SEO FAQ

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization

SEO basically encompasses everything you do to help people and search engines to find your website. SEO includes on-page work to make content more assessable to search engines and relevant to keywords as well as off-page work such as link building.

No one can promise you #1 on any search engine. SEO services can improve your results, and in many cases page one of results is a reasonable goal, but no one can guarantee any specific spot on search engine results.

Generally if your search results aren’t where you want them to be it’s either because of poor SEO or strong competition. Some websites are nearly impossible to unseat from the #1 spot on Google due to age, high PageRank and a wealth of backlinks. No SEO company can promise you the #1 spot, but SEO can improve your results significantly.

It’s most likely that her computer has cached results and is not looking at the most recent data from the search engines. It’s very common for browsers or search engines to save your results so that they do not need to be regenerated so often. If you still have this problem after clearing the cache or looking on a different computer, you may be seeing personalized results based on other factors, such as friend suggestions (Bing) or results she’s upvoted in the past (Google).

The short answer is that no one knows. SEO unfortunately is not an exact science, and anyone promising you immediate results is lying through their teeth. We sometimes see results as early as a few days, but it’s much more common to have to wait a few months before the SEO begins to really get going. For particularly stubborn keywords or difficult websites, it can take even longer.

Your site rank depends on a number of factors, including content, titles, keyword density, age, accessibility, and backlinks. Even your website’s url can be a contributing factor.

While we can’t promise results, we can always try. Going after very common keywords (such as “computer”) or name brand products with a strong company behind them (like “iPhone”) is incredibly difficult. You’re basically pitting yourself against the full might of Steve Jobs, or a whole sea of strong competitors with a head start going back decades. Usually our advice will be to focus on keywords that have less daunting competition so that you’ll see results sooner, but if you really need that one difficult keyword we have the experience to give you a fighting chance.

Anyone can try to rank for every keyword imaginable, but it’s probably a bad idea. Trying to win for keywords that are unrelated to your website will leave visitors feeling hoodwinked and result in high bounce rates and low conversions. It’s much better to focus on keywords that directly relate to the subject of your site, and to target specific pages to those keywords so that your visitors immediately know they’ve come to the right place.

We offer several plans, some for as little as $500. When you receive your free SEO report, we will make a suggestion for which package you may need to go with based on your website’s current rankings and competition

SEO is an ongoing investment in your website. As your rankings improve, this investment will usually pay off far more than you’ve put into it through increased traffic and sales. When compared to traditional advertising costs, SEO is relatively inexpensive and provides more tangible results to track.

Yes, you should optimize every page of your site, but they don’t all need to be optimized for the same keywords. Optimizing different pages for different but related keywords helps search engines build a better profile of the theme of your website, and having many pages with high rankings will reinforce your results across the board.

No one can say how long it takes to get indexed, but generally you can expect somewhere between a few hours and a few days. Without SEO your site may never get indexed at all.

While there are submission portals, it’s generally wiser to submit your website through content and XML sitemaps.

Simple: you don’t. The “big three” (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) account for almost 100% of internet searches, and the smaller independent search engines usually gather data from one or more of these indexes. Submitting websites to search engines is also less productive than it once was, as Google and the others put more weight on pages that are discovered organically than ones that are submitted.

Absolutely. While search engines may be much better at crawling your site unassisted than they might have been in the past, an XML sitemap makes it easy for your whole website to be crawled quickly, getting you indexed and moving up the rankings faster.

Although meta tags are no longer the primary way all search engines determine what your website is about, you still need meta tags for SEO. Smaller, independent search engines still rely heavily on meta tag information, and Google will use your meta tags to give visitors a first glimpse at your content. It can also tell search engines how often to crawl your site and whether the content is safe.

PageRank helps SEO campaigns, but isn’t necessary for every site. If your competition tends to have very high PageRanks, improving the PageRank of your website may be required to move up in the results. For many niches, however, PageRank is less important than other qualities of your website.

Linkbait is content visitors will want to link to. Generally this means useful, well written content that is relevant to your website and the interests of your users with lots of easy, one-click ways to share it with their friends.

Probably not. Web developers, even ones who are very well schooled and experienced, rarely pick up more than the most rudimentary SEO skills along the way.

SEO is a full time job. Unless you can afford to keep someone in-house just for SEO work who has the experience to get the results you need, it’s wise to seek help from a professional SEO team.

SEO plugins for WordPress are a good place to start, but they aren’t enough. SEO plugins can help your on-page optimization by improving page names and other minor things, but to get strong results you need a professional SEO team managing both on and off-page SEO by hand.

No, Google’s feelings on SEO are much more complex than that. When SEO is used to promote “junk” websites it can lead to bad results in Google, but more often than not SEO helps Google put more relevant websites near the top. SEO helps webmasters make it clear to Google and other search engines exactly what a website is about and why it should rank for certain keywords, promoting relevant websites that may have been missed otherwise.

Yes, domain extensions do matter! Country specific domain extensions such as .fr or .de help identify local sites for a slight advantage in results from those countries. Other extensions, such as .net, .info, and .biz may be weighed slightly differently than .com websites, and .org and .gov sites may get a slight advantage from their extensions.