Leese Internet Technology

[editor: this post is a condensed version of an email written by Michael Provencher of Sators.com for a client and outlines SEO so well, we decided to post it so that we can direct future clients to it for reading]

[Here] are some things I know as far as SEO. The PAID route, means looking into Google Adwords, Yahoo! ads, etc, etc. Paying for search engine placement. That could be a direction they go, which will mean a little bit of research and communication with them to determine what they are looking to spend, etc.

The “unpaid” route, which still means they pay us, is what we can organically do for them:

• update and include proper meta data
• optimize tags (title tags, standard html tags, etc.)
• optimize image tags (alt tags, etc)
• create an XML sitemap for submitting to search engines directly
• optimize content (which requires doing research on who their customers are, what keywords they are using, if any, who [client]’s target market is, what keywords they are used to using when they search, determining what they typically search for, and then re-writing the contents of the site to incorporate those keywords effectively)

that’s about the extent of what i know what we can do. the crappy part of that is that SEO is never guaranteed. any company that guarantees SEO is lying and promising something they can’t deliver on. since SEO is based on so many factors, such as hit count, cross-linking from other sites, proper indexing in the search engines (which relates to the keywords, content and meta data), etc., from experience I know that customers with a site typically don’t understand that SEO can take between 6 months and a year to show good improvement. so I’m a LITTLE hesitant to say we can do this for them, just because they can pay us hundreds of dollars for SEO and not see a difference in the first couple of weeks and “what did we pay you for?” comments start rolling in.

As long as they understand that…

… a preliminary, base-line SEO, [includes] adding meta keywords (between 15 and 30 words/phrases), meta description, updating title tags, image alt tags, and placing proper HTML mark-up tags (such as H1, etc.) …

A second level of SEO could be content-driven optimization, where, we could do more research into who their competition is, what keywords they are using, then combine and develop a better list of keywords/phrases, do the above-mentiond preliminary process, as well as incorporate those keywords into the contents of the site, cross-linking wherever possible. realistically, in comparision, that could take like 12-20 hours, because it would depend on how much research we did. also, i don’t have any software at home that can run web analytics on keywords and stuff like that [edit: see adlab.microsoft.com for content categorization and comparison tools]

Sorry for the novel. Let me know what you think… Like I said, the biggest issue I have is the mis-conception that clients have that SEO is an instant gratification thing. They will pay us, but realistically will not see results for possibly 6 months or more. If they understand that, I’d say we can do the preliminary level of SEO …

[editor: this post is a condensed version of an email written by Michael Provencher of Sators.com for a client and outlines SEO so well, we decided to post it so that we can direct future clients to it for reading]

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Business Development, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.