Search Engine Optimization - the official thread (1 Viewer)

[TripItUp]

If I'm starting a business, what do I need to know?

What is a good price? Which companies realize the best success and why?

etc. etc.

any SEO experts in the house?

 

[Abraham]

SEO starts and ends these days with posting original content on a regular basis. In the best case it will be 4-6 months before you see any results. It is a long slog, which is why pushing through matters since your competition probably won't.

 

[TripItUp]

SEO starts and ends these days with posting original content on a regular basis. In the best case it will be 4-6 months before you see any results. It is a long slog, which is why pushing through matters since your competition probably won't.

this is consistent with what I've heard...should small businesses do this in house, or pay an outside company to do it?

 

[Nathan R. Jessep]

short of spending money, you can do the basics yourself and have an advantage over those who have done zero SEO

1: if you already have your site content, generate your own KEYWORDS (for metatags in the header section of your web page(s). Use the words that are used the most on the page. If the keywords you are wanting to target aren't used the most on the page(s), go back and weave more of them into your content

2: if you have a google account, you can log in to google webmaster tools, and add a sitemap (there used to be a free XML sitemap generator that I used years ago, that will scour your site and generate a sitemap file for you for free)

3: as Abe said, change/update/add new content regularly, as over time the search robots will notice that your site has stale, unchanged content and you'll drop in rankings in favor of those with newer content

 

[Maelstrom]

Quality, original and relevant content. If you can do that yourself, do so, it'll be more authentic. If not, make sure whoever is creating your content is writing in the correct voice for your business, and that it is original, not generated, content.

Also, the only meta tags that matter for SEO are the <title> tag and <meta type="description"> tag. The keywords tag is pointless, no one uses it, and it tells your competitors what keywords you want to rank for. You should also include the Open Graph tags for Facebook and Twitter (and any other social platform that uses them), people forget they are search engines also.

 

[sublimeone]

What type of business? Are you looking to rank locally or nationally? How many competitors are there?

 

[Nathan R. Jessep]

Quality, original and relevant content. If you can do that yourself, do so, it'll be more authentic. If not, make sure whoever is creating your content is writing in the correct voice for your business, and that it is original, not generated, content.

Also, the only meta tags that matter for SEO are the <title> tag and <meta type="description"> tag. The keywords tag is pointless, no one uses it, and it tells your competitors what keywords you want to rank for. You should also include the Open Graph tags for Facebook and Twitter (and any other social platform that uses them), people forget they are search engines also.

keywords are useless? since when? I've not done any in the last year or so, but aren't there still entire advertising setups based on keywords?

ETA: not questioning your expertise here, just curious

 

[cstu]

SEO starts and ends these days with posting original content on a regular basis. In the best case it will be 4-6 months before you see any results. It is a long slog, which is why pushing through matters since your competition probably won't.

this is consistent with what I've heard...should small businesses do this in house, or pay an outside company to do it?

I'm looking for company to handle the SEO and the blog updates (real estate appraisal related) - anything out there?

 

[cstu]

What type of business? Are you looking to rank locally or nationally? How many competitors are there?

Here's where I want to show up: los angeles real estate appraiser

 

[TripItUp]

What type of business? Are you looking to rank locally or nationally? How many competitors are there?

two completely different businesses, sports betting analytics(national) and a landscaping business(Denver area)

 

[AnonymousBob]

.

 

[captain_amazing]

I've said this in other threads. SEO is generally overrated. Create great, original content with a developer who understands current standards and best practices. Focus more your email marketing strategy.

 

[captain_amazing]

Quality, original and relevant content. If you can do that yourself, do so, it'll be more authentic. If not, make sure whoever is creating your content is writing in the correct voice for your business, and that it is original, not generated, content.

Also, the only meta tags that matter for SEO are the <title> tag and <meta type="description"> tag. The keywords tag is pointless, no one uses it, and it tells your competitors what keywords you want to rank for. You should also include the Open Graph tags for Facebook and Twitter (and any other social platform that uses them), people forget they are search engines also.

keywords are useless? since when? I've not done any in the last year or so, but aren't there still entire advertising setups based on keywords?ETA: not questioning your expertise here, just curious

Not useless, but certainly carries significantly less weight in ranking than they used to. Title and description are important, in addition to H1 and H2 elements. Most important is that content is rich/original and a site is structured efficiently according to current standards and is not ignored for 3-5 years after being built - sites need to be continually maintained to keep up with all the changing things.

 

[Abraham]

SEO starts and ends these days with posting original content on a regular basis. In the best case it will be 4-6 months before you see any results. It is a long slog, which is why pushing through matters since your competition probably won't.

this is consistent with what I've heard...should small businesses do this in house, or pay an outside company to do it?

I'm looking for company to handle the SEO and the blog updates (real estate appraisal related) - anything out there?

First page sage is very good. I work with them some. Otherwise there are tons of options. Pm me if you want my contacts email there.

 

[RnR]

 

[AhrnCityPahnder]

gonna go ahead and blackdot here.

I used to know how to do this pretty well before google took over the world, but it's a different game now.

 

[Maelstrom]

Quality, original and relevant content. If you can do that yourself, do so, it'll be more authentic. If not, make sure whoever is creating your content is writing in the correct voice for your business, and that it is original, not generated, content.

Also, the only meta tags that matter for SEO are the <title> tag and <meta type="description"> tag. The keywords tag is pointless, no one uses it, and it tells your competitors what keywords you want to rank for. You should also include the Open Graph tags for Facebook and Twitter (and any other social platform that uses them), people forget they are search engines also.

keywords are useless? since when? I've not done any in the last year or so, but aren't there still entire advertising setups based on keywords?ETA: not questioning your expertise here, just curious

Not useless, but certainly carries significantly less weight in ranking than they used to. Title and description are important, in addition to H1 and H2 elements. Most important is that content is rich/original and a site is structured efficiently according to current standards and is not ignored for 3-5 years after being built - sites need to be continually maintained to keep up with all the changing things.

The keyword meta tag is absolutely worthless. The idea of keywords is absolutely not worthless, that should be the basis of your content strategy. But the actual tag isn't used by the search engines.

<h1> tags (1 per major section of each page, some will say 1 per page, but that is a bit outdated with HTML5 markup) are extremely important, and putting your main keywords early in your content (title, first paragraph, first half of the section). Basically HTML markup is really useful for search engines to determine the important content on your page - H1, H2 for titles. Using semantic tagging where the HTML tags are used appropriately (section, article, blockquote, etc). Another markup thing you can do is to use schema tagging, this is extra markup designed to describe the content to the search engines and in theory, they may display it in a nicer format in the search engine results (leading to more click-throughs).

Also, a HUGE thing to understand about SEO is that only about ~50% of it is on-page and controllable by the things you do with your website and content, how fresh it is, how often it is updated. The other ~50% is based on the incoming links, the text those links use, what people search for to end up on your site and other stuff like that. You need to get a lot of the RIGHT websites linking to you, you can be hurt by having link-farms and other non-reputable sites link to you. And the links need to grow organically, they can't just all appear overnight.

 

[TripItUp]

interesting stuff so far...thanks fellas.

 

[KiddLattimer]

Be careful when hiring an SEO agency... unless you go with a top notch group (which is very expensive 99% of the time) they can do more harm than good.

SEO has changed a LOT over the past decade and spammy methods that worked great just 2 years ago can get you booted from the index today... trust me, I know. Most low priced agencies will just blast your site with garbage spam blog links, collect their money and disappear. Google gets a whiff of them and they penalize your site to oblivion or just boot your ### out all together.

Keywords are important but be careful... Don't use the same keywords 30 times in an article. Google is smart enough to know that an article about football is about football because you talk about the NFL, Peyton Manning, Adrian Peterson, The Cowboys, etc. Google is also smart enough to know that "Discount luxury watches are nice because discount luxury watches make great gifts and people love discount luxury watches" is not natural - the problem is that when beginners want to include important keywords this is exactly what they do.

Writing good, helpful content is the best place to start, but most people don't know what GOOD content is. Most people find a profitable keyword, bang out a 600 word article that sounds great, but accomplishes little and get disappointed when nothing happens.

If I were starting from scratch I would take my niche and think of every single question you can come up with and answer it. Let's say you're a carpenter... you could write hundreds of how to articles... how to change a light switch, how to unclog a sink, how to fix a leaky roof, etc.

People ask Google questions all the time and not many companies take the time to actually answer them. Your customers will be grateful for the information, other sites will link to you, Google will figure out that your site is about carpentry and things will start to take off.

The best advice I can give is don't look for a magic bullet - there isn't one - but there are thousands of companies that will tell you they have one... for a price.