dramatically increasing the chances of the website being found during a search.
Showcases To Go
This client has Google returning 4.08 million pages for their company name alone. Before we began the Search Engine Optimization efforts, they were not listed on the top three pages for their own name, now they are #1 for their name and several derivations of their name.
Since reworking their site, Showcases To Go has over 35 searchable phrases relevant to their business, according to Google. 20 of them are on the first page, with 13 of them in the top five positions, and another two key phrases are on the second page. Showcases To Go has seen the overall use of their site increase.
Before the optimization they received approximately 4% of their website visitors from search engines. Now over 37% of their site visitors come from a search engine. Their site is well rounded when it comes to visitors finding them, as it is split between search engines, external sites, email campaigns, and people who have bookmarked their site.
No external fees, advertising, or directory services or monthly costs were needed to generate those results.
Contact WaltDesign and Development to find out how we can help you optimize your search engine placement.