Question: What does it cost, and what results should I expect?

Answer:   Whatever the market will bear, and how long is a piece of string?

For SEO/SEM there is no single answer to those questions – and one question leads to another.  What do you want to achieve, and what resources can you commit to it?  Resources are more than just funds; they include management strategy and work effort.

The following is an outline of strategies and available options for successful internet marketing.  Specific recommendations and scope of work proposals require evaluation and discussion of the client’s needs, and the current status of website(s) and maturity of internet presence.  Scope and scale of work (what, when and how much) are directly related to available budget guidelines.

We hope you find this information valuable.  Please contact us if you have specific questions or comments.

SEO / SEM

Onsite and Offsite

While they must be aligned and share common strategies, work is fundamentally separated by efforts done on the website, and work done off the site.

SEO and SEM should also be coordinated to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

While there are numerous technical issues, the key to successful internet marketing is employing an organized and systematic approach, together with application of common-sense (assume nothing, everything for a reason).

Fundamental:  the better everything connects together, the better the desired results will be achieved.

Goals

Internet Presence, Generate Quality Traffic, Conversions, and Other Goals

Establishing well thought-out and communicated goals and expectations is important to do from the very beginning.

Internet Presence

Build foundation to support other goals by having a baseline of presence on the web.  For example if someone researches the company/website and specifically searches for it, how many results are found?  Six or 60,000?  Quality matters most, but quantity is important too.  Over time this also affects PR (page rank – ratio of incoming/versus outgoing links) and means better quality score, and should improve effectiveness of strategies.

Generate Quality Traffic

Targeting the right audience means using appropriate language, presented in the correct places and methods, and matching these to the website content.

Conversions

Keeping in mind the end-game at all times is important.  All roads lead to placing an order or ‘doing business’.  Of course, conversions can mean different things and often have multiple layers.  Relationship marketing might have a conversion goal of signing up for a newsletter, and this could be accomplished by the goal of people requesting free information or a product trial.  Usability, site architecture and visitor flow and behavior are related to both SEO and SEM.  People tend to do what you ask them to do, and make easy to do – the sooner you start asking the better.

Other Goals

Every organization has their specific ideas as to what is important.  Marketing must adapt to meet those goals.

Strategies

Content, Incoming Links, Keyword Phrases, Anchor Text Links, Quality Score, Strategic Promotions

Reach and relevancy – what is the message, who is it presented to, where and when.

Content

Make no mistake; there are no shortcuts and tricks.  Everything starts with quality content that is formatted correctly for usability and SEO.  Write for people first, then adjust and edit or SEO.

Incoming Links

The holy grail of SEO.  Google and the other search engines determine SERP (search engine result position) on numerous factors that are heavily weighted toward a website’s perceived value by the internet community.  If other websites (people) think your site is worthy of linking to, then you deserve to be ranked higher on the search results page.  The quality and type of these links is very important as the search engines map the web, and have sophisticated algorithms to evaluate and categorize websites.

Keyword Phrases and Anchor Text Links

What words do people use to find the content you want to present to them?  Can you compete against more established and organized competitors or should you find niches to exploit?  Anchor Text Links are extremely important and valuable – they should be relevant keyword phrases used in outside links coming into the site, and from within the site to connect pages and strengthen understanding of what content is about.

Quality Score

An extremely critical concept to keep in mind and that should be part of every element of the website and the off-site efforts.  From clean code to relevant words – it directly affects both SEO and SEM performance results.

Strategic Promotions

The shotgun blast approach of widespread targeting, or throwing spaghetti against the wall, to see what sticks do have a place in internet marketing strategies; but the reality of limited resources and time sensitive economics means picking targets and promotional offers that are competitive, effective and efficient is very important.

Target, try, test, evaluate and repeat.

Tools/Tactics

Analysis and Evaluation

• Google Analytics – powerful tool for free, other analytic tools are good, but GA is recommended
• Google Webmaster Tools – critical for evaluating the site, and presenting to Google
• Yahoo Site Explorer – similar reasons to Google webmaster tools, not as comprehensive
• Bing Webmaster Tools – similar reasons to Google webmaster tools, not as comprehensive

Content

• Authoritative and Relevant content is what gets found and noticed. Keyword rich content and anchor text links throughout the site. Challenge: typical descriptions are worded differently than the usual way people search.
• Blogs – a WordPress blog is almost mandatory. Sites must have a quantity of high-quality, original non-duplicated content formatted properly for SEO.
• RSS Feeds – for human interest and critical for SEO
• Word Count and Page Count – more words, more pages do matter.
• Landing Pages – should be different than typical content.

Site Structure

• Clean Code – must have proper coding without excessive errors. ‘no-follow’ outgoing links
• SEO Architecture – URL, Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Tags, H-tags, Content, Images, Links & Navigation, dynamic XML sitemaps

Backlinks/Bookmarking

• Articles – Quality articles (authoritative and relevant content) are a very good way to get quality links, labor intensive
• Article Spinning – great way to generate links, presence and real direct traffic, semi-automated tools available, very labor intensive
• Social Bookmarking – looked for by engines, also generate traffic, semi-automated tools available
• Forum Profiles – good way to generate links, semi-automated tools available
• Forum Postings – can be good for links and traffic, need to be relevant and allow ‘follow’, labor intensive
• Blog Comments – can be good for links and traffic, need to be relevant and allow ‘follow’, labor intensive
• Evaluation Site Submission – good to start getting site crawled and for backlinks, semi-automated tools available
• Search Engine Submissions – hundreds of search engines exist, semi-automated tools available
• Directory Listings – one of the original backlink strategies still plays a role, but not a priority, semi-automated tools available. DMOZ very valuable, but arbitrary inclusion
• FFA – “free for all”, for the right niche can have surprising results, but not necessarily recommended
• Reciprocal Links – if done properly as part of real community networking and resource sharing they can be very effective however heeding Google admonishments about bad community and paid link farms is important. Quality matters – doing this correctly requires resources and involvement from site owners.

Advertising and Miscellaneous

• Press Releases – once a week (more or less) of real, quality news, properly formatted – free or paid
• Videos (you tube etc)
• Article Incubators – manually provide information and solicit interest from vertical market media/authorities
• Search Engine Marketing Text and Banner Ads – Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook
• Classified ads, Sponsorship Banner, and Text ads on relevant forums, authoritative blogs, and websites.
• Email Marketing – solicited and unsolicited – must adhere to best practices guidelines

Initial Steps

• Establish Budget Guideline
• Establish Goals
• Market Analysis – target audience, keywords – usage, competitive rankings, competitor sites and strategies
• Strategic Marketing Plan – targets, reach and relevancy, methods, schedule
• Site Development – evaluate site architecture, update according to strategies
• Content Development – onsite and offsite
• Daily Activity Work Plan

Resources

Design Chemical has an 88-point website SEO evaluation outline available – click here

“There is no such thing as bad publicity when you’re reading about yourself, unless its your obituary.”

One of our clients was concerned that their name and article was being associated with a ‘cheap’ discount domain name because their article was posted on a travel site offering cheap airline tickets, while they are offering a 4 star travel destination.
Unfortunately it is a balancing act, and a bit of a Catch-22.  Protecting brand image is important – so the client does  need to make the call whether to continue article spinning, but let’s review just what these articles are before doing that.

We spin an article to create a gazillion non-duplicated articles by inserting synonyms everywhere we can.  Sometimes the syntax and grammar gets a little clunky, but we do make an extra effort to make sure the content reads well under all combination of wording.

These articles then get submitted through subscription services to either blogs or article directories based on subject category.

These subject categories are standard off the shelf categories – and while everyone has a different list, they’re basically the same.

Travel and Leisure
Travel and Leisure, Boating
Travel and Leisure, Aviation
etc

Within each category there are dozens of websites that will post an article with backlinks to your site.

They accept the article because they want content, and then they display Google Ads in the hopes that people end up finding the article.

So it is an exchange of decent RELEVANT content , we get a decent relevant backlink to the website

One way to gauge the effectiveness of article posting is to subscribe to Google Alerts for key search terms.  The fact that these are showing up in Google Alerts is fantastic for a website.  It means the content is getting indexed by Google and the backlink to the site is getting recognized and evaluated, and Google spiderbots will follow the link to your site too – checking relevancy, registering what your site is about based on the anchor text link and all the keywords it discovers.  Also the fact that it happens quickly is very telling that Google respects the sites and indexes them quickly.  You might notice some Google Alerts popping up for things that are dated  six months ago.

Waiting six months is a lifetime on the internet.  Not all directories and blogs are created equal, and Google is a bit random (by design) so the more exposure you get the better.

The primary purpose of these article submissions is to get the backlinks.  This is what SEO and getting organic search traffic is all about.  Backlinks mean value and quality score for your website.  The article submissions are foundation building blocks for creating web presence for your site.

They are not really about what is to be presented to the target audience.

Having the articles read by people that follow the link, isn’t even really expected or intended.  However they do, traffic does arrive directly from these sites, but it is not why we’re doing the article submissions.  An extremely small percentage of people that see these articles are also looking for your site — but your site better have the relevant content on the site, and is getting indexed etc….

here’s some of the Catch-22 part:
So in the short run, there is an issue that people searching topics might actually find these articles rather than find your website, but then if you do the math it shrinks into a minuscule probability that there will be a negative connotation perceived by a target audience.  Most of the odd-ball and undesirable content is in adword ads, that people disregard.  The handful of cheesy domain names just don’t add up to much in the big picture.

Our articles are set not to display on adult, gambling, on-line pharmacy, or weight loss sites… but other than selecting categories to submit we’re at the mercy of sites.

I would stress that the benefits far outweigh the chance of any negative perceptions – exponentially.  The Google Alerts mash ads and article together and tend to make us focus on those articles a lot more than anyone else does.

Concerns about protecting brand are valid and it is worth talking about.   But these links are fundamental to having people find the

Web…. everything is connected by sticky strings of information…


It is a common mistake to think something like “we’ll design the site, and write the content, and then send it off for SEO”.  That means rewriting and re-designing each page…after rewriting and redesigning them from the old site to the new site.

Please forgive the following lecturing tone, but, well this is sort of a tutorial, so take advice on what you already know with a grain of salt, and please embrace/question/challenge the rest.   Some points will be stating the obvious, but there is also a lot of nuance and detail, so hopefully reading it carefully will be of benefit.

First things first – writing for the web is not technical.  When words like ‘code’, ‘tags’, ‘keywords’, ‘anchor text links’ or ‘format’ get thrown about, they are no different than ‘punctuation’, ‘word choice’, or ‘grammar’.  Really.  I have a certificate to teach English so I’m sort of qualified to say that!

Let’s set the scene:

Site visitors will vary widely by demographic and purpose.  Stereotypically they will fit within three general sales cycle categories.  Discovery – Research – Purchase.

Ecommerce buying emotional triggers include ‘fear’ and ‘guilt’, and ‘trust’ ‘value’ and ‘belonging’ are most important.  Instilling confidence through understanding is very important.  To achieve conversions the site needs to be understandable, and convey quality and trust.

Whatever business that can be “closed” on the site, should be closed through the site.  There probably won’t be a lot of personal follow-up for a very long time, and if we do marketing right there will be a lull, and then an avalanche of inquiries – and inquiries will turn into person to person contact that needs attention.    The site needs to support these issues.

Ideally there should be a lot of first visit conversions, and visitors should be expected to return multiple times. Relationship marketing (trigger “belonging”) is fundamental.  Content and layout needs to ‘ask for the order”

Returning ‘customers’ will be coming to ‘take care of business’ (information, contacts, etc) – but they are also ideal for cross-selling (a parent interested in the quality of the science classes finds out about after school programs or the futsal league – or spa treatment discounts for members, or swimming lessons, or wellness etc)  To me this translates into content that always hints at and leads to more information.

Reach, relevancy, audience, behavior, purpose, goals, style…

… downstream value, re-usability, — efficiency of effort(s)

Concepts/Definitions:

Search Engine Optimization SEO — is not technical.  it is about making the information findable.  The more understandable and the more organized the site is for humans, then Google and the search engines will follow.  Sure, there is a lot of technical stuff behind the scenes, but usually only to correct poor development practices.  Websites are software, but they are really quite simple once the basics are understood.  Hwoever, shortcuts cause more problems then most people realize.

URL – the website address for each page

Page Title – what you see in the browser tabs and at the top of the screen.  For PIA new-site these will be automatically generated for most pages from the header tags, so while really important for SEO, not something we have to think about too much.

Meta Description – what is displayed by Google and search engines on the search engine results page.  This is the 160-character paragraph that describes the Page.  Primary pages should be generated manually as Custom pages.  Secondary, less important pages should be generated automatically using a set phrase “Phuket International Academy” + headers from the page, and anchor text.

Headers, or H-tags – H1 through H6.  Content writing MUST use these protocols.
H1 – there should be one per page.  “About Us” for example.

Anchor Text Link – what sentence or paragraph describes the page, or describes the block of content.  Usually this will point at the page or content from another page or website.

Keywords/Keyword Phrases – SEO sees these as ‘what words do people use to search’, the content writer would see these as the words of interest to readers – emphasize them and repeat them.   The nuance and subtlety to this is that word order in phrases can be very important.  Keywords for ‘topics’ or pages require research, and writing must incorporate this research otherwise the content is not relevant to the target audience.  So it won’t be as interesting, and people won’t find it after searching on Google etc.

Article Spinning – the new method for generating both incoming traffic (people) and quality incoming links to the site (mandatory to achieve Quality Score and decent Search Engine Results Page performance) involves submitting articles to various blog and article directory submission services.  The trick is to have non-duplicated content for each submission.  This can be done by using synonyms and some code tags to tell software what to do.

Example:

Phuket International Academy (PIA) {Blueprint|Standard|Formula} for {Personal|Human} {Development|Achievement}

The Phuket International Academy (PIA) is a {innovative|pioneering|revolutionary|brand new} sports, education, arts and wellness facility {located|sited} Phuket Thailand.   {It|PIA} {is comprised of|comprises} three synergistic  centres: the PIA Day School, the PIA Sports, Arts and Wellness Centre and the PIA Mind Centre

When submitted to the article directories, random combinations will be generated and unique, non-duplicated content will be indexed by search engines.  People will find these articles, but more importantly if anchor text links are used then good quality links to the site are established and the Quality Score is raised.  There is some risk of diluting keyword ‘juice’ of the original site, so keywords in articles should be minimized – but anchor text should be relevant.

Under best practices each of these points need to be addressed when writing the original content.

There are a number of websites and services to help evaluate the quality of your potential link partners, and while it is important, and certainly part of our process as hired SEO consultants, you don’t necessarily need to agonize over this  – especially since you have a newish site and are hungry to find links.

When looking at potential sites to exchange links with, the first thing to look into is whether they have a Google Page rank higher than yours. (typically PR goes from 0 to 5 – there are lots of sites that rate higher but aren’t typical).  You normally don’t want to link to someone less than 3 but if you go to the site and it looks like the care about quality content and they are just starting – you can help each other by linking and both will improve.

Google Page Rank is a measure of how many relevant sites link to you – and it comes into play regarding your SERP – search engine results page position (top ten or somewhere in the hundreds or nowadays millions).

If you download the google toolbar for either Internet Explorer or Firefox, the PR ranking of the page you are visiting is displayed when you visit their site.

If you want to really learn about a website there is a great add-on for Firefox — go to the firefox add-on site (search for that)  — then search for add-ons for  wmtips – they will display an addon called ‘info’ – go ahead and add that (download and install)- after it installs etc you will see a little icon in the lower right of your browser screen that says ‘info’ when on a page you’re interested in click that icon – a new tab will open up with all kinds of info about the site, google rank, keywords, when it was created, registered domain owner etc — very useful stuff.

Most important thing about assessing whether a link is suitable or not, is whether it is a ‘relevant’ site to yours.  Fashion and fashion accessories should mean that sunglasses and handbags are related – but Googlebot is a piece of software – it contains advanced algorithms but it is still sort of dumb, it only knows what you tell it.  So if there is some doubt about whether a site is relevant, you need to look at their page title, meta description and keywords.  Googlebot is smart enough to use a little thesaurus knowhow so if the words aren’t exactly the same, it still knows enough if they are related.

It is also critically important to avoid link farms and paid link schemes – a lot of sites have self-destructed doing this.  Don’t.

It’s also important to remember not to submit just www.worldsgreateswebsite.com but http://www.worldsgreateswebsite..com/products.htm (PLEASE NOTE  the extension at the end… its always a good idea to go the page you want people to link to and copy the link location from your browser – sometimes there are a lot of add on parameter data you don’t want either – so if in doubt contact us, we’ll let you know.

Of course when we talk SEO we’re really talking about keywords. Keywords aren’t that mysterious – they’re just the terms people use to search, so you want the search engine spiders to associate your page with those terms.  So the trick is pick one, two or three keyword/keyword phrases that you want associated with that page.  That might be the hardest part – narrowing down the words to less than a handful.

So to be most effective, the URL should include a keyword you want to ‘own’, then the page title has that or very closely related term, then the meta description includes it, and the H tag headers have the same and related terms, and the content has bolded, and/or underlined the same words.  Yes you are repeating it over and over.  That isn’t “stuffing” that is making it clear to the spiders, and much more importantly, clear to the human visitors what the page is about.

If you approach that intuitively it makes sense.  Tell me what you’re going to tell me, tell me, and tell me what you told me…  Peoples eyes go to the headers and bold text.  If that is what they are searching for you are showing them what they want to see.  Of course, you should have relevant content to back it up!

We can either produce these, or at least advise on how to get the best results from them.

Website directories give your site a quick description and a link to a landing page. This is a proven way to build a many backlinks in a short period of time. They won’t perform miracles, but directories can help when combined with other SEO techniques.

SEO blogging gurus have a variety of opinions ranging from Google doesn’t count directories anymore, to you need 2500 directory listings to make an impact.  We’re doing some testing to determine effects but it is difficult to determine exactly what benefits you get.  But do keep in mind that Google penalizes paid links so my advice is to avoid paying for links of anykind.  The directory submission services that offer manual linking service may be okay, but again what they do is out of your control so not necessarily a sure bet either.

Directory submission used to be the wholy grail, but things change and I would move this down the ‘to do’ list.  Blogging is what gets it done, and the better the content you offer about what you know about the better.

Thanks for visiting.

While you’re waiting for SEO to take affect, you might want to consider implementing Search Engine Marketing SEM to either jumpstart your business or as a permanent part of your business development portfolio.

We can help design, develop and manage you Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo or Social Networking Advertising (Facebook) campaigns.

When clients have paid to have someone generate links we’re usually faced with the need for a complete do over in order to start generating quality incoming links.  We definitely will eliminate questionable outgoing links.  The next several check- list items involve evaluating the link situation and making recommendations on how to proceed.

What do we mean by “bad links”?

We’ve noticed people continue to use techniques for search engine optimization to generate incoming links that stopped working years ago.  Namely link schemes for paid links, and potential ‘black hat” techniques trying to fool the search engines.  We see a lot of them too, especially here in Thailand.  Five year old techniques do more harm than good.

Not all incoming links are valuable, and some will get your site a black mark.  More on this topic soon.

Thanks for visiting.

Einstein Already Proved the Design Chemical Alchemy Formula

There are other analytics programs in use, but Google does a pretty good job and I tend to advocate going with what you know.  However we repeatedly see something that is very bothersome.  Many website owners don’t own their analytics.  They had a web developer or SEO company set it up for them, however many of those companies put the analytics under their own account to sort of extort the website owner into retaining their services.  We don’t like that.  Same holds for domain registration.  Its your business, own it.  Of course a lot of this stuff is a mystery and that’s why you hire consultants and service companies.  But just the same, insist on having the accounts under your control and then give access to your consultants.  Talk to us about this, we’re here to help.

How you SEO represents how you think about your business, and therefore how you think about your customers.  Aside from all the various techniques available to increase qualified traffic, you should also think about what you want people to expect when they arrive.

The usability and intent of your website is important for many reasons.  Particularly for ‘conversions’ – meaning visitors do what you want them to do – buy something, read something, sign-up or whatever.

When the intent of the site is well known, it makes it easier to define appropriate means for bringing the right kinds of visitors to your site.  Think about it.  We do… and we’ll write more about this in upcoming posts.

thanks for visiting

More on blogging, in well, the next blog!

“But its not easy to write good content!”  Well, that’s the point.  Google and the other search engines have gotten a lot more sophisticated in analyzing content.  Its not just about interesting subjects and good grammar either.  How your content is placed on your site and the navigation tools and descriptive techniques (descriptive to a spider crawling your site, not whether Granny uses the same needle-point terminology) are all important.

More on this to follow soon.

However, the days of paid link exchanges and link farm schemes are over.  Stop doing what you’ve been doing!

More on this in a moment.

There is some reason information and clarification out from Google about this and we will be updating this post soon with more information.

More on this topic in updates coming soon.  thanks for visiting

If you are a blogger you really need to get in the habit of linking to other blogs – and even more importantly pages within your site that have good content.  For example you might have a fairly detailed technical page about something you specialize in.  You put a lot of work into that content and it’s not likely to change much – and you might like it the way it is and don’t want to change it all the time.  Great.  But search engines like dynamic content and they like to follow links.

Blogs make it easy to be ‘dynamic’ – or changing a lot.  So you can link to that page with a short article in a blog and a link.  Instead of something like ‘click here’ you might instead offer readers (and the spiders that like to pretend to be people) a more descriptive “anchor text link” – or in other words hyperlink a phrase to another page.

For example:

Learn more about Printing with Art Paper or Woodfree Paper on Jaff’s blog.  Is better than click here to find out more about Website validation best practices.  Of course you might think Art paper is more interesting than coding web pages but so does Jaff!

Why is it important to have proper code?  If a page displays okay, isn’t that what really matters?  Spiders don’t like bad code.  The goal of Search Engine Optimization is to make it easy for search engine spiders (Googlebot etc) to understand your site – they are determined to know what’s the content and where is it.  Once they know that they also evaluate your Quality Score.  Improperly coded sites will stop spiders, or at least frustrate them, from navigating through the text and linking to other pages.  If they can’t read it, they don’t know what it’s about, and can’t give you a good score, or make sure you rank well for your relevant content.   When terms are used such as ‘indexed by search engines’ it means they have been crawled and evaluated by the search engine.

It is really surprising just how much sloppy code writing is still being used.  The two biggest culprits of bad code are 1) Flash, and 2) tables.  Of course lazy and/or inexperienced web developers can wreck just about anything if they aren’t careful.

Flash – it might look nice, but it really should be avoided.  It doesn’t get indexed, it is usually slow to load on a page which frustrates visitors, it is seldom interactive, and it is very difficult to edit to keep it updated and fresh.

Tables – the old way of coding pages – lots of reasons tables aren’t used by modern web developers – but for Search Engine Optimization it often comes down to content being deep within ‘nested’ tables.  Meaning your good content is buried deep in table code that spiders just don’t like to deal with.  Tables add a lot of unnecessary code to sites that makes it hard for spiders to string together sentences and makes sense of your content.  They typically don’t index deeper than 4 nested tables – most table sites are much worse than that – 8, 1o, 14 tables deep.  Forget getting ranked for that…

More about code in future updates.  Thanks for visiting.

Improving website search engine marketing performance, or SEO, is relatively straightforward. Current strategies, tactics and techniques that produce desired results are well established. However that doesn’t mean they can be done without investing time and effort.

The Design Chemical 88-point SEO Guideline Checklist has been developed to allow us to systematically evaluate websites and implement changes to make them perform as well as possible. While the checklist is technically oriented, we are sensitive to human usability and purpose of the site, and this process often uncovers design or philosophical shortcomings that keep sites from maximizing results. While we label this a SEO checklist it is also a usability checklist. Hey, we’re efficient and try to do as many things as possible at the same time. Jugglers and alchemists!

We will start using the checklist as soon as you contact us and ask for a bit of help. We can quickly determine the scope of work you need and the scale of the project. Remember, the internet has few true secrets and many things can be revealed under the Design Chemical microscope. A lot of what we do can be done without access to your hosted files, other issues will require some passwords and permissions.

Checklist Item 1

First the bad news. The Code. For an existing site we make a quick technical evaluation to uncover coding errors or other issues that may prevent spiders from crawling and indexing the site properly, and that often lead to many different performance issues. We still find it shocking how many poorly put together websites there are out there. We know very quickly if repairs are in order, or its time for a transplant or replacement clone.

Checklist Item 2

More bad news. Flash. If your site is all Flash or uses mostly Flash then you are probably aware that your site doesn’t get very good search engine results. While there are techniques to help Flash site SEO, they generally require involvement from the original Flash page developer and we have found them to be less than helpful, if they are even still around. If you’re thinking of adding it to your site… don’t. We can help develop an original Flash site to have some SEO value, but Flash is more trouble than it is worth and many desirable graphic affects can be achieved without it. Slow, cumbersome, hard to edit, with no SEO or quality score content value… yes, we don’t like Flash. Sorry Mr. Adobe. If a site is all Flash we know right away we are going to be the bearers of bad news. Please don’t shoot the messenger.

Checklist Item 3

No news is not good news. Web Presence. We reach into our bag of tricks and make a profile of the site to determine what the internet thinks of it. While we are certainly opinionated about what we like, ultimately our opinion doesn’t matter. What matters most is how well it performs by various ranking tools and services. We also like to have reliable benchmarks to measure against so we can boast about improvements later.

Checklist Item 4

Just news. Content and Keywords. Of course the scope and scale of this checklist item can grow into many tasks and even stand-alone projects. For existing sites that aren’t looking for reconstructive surgery we perform an initial analysis of the content. While we may actually read it, especially if we think it is interesting, what this really means is that we check to see what the spiders are seeing. After Checklist Item 1 we usually have the answer “probably not much” but it gives us all a good idea of what we need to change to help improve sites.

Checklist Item 5

Just the facts. Usability and Intent. This is actually not really about facts; it is about subjectivity and purpose. Review of this helps us define what the site needs to be more effective. While we may have been asked to ‘just do something about my SEO’, ultimately there are many other issues that come together that determine success or failure. Sometimes a minor technical tweak releases the power of SEO, other times a major do over is the only thing that will help. At this stage, we have a pretty good idea what is required and can prepare an initial proposal, or sit down with a client and go over our recommendations.

We will discuss these and other checklist items in the upcoming Design Chemical SEO Blog, but meanwhile you are welcome to download a PDF of this discussion (thank you Mr. Adobe), or better yet contact us and request a quick and free evaluation of your site and our proposal.

Most people realize that their Search Engine Marketing goal should be about quality traffic rather than quantity of traffic; how to do this effectively and efficiently is the tough part. Getting more of the right kind of people to visit your site is our aim, and we can help build the infrastructure and provide the on-going services that will make this happen. We will try to give you as much, or as little information as you need and want to understand these issues.

People have websites for a variety of reasons: build brand identity and value, give prospective customers a place to find more information, use the site as a way to generate leads for new business, establish a relationship with prospective and existing customers, and to take and process orders. All these reasons benefit from good SEO.

Even if a website is just intended to give existing customers information, or to establish brand identity – it is important that your website perform well in search engine results. If someone is researching you, or has forgotten your exact name or website address they will likely make a search using your business name or the keywords related to your line of business. If you don’t rank very well, they will perceive you to be of lower quality or importance. If they find you at all.

Adword Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Pay-Per-Impression campaigns are a great way to quickly generate leads but can also become costly. Even if you are relying on an Adword campaign, people are still likely to search for you when they come back. You can’t count on them always bookmarking your site or remembering your address.

Design Chemical SEO Alchemy – Science, not Magic

When unraveling the mysteries of SEO we suggest you keep in mind that there aren’t magic trick shortcuts that will instantly solve your marketing problems, or guaranteed top-ten results on Google for popular search terms.

Maximizing results for your SEO involve many complex issues that are evolving over time. What used to work five years ago to improve internet presence now backfire and can actually hinder your site’s performance.

We’re often asked to help site owners that have already paid other contractors good money for SEO only to find that the techniques being used are actually causing them to be ‘penalized’ by Google instead of rewarded with good results.

The biggest culprit is the old idea of generating lots of links to your site from other websites. Links are very important. But only the right kind of links from quality sites with content that is relevant to your website.

Google considers links between sites as a sign of community and sharing – and quality. They are now protecting the values of community very stringently. Google frowns on reciprocal link exchanges (I’ll link to you if you’ll link to me), and looks for signs that the links are merely intended to try to fool them. Google doesn’t like being made to look foolish. Meaning a travel site linking to a website hosting service is not a good thing. If you have an outgoing link going to a ‘bad’ site – a link farm scheme, or other shady automated system that they have identified, then your search engine results can be severely impacted. When Google sees these kind of links it discounts your content.

The most important thing to keep in mind regarding SEO/SEM is quality. Google and the other major search engines create a Quality Score for your site based on what they think it is about. The underlying key to this is that the search engine spiders that crawl your site looking for information need to be able to understand your site. Quality content is critical, but it needs to be readable by spiders, and shouldn’t be diluted by bad links.