SEO TIPS

By Gabriel Gervelis

The analytics of SEO

What goes into a SEO campaign? More important, how much is a SEO campaign going to cost me? Below is a list of questions i ask myself before starting or quoting an SEO Campaign.
How many pages are in your site?

How often do you add content to your website?

How long has your website been online?

Do you have any top search engine rankings under keywords?

Are search engines currently generating traffic to your website?

How long has your top competitors been online?

Do you know who your top competitors are?

What SEO Techniques are your competitors using?

Are there industry related bolgs, forums, or social networking sites that are relevent to your industry?

Are competitors using active members of industry related blogs, forums, or social networking sites?

If so, how long have they been active?

How much “catching up” do you need to do?

What are the main keywords you want to target?

How aggressive are the keywords that the SEO campaign will be targeting?

How much money are your top competitors spending on link placement?

Do you have internal resources that you can dedicate to an SEO campaign?

And the list goes on and on!

By: Gabriel Gervelis

Run….Run far away…..Run for the hills and don’t look back. Its time to take a step back and ask your self some serious questions.

QUESTION 1
“I know top search engine rankings in Google will help my business. Do i want this so bad that i am going to believe this sales rep that only knows what they learned during a two week training course?”

QUESTION 2
“If a used car salesmen told me that a used car with 100,000 miles would never break down, would i believe them?”

QUESTION 3
“This sales rep keeps telling me that ranking a web site on Google is easy and that they do it all the time, should i believe them?”

QUESTION 4
“Everything sounds good, but i don’t see any time in the project that allows for this company to understand my product, service, and business. Can they truly find the best keywords for my site by only reading my web sites content?”

QUESTION 5

“The sales rep/consultant is not asking any questions like: What keywords are generating traffic to my site? Do you have an analytics program that i can review? Or, What is your website’s marketing history?….Yet they are guaranteeing results, should i believe them?”

QUESTION 6

“How can someone guarantee X number of hits or leads? Not even my TV ad broker does that!”

Don’t be fooled by gimmicks, fake guarantees, salesmen, other clients top rankings, or any other sales pitch that is thrown your way. Take a step back and remember - Quality work takes quality time, quality time usually takes quality money.

Take a look at what Google says about SEO’s and some additional red flags to watch out for.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

Take a look at what happened to this company when they promised rankings.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internet-advancement-fuels-my-rage

and again.

http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?id=18382

and again.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html

And then there is the 40 rip off reports filed here

My point?
Run….Run far away…..Run for the hills and don’t look back. Its time to take a step back and ask your self some serious questions.

By Gabriel Gervelis

.
So your website is ranking well, but you know it can be better. After reading the SEO TIPS blog you understand how to research SEO Companies, find a quality firm, and hire them. You just launched a 6 month print campaign in a niche magazine and you want to find a way to monitor the Revenue generated from SEO.

.
Have no fear, Google Analytics is here!

.
Any reputable SEO company should have enough knowledge to provide this information, however this is how you can set up your own benchmarking.

.
1) Using Google Analytics set up a goal funnel to monitor your shopping cart check out process, make the “Goal” page the “Thank you for shopping with us”.

.
2) Assign a dollar value for a goal conversion (usually your average sale amount)

.
3) Log into your Google Analytics account and click on the Traffic Sources tab (left navigation)

.
3) Click on the search engine that you want to monitor

.
4) Below the main title you will see 3 text links that read: “Show: total| paid | non-paid” and select non-paid.

.
5) On the top of the content box holding the keywords and site usage information you will see two tabs a) Site Usage b) Goal Conversions

.
6) Click on Goal Conversion tab

.
This information will show you what keywords generated traffic that leads to goal conversions (sales). Make sure you have enough data collected before you hire the SEO Company; I recommend at least 2-3 months. This way you can monitor total goal conversions generated VIA search engines, giving you a way to use Google Analytics to Measure ROI from and SEO campaign!

By: Gabriel Gervelis

Going along with an earlier post about supplying some top SEO Tutorials for our readers, another one appeared today that i felt was worthly of mention. It comes to us from the all mighty Oz, the all mighty SEOMoz.

SEOMoz is a seattle based SEO company that has successful created one of the worlds largest search engine optimization communitys. As an SEO company, the take on projects 10K monthly or higher, and thrive around a subscription based membership program.

Currently SEOMoz issued a 7 hour, 8 segment seo tutorial that is available for download. This program is available at a low cost, and is recommended by verious SEO Experts.

 Read more about the videos here. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seomoz-launches-seo-video-training-series/6744/

Read more from the source, SEOmoz video downloads are found here.

By: Gabriel Gervelis

An underlined theme throughout our SEO TIPs blog is that the cost of an SEO campaign is a direct relation to how much work is involved. Stand clear for the “we will put your site #1 on Google for a hundred bucks a month” and the “we guarantee results.” Good work takes time to perform. This is true with any industry.

The beginning steps to all SEO campaigns start with keyword research and/or competitor analysis. The results of the keyword research and/or competitor analysis will dictate how aggressive targeted keyword markets are. Less aggressive markets can be conquered using Basic SEO Techniques, aggressive markets may need advanced SEO techniques.

Its all in the name, Basic SEO Techniques take less time to document, present, and preform - Thus the cost of a campaign using only basic techniques is less. Advanced techniques take more time to strategize, document, present, and perform - thus leading to a higher cost of a SEO campaign.

People always ask, “why do some SEO campaigns cost $500 a month, and others cost $10,000 a month?” The style of SEO technique answers this question.

Some Basic SEO Techniques

1. Title Tag Optimization
2. Meta Tag Optimization
3. Header Tag Optimization
4. Content Optimization
5. Limited Competitor Research
6. Limited Keyword Research
7. Alt Text Optimization
8. Footer Optimization
9. Basic Navigation Optimization
10. Simple Forms of Link Building - Directory submissions
11. Syndication of Existing (or Provided) Content

Other Sources of Information

Cheat Ad - Good post of 10 Basic SEO Techniques shown with HTML examples

DIY SEO - Good Article about 10 Basic SEO Techniques from a guy that writes better then I do!