SEO FAQ
Search Engine Optimization Frequently Asked
Questions
FAQ
There are a lot of
questions when it comes to SEO. Hopefully, some of these common questions and answers will help out. If you have
any more, please feel free to contact us, and we will be all too happy to answer them.
I thought SEO was an on-going
process.
Why are you offering just a "One-Time SEO" Service
Plan?
SEO is indeed an on-going process. More appropriately, Internet
marketing is an on-going process. That being said, you can't implement a successful online campaign without a
strong foundation. That's what we committed to giving you; a strong foundation.
After the set-up of
your One-Time SEO service plan is complete though, it may be in your interest to take advantage of
our Monthly SEO services to help you
along.
How will I know if any of this stuff is
working?
If you choose our Advanced or Enhanced Monthly SEO Consulting
service, you will receive monthly plans in which you will receive ranking and visibility reports. This is a
good way to measure the progress of your SEO efforts at a glance.
Though rankings and visibility are very important,
they are by no means a measure of complete success. You will want to pair up your rankings with conversions. Are
your high ranking search terms producing a sale? That's the true measure of SEO success.
Small businesses? What if I'm a bigger
business?
Well, unfortunately our One-Time SEO plans
aren't for you. We cater to small businesses that don't have the budget for a full scale internet marketing
campaign. These businesses are usually left with alternatives that end up giving SEO a bad name as a whole, and was
the driving reason for the creation of Foundational SEO in the first place. You can read a bit more about that on
our mission statement.
For the purposes of our target market, small business owners,
Mitchell Marketing does not detail our large scale Internet campaign options on this site. However, we are
able to accommodate you. If this is the case, contact us for more information with the subject "Large-Scale
SEO Options."
Bad name to SEO? What are you talking
about?
If you read
our SEO mission statement, you will see that
our services were created to offer an alternative to expensive SEO services to businesses that simply don't have
the budget. Before our services, business owners were left only with options that were, to say so
professionally, of lesser quality. To get a better understanding of what we are talking about, check out
our comparison page.
Well, thank you. I think I am indeed interested in your
services.
How do I get started?
You're welcome. To get started, determine
which services meets your needs, or contact us for a little guidance. If we are already in process of using our Web
Design services, we've probably already discussed this. We think you will be pleased.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of modifying or "optimizing" a website so
as to gain more visibility on the Internet through search engines like Google. This usually means gaining higher
rankings in the search engines for the search terms that people use to find your product or
service.
The Search
Engines
If you haven't already (and I'm pretty sure
you have) go to Google.com. Type in a search. Anything at all. You see all that stuff? Well, that's what happens
when you search on Google. Google is a search engine, and it's job is to process your search query, and return to
you a list of websites it believes to be most relevant. In this respect, most of the major search engines (Google,
Yahoo!, and MSN) act in much the same way. They take what you type in, and give you what they think you want. I say
think because, like anything else man-made, it isn't a perfect system. As such, this is really where SEO comes
in.
You see, the search engines have a vested interest to return results that you
want. They make their money through advertising, so the more users they have, the more lucrative their ad spots
will become. Likewise, if you were to use Google, and it consistently returned poor results, you would soon leave,
and the ad spots would decrease in value; at the same time pushing the value of the search engine you decided to
move to up just a little more. So, how do they determine what the right results are?
Relevancy
This term is used a lot
in the SEO world. The idea for a search engine is to return relevant results, meaning results that would
satisfy your search. Once a website is included in a search engines index (the database that holds a record
of all sites that a search engine has crawled and listed) an algorithm makes a number of decision on it's
relevancy to terms depending on the site's content. The more relevant a site is to a certain word or term,
the higher its location in a search engine's results page (SERP). Now, there are a lot of things that
determine a website's relevancy in a search engine's eyes, and all the engines determine it in different
ways.
Overall, a site's content, its markup (HTML, the way your site is built), and it's
popularity online make up a large portion of the relevance determination. Those, along with the selection of the
words you want your site to target, the competition of those terms, where and how they are used on your page(s),
what other websites link to yours, how many sites link to yours, how other sites link to yours, and a great giant
number of other fine details help to push your relevancy score higher; and so your rankings will follow. Sound like
a lot? It is. But it's not as much as it sounds like it is right now. You might have few questions about how SEO
can help a business, so we compiled a few numbers that you might find interesting...
Some Convincing, Real World Numbers to Think About
All this talk about what SEO is, and we haven't even begun a pitch the idea to a
business. But, we got all the basic idea stuff out of the way, let's talk some numbers.
Appealing To The
Masses
Take a look at the Nielsen/NetRatings Report for August 2007. This shows that 4.2 billion searches were conducted at Google in August
alone; and that's only 54% of the search share. Yahoo! and MSN show another 33% of the total number of searches.
These three search engines alone made up roughly 6.8 billion of the total searches through a search engine
online, and those are the top three.
Online Spending
According to a BIG research report just before the 2007 holiday season, it was
estimated that 47% of consumers planned to make at least one online purchase. This was up from 36% three years
prior. The same report 88.7% of consumers regularly or occasionally examine products online before buying from a
store directly. Percentages are great and all, but let's talk dollars.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported $32
billion in ecommerce sales in the first quarter of 2007, which is up
20.7% from the same quarter in 2006.
Your Business Online
As a business owner of any size, having an online presence should be one of your more
important considerations. Further more, making that presence as visible to as many people as possible should be
even more important. Having a website is one thing, but making sure people see your site is something else. It's
obvious that people use search engines to find what they are looking for, so having your site listed as close to
the top as possible can help your bottom line. And that's what we do.
By making use of our affordable SEO Services as a part of your online
campaign, you can increase the amount of visitors to your site, and grow your business as a whole.
SEO Home Page
One-Time SEO Plans
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SEO Comparison Page
SEO Terms of
Service
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