What Search Engine Optimization Should a Good SEO Company Do For You?
When you are searching for a good SEO company to conduct search engine optimization on your blog or site do you know what to look for? This article provides a short checklist of the basics they should be covering and a few points of what they should not do to identify the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Keyword research
Ideally keyword research is done to produce a list of keywords that you want to rank highly for. These are the words that your potential visitors may type into a search engine query. You want your site to appear on the first page of results for these keywords. A good SEO company will be able to produce a list of keywords that are highly relevant to your site, have a high search volume and a relatively low competition. However, your competition depends on your niche. For highly competitive keywords you will have to work harder for good rankings or decide to not try to rank highly for them at all. A second list of long tail action oriented keywords is very helpful and should always be supplied by a good SEO service provider. You can use these secondary keywords when creating additional content for your site, especially in blog article titles and copy.
How the Keywords from your research should be used
Once a keyword list is drawn up, the site must be optimized for these keywords. This is done simply by adding these keywords in the best places on the site. The most important place to have your highest traffic keyword is the site title META tag and the page title HTML tag. This should be done as a basic part of the initial building of your site. When choosing a domain name it is advantageous to include a high traffic keyword in the URL. If you have not done this that's okay, your web pages can be named using your primary keywords, for example www.yoursitename.com/additionalkeyword.html . Links on appropriate keywords in the copy of your site to other pages on your site that are appropriate for the keyword should be created; this is called deep linking and search engines will like this. However, this should not be overdone by making links of all your keywords in your copy as that will look spammy to the search engines. Keywords should be used in headings and the headings should be relevant to the content. Keywords should be used in the beginning of a document, in the ALT image tags (these are the text descriptions of images), and in META tags.
We advise to start with a top ten of primary keywords you want to rank highly for. A further list of ten long tail keywords could be added to this. Once your site is fully optimized for these keywords, you may want to move onto another list of top ten for a slightly different aspect of your site and optimize separate pages for these. Depending on how large you want your site to be this process can continue indefinitely.
What a good seo company should not do with the keyword research
You can tell a good SEO service provider from a bad one by what a good seo service provider won't do. They should not use incorrectly spelled keywords. These may have high traffic but their use on your site will damage your search engine ranking. They should not aim to use too many keywords, the list should be short and highly targeted. In this case more is not necessarily better, and if they offer to optimise for 100 keywords you are not really getting a better deal. Avoid any SEO service providers who employ keyword stuffing. Any density of greater that 10% of keywords in your copy could be considered keyword stuffing and will damage your search engine ranking as it's seen as spam.
Link Building
Your search engine ranking is increased by good quality inbound links to your site. This can be achieved in a few different ways. It can be done the old fashioned way, by finding a good quality site with a higher page ranking than yours, contacting the site owner and requesting a link to your site or a link exchange. When doing this a suggested anchor text tag for the link that includes a keyword should be supplied. Another way to build links is to leave comments on related blogs and discussion boards with your link. Many SEO companies will do this for you and it is a good idea but should not be relied upon alone. Back links can also be created by posting your own unique original content to social authority sites such as twitter, facebook, and posterous. As long as the content includes a link back to your site it will be counted as a link by the search engines. As links age the search engines like them more. Having too many new links appear at once suggests buying back links and search engines do not like this. The number of links on a page with your inbound link is important, fewer is better. Finally, and not many SEO experts know this one, the placement on the page of the inbound link to your site is important. Placement at the bottom of the page is an authoritative position that search engines love. This is what TwoKad blogmatics does for you.
Content Building
This is where most of your ranking will come from and this is the part that takes the most time. If you begin your site with the philosophy that you are building a site with unique valuable content that provides something for others you will rank well. You need at least two new pages every week to keep the site fresh. Build the site for your customers and the search engines will follow. Regular, unique content that is relevant to your site will build your search engine ranking. The best way to achieve this is through a blog attached to your site. When writing new content keywords should be used in page titles and titles should have a larger font size than the rest of the copy. Changing the text formatting such as using bold or italic for keywords is also helpful. It is essential to always adhere to copyright laws when creating your own content, breach of copyright can get you kicked out of the search engines completely.
Flash and SEO
Flash is a multimedia platform that can be used to create animated web pages. As long as alternative methods to display to search engines what your site is about are used correctly there is no disadvantage to using flash on your site. Here's a great explanation of how a flash site can be SEO optimized.
Conclusion
Finding a good SEO service provider should not be hard if you know what questions to ask of them. At TwoKad we firmly believe most seo should be done as part of building a site by any developer worth their salt. Once your site is built you should not have to pay any extra money to any other service provider to optimize it for search engines. What can be beneficial to you after your site is built is building quality links and creating good quality content.
