Selecting A Small Business SEO Company

All SEO companies targeting small businesses are selling snake oil!

OK not really but there are many out there you need to watch for which I believe has given the industry a bad name. Search Engine Optimization is something every company with a website or developing a website should take into consideration as they develop their plan for implementation.

If you are not familiar with SEO the simplest explanation without getting technical is the following:

SEO is the process of building your website in a manner that allows it to show up in the search engines for specific items that people maybe searching for, and more importantly it is optimizing it in a way that draws in searches that are specifically targeted at the products you sell.

There are many more technical explanations but that one really is the gist of it.

Now, why did I say many companies are selling snake oil, well let me first say, my company is not an SEO company, I say that very specifically because we do more than just optimize sites. That said we do work with customers that do want some level of SEO work done on their websites and we do build every customer website with SEO in mind from day one. Our success getting customers the search traffic they want has been great but we never guarantee anything, period.

There are a few things that you need to pay attention to when selecting a search engine optimization partner.

If they promise you page one listings run away, here is why. In many businesses you can guarantee something, when it comes to the search engines you are always at Googles (or Bing, or Yahoo) mercy. The provider can do everything right but at the end of the day there is always a chance that Google may not rank the site on the first page number one listing.

If they guaranteed it there are a few things they may be doing that you need to ask about or be aware of, there are companies that will take advantage of the lack of awareness of how the search engines work and will sometimes do one of the following to show you a first page listing:

1. Paid submission directories or search engines - Many will pay a fee to have your site listed number one in a lesser search engine or website directory or possibly take advantage of pay per click advertising on a lesser search engine or directory. These listings are only there if you are paying, quit paying and the listings go away.
2. Black Hat SEO - When it comes to search engine optimization there are two main types without getting to technical, there is white hat which is the proper way to optimize the site, and there is something called black hat. Black hat is the process of trying to trick the search engines into ranking your site but doing things that Google and others frown on. It may work for a short period of time but sooner or later Google will catch on and your site will be banned from search and your competitors will be smiling.
3. Using very odd searches to rank - What this means is showing you a page one ranking for a term that really no one searches for, for instance if you are interested in showing up for Chicago Hair Salons they may work to optimize for Chicago Illinois Hair Salons On Rush Street. You can see how it changes the value of a first page ranking.

Those are just a few things, there are many more but after speaking with customers lately I have a concern that there are people still working down these paths with customers.

All that said, there are many very upstanding SEO companies out there, there are MANY MORE good than bad. Make sure you select one you are comfortable with and ask the right questions.

How To Search Engine Optimize For Google Image Search

After my post earlier today I had a couple questions asking for more detail about SEO for Google Image Search. I Thought I would do a quick post with some quick and easy steps, by no means will I ever claim to be an SEO expert but I do think there are many basic rules you can live by to give yourself a solid chance at success.

Here are the things to look at:

Image File Name - Make sure you name the file based on the keywords you are optimizing for, in other words if the page is about iPhone App Reviews do your keyword research to determine the optimal words to put in file name. The easy way to look at this is it is not much different than the file name for the actual site page.

An example, and Aron will hate me for this (Sorry Aron) but search Google for Aron Meystedt or click here. You will see I rank on the page first based on my file name of the image when I did the interview with Aron.

Also, a little tip that seems to work but if you look around you will see much debate on, is using dashes in a file name rather than running the words together, i.e. Bruce-Marler rather than BruceMarler. I try to use dashes.

Content On Page - The content and surrounding information on the page around the photo is taken into account by Google as well, this will have an effect on how your images rank. In otherwords, do not try to scam Google by ranking high for an image name for Debt Consolidation on a page about iPhones.

Title Tag - The next thing is to make sure you have the title tag set an based on the keywords you are optimizing for, here is an example:

<img src=”http://YourSite.com/Keywords-Here.jpg” alt=”Keyword Focused Description.” title=”Keyword Based Title” />

This is something quick and easy to do and CMS software like Wordpress has a place to insert this text when uploading a picture making it really easy.

Alt Text Tag - You can see in the above example that the "alt" tag is also set based on keywords, this is the text that show if the image does not load or the browser does not support showing images.

Although there is also debate about how much emphasis Google puts on these tags, any extra edge you can get is important. Set them and you may of given yourself just enough juice to move higher.

I hope this helps answer some of the questions. Good luck!

Google Images SEO And Other Quirks

If you are not taking the time to optimize your image titles for SEO reasons then you are not taking advantage of the love that Google gives back for that little bit of work.

We recently did a spot check on some of our customers websites looking at traffic, keyword rankings, and other things. One of the things we noticed was that a couple of our customers sites were getting large amounts of traffic when we really did not expect it, these were customers in very targeted niche areas and the customers had really done little to nothing to add content to their sites since we had turned them over so although they were ranking well for the terms they had been optimized for they really should of had minimal growth except for some long tail terms.

As you can imagine as we scanned the Awstats logs it did not take long to figure out what was happening, in one case for a very highly searched term the customer ranked in the number one position in Google images for the term. This was a nice surprise and what was nice is the pageviews did not trend downward as I would of expected based on the typical bounce rate you expect on images. So, based on this picture and the quality of it the users were actually taking the time to look at the website.

As I continued to look through the stats of other sites I noticed something else, on one of another of our customers sites traffic had increased more than I would of expected since he had only had it up for less than 3 weeks. We had given him a tip sheet for what to do when he added content, etc and it looks like he actually used it which is a great thing. When adding images and content he took the time to optimize the image names, titles, etc and based on this sure enough his traffic was moving up nicely.

I know many people discount the quality of traffic from Google image search but to me every visitor is a potential customer.

One little quirk I noticed, and I know most of you have probably had this happen, we were turning up a few Geo niche sites and one of them had not even gotten past the initial Wordpress default Hello World page but was ranking on the first page for a rather competitive niche term. Sometimes Google makes me want to scream, it cracks me up how we can spend so much time sometimes on less competitive niches and take forever to show up but on a site that we have done nothing on there we are, first page.