- What is a search engine?
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A search engine is a website that people use to search the Internet for
products, services and information. The three primary search engines are Google,
Yahoo!, and MSN which account for nearly 90% of all Internet search traffic.
Other search engines include Ask.com, Lycos, AOL and AltaVista.
- What is search engine optimization?
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Search Engine Optimization is the process of analyzing and enhancing your
website so that it's easier for potential customers to find your site from a
search engine. Use our SEO tools to help improve where your site appears in the
results pages when someone conducts a search for your product or service.
- Why is SEO critical to my business?
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1. You may have a great website, but if nobody sees it, your
business is not going to be successful. Employing proper SEO practices on your
website can help your site get found by people looking to buy your product or
service.
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2. SEO can help you tap into the vast market of potential customers
who are out there right now searching on Google and other search engines.
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3. Proper SEO can help you gain a competitive advantage by helping
your site get seen before your competitors'.
- What's involved in optimizing my site for search engines?
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Although it may sound complicated, optimizing your site is a fairly
straightforward process. Anyone can do it - it doesn't take any special
technical skill or knowledge - it just takes a little time and some dedication
to improving your business.
With our Do-It-Yourself solutions, the Getting Started Tutorial takes you
through the principals of SEO and guides you through the tools you'll use. With
our Monthly Consulting and Full Service solutions, you'll have an SEO Specialist
take you through everything you need to know.
- Which SEO Solution is best for me?
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We offer a range of Search Engine Optimization solutions to match your
goals and your budget. Use this quick guide to help you choose a solution.
A One-Time SEO Consultancy - Our most affordable solution:
A basic set of tools to help optimize your site yourself. A great way to
learn the SEO fundamentals.
A Two-Time SEO Consultancy -
A more comprehensive Do-It-Yourself website optimization
solution. Comes with all the tools of Essential, plus Advanced tools to help you monitor your competition
and track your results. For when you're completely committed to improving your site traffic and
rankings.
Monthly SEO Consulting -
All the tools in our Advanced solution plus a monthly consultation to help
you use your tools and optimize your site. Perfect for when you want to enhance
your site yourself but would like professional guidance to make sure you're on
the right track.
Full Service SEO -
We do everything for you and keep you informed of the
progress. For when you're serious about Search
Engine Optimization and want it done right but don't
have time to do it yourself. You have the budget for
a professional SEO program and prefer to leave it to the
professionals.
- What kind of results should I expect from SEO?
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SEO is a powerful and effective way to increase your site's traffic - but even
the most serious SEO efforts can take several weeks to take effect. If you are
committed and willing to manage your website's SEO on an on-going basis, you
will likely see your results increase steadily over time. As a general rule, the
more dedicated and persistent you are with site optimization, the better your
results will be.
- What are keywords?
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Keywords are terms that people use to search the web. For instance, if someone
wanted search on Google for a dentist in the Denver area, they might enter
"Denver Dentist" in the search field - these would be the keywords for that
particular search.
A critical part of the SEO process is deciding which keywords are the most
valuable for your business. Obviously a dentist in Denver would want to optimize
her site for "Denver dentist". If the same dentist also specialized in veneers,
she would want to optimize her site to perform well for the keywords "veneer
specialist", and so on. The keywords you choose and how well your site is
optimized for those keywords can make all difference in getting qualified
traffic to your site.
- What are search engine rankings?
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Your site's "ranking" is where your site appears in a list of search results
returned by a search engine. For instance, if someone searches for a "dentist in
Denver" and your site appears 27th on a list of results, your ranking would be
27 for that keyword. The higher your ranking (with position #1 being the highest
ranking) the more visibility you'll get and the more traffic you are likely to
bring to your site as a result.
- What are meta-tags?
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Meta-tags are part of your website's HTML code that search engines use to help
rank your site. The three primary meta-tags are the title tag, header tag and
keyword tag. An important part of Search Engine Optimization is to optimize
these tags so that search engines can more easily evaluate your site and rank
you higher in search results.
While it may sound technical, adjusting your site's meta-tags is a fairly simple
process. Our Do-It-Yourself solutions offer tools and guidance to take you
through the process. With monthly consulting, your SEO specialist will guide you
through it step by step. With Full Service SEO, your account manager will
optimize your meta-tags for you.
- What are site links and why are they important?
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When search engines evaluate your site for rankings, an important factor is how
you use links on your site, as well as how many other websites link to your
site. Our Advanced, Monthly SEO Consulting and Full Service solutions offer ways
to help you evaluate your site links and optimize them to help improve your
rankings.
- What's a search engine spider?
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A spider is an automatic indexing tool - or robot - used by search engines.
Spiders continually "crawl" the web evaluating websites for content, html tags
and many other factors. With proper Search Engine Optimization in place, your
site can be more easily and completely indexed by spiders, which can help
improve rankings.
- What is a search engine algorithm?
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A search engine algorithm is the computer program a search engine uses to
evaluate and rank websites. Each search engine uses its own algorithm, which may
involve hundreds of factors, including:
- what do your title, keyword and header tags say?
- what keywords are used in the copy of your site and in what
frequency (keyword density)?
- what do sites with similar content look like?
- how many websites link to your site?
- what is the content of the sites that link to yours?
- What is search engine submission?
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Submitting your site to a search engine is a way to help your site get indexed
and ranked - so that your listing will appear in that engine's search results.
All our SEO solutions provide automatic monthly submission to the major search
engines.
- What is "Paid Search" or "Search Engine Marketing"?
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Paid Search campaigns, (also known as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM) are
text ads for your business that appear in the "sponsored links" section of
Google and other search engines. (In most cases, this section appears above and
next to the search results listings). The cost of these ads will vary depending
on your business, the keywords you want to buy and the search engine on which
you want them to appear.Paid Search can be an effective component of your site's marketing - and
when used in conjunction with Search Engine Optimization can lead to significant
increases in traffic and sales for your site. Check out our
NETWORD program
for more about boosting traffic through a paid search campaign.