Olivier T
# 1 LinkedIn Group Management Expert | Groups owned include Linked:HR, the largest LinkedIn Group worldwide
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION IS TOO EXPENSIVE for small office & home office’s websites. Any advices?
I know enough about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to know it is a MUST DO. I believe having a website is useless unless potential customers can easily find it.
I recommend all my clients to focus on SEO. My smallest clients ALWAYS come back to me after meeting with SEO experts: They find SEO too expensive to outsource since it has to be a long-term commitment. They want to learn how to do it by themselves!
How can they learn how to do SEO quickly and for a reasonable price? Thank you in advance for your advices.
Clarification added April 19, 2007:
By any chance, has anybody purchased the eBook sold http://www.deutsche-webdesign.com/index.php?s=book-1 ? I would prefer getting an unbiased opinion (I mean other than Lars Hills - who is obviously promoting his company's work here!) before spending the $25 box.
I realize I may look very cheap by asking such a question!!!
Clarification added April 20, 2007:
5 days before closing and already 32 answers! Thank you all: I am learning so much. If answers continue to popup at this speed, I'll be able to write a book about the pro and cons of Do-It-Yourself SEO! There is so much good stuff here that the best answer will be difficult to select… I will have quite a few websites to visit, blogs to participate, and eBooks to download and read!
Good Answers (29)
Roberto L
Sr. Manager, Web Marketing at Cisco WebEx
Best Answers in: Internet Marketing (1), Small Business (1)
Search Engine Optimization is really all about having good content and being relevant. You shouldn't expect to have a site about dogs and want to be indexed in the top spots for cats. Tricks and magic won't do it... if you have good, relevant content then relevant sites will link to you and your ranking goes up. This is the MOST important part of SEO.
From a technical angle, just make sure you have a correctly structured site, well coded, and make sure the coding is complete: meta tags (keywords, description, title), alt tags, and good content. If you’re honest about it you will end up having key words in synch on the title, keywords, description, body, links, images, footer, etc. This will help enormously.
Last touch, signup for a Google account and use their webmaster tools, sitemaps, etc.
Doesn’t take a lot of money. Takes patience, monitoring, and tweaking.
Lars H
L'enfant terrible / Web Strategist / Speaker / Social Networker / Entrepreneur [LH79@gmx.net |TopLinked/LION/5000+]
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This is a good question Olivier.
I am a SEO expert and I often cannot sell my work to small businesses because they cannot afford my time. They don't understand SEO is very time consuming.
For this reason our group has published a Do-It-Yourself SEO eBook, for people willing to spend time optimizing their Website for Search Engine by themselves.
You can download this eBook the link provided below.
All the best
Lars Hilse
CEO
Insurancemerchant spec corp./indust. risks
(Chamber of industry and commerce-examined)
T +49 (0)4835 9513030
M +49 (0)173 5433491 (Univ. Number)
Skype: larshilse
mailto:lh@deutsche-webdesign.com
--------------------------------------------
DEUTSCHE WEBDESIGN
Eichstr. 10b
DE-25767 Bunsoh
--------------------------------------------
T +49 (0)4835 9513027
F +49 (0)4835 9513029
mailto:info@deutsche-webdesign.com
--------------------------------------------
For more Information visit
http://www.deutsche-webdesign.com
--------------------------------------------
Links:
Suggest you check out the simple analysis tool at: www.teliko.co.uk
Additionally this book is helpful:
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site (Ibm Press) (Paperback)
by Bill Hunt (Author), Mike Moran (Author)
Links:
David N
Technologist, Evangelist, Entrepreneur, Inventor ► Executive Consultant, CTO
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Do-it-yourself - literally.
Before you do anything else - use the main search engines to create a baseline - how do you rank today?
The links below are steps you can take yourself to increase your SE rankings.
You can measure the success of the project by tracking traffic to your site and rechecking your rankings against the baseline.
I'd suggest an SEO monitoring tool like WebCEO or WebTrends...
Basicly, the steps are:
1: Find effective high traffic keywords and keyword phrases.
2: Use correctly formatted title and meta tags on all pages.
3: Optimize your content and design for higher rankings.
4: Check for common SEO mistakes.
5: Add your URL to the top search engines.
6: Monitor and improve your site's ranking.
Links to Kevin Lee's column...
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624314
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624388
Links:
SEO is becoming a real issue for small businesses as you already understand. For the fact that it is quite expensive to have an expert do it for you , and very time consuming to DIY.
I do my SEO myself and the main frustration I have is competition. There are so many websites competing for the same keywords and phrases that it is a constant struggle to compete. If everyone is doing SEO, who gets noticed and who doesn't?
I think SEO should be left with the experts and those who can afford the time to keep up.
I agree with some of the above answers, the DIY approach is probably the best one if you are a small company on a budget.
The first thing to look at is content: 1st quality content together with a well structured semantical deployment is always paying off. This should be followed with a clean and standard compliant underlying code.
Update often and wisely. Content should be always up to date and relevant to your business and, this is more important, your costumers. I mean, your customer's interests.
Do not understimate social networking. Make your self visible, even in unconventional ways. It's the same old story repeating, make people talk about you. Now it's just a digital version of this attitude.
Metatags are ok, but do not trust them too much. They can even be counterproductive. Better way is to send out your links and get linked back. Rely on a good stats tool, Google Analytics are just great, easy to learn (the basics, that is) and free. Delegate somebody in the company to manage the whole thing.
There's a nice piece on WIRED (April 2007): The See-Through CEO (Get Naked and Rule the World). It's worth reading.
"Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear." (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/wired40_ceo.html)
Also, steal some traditional media tactics. Have a look at what newspapers, television, cinema or radio are doing. Sounds nonsense, but you'll find some great inspirations to adapt for your online biz.
Find the links to some SEO posts on my blog at the bottom of this. Hope they can help.
Links:
Jacques R
Principal & CEO, The Scotcrest Group, Inc
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Planet Ocean has been around since before Google and is an excellent source for the DIY set.
I think it costs $99 a year and they start you off with a book and then a monthly newsletter with tips and tricks for the DIY web site owners. We recommend our smaller clients go this route. Usually, after both some success with implementing their advise and routines [all the usual stuff like competitor site analysis, keyword tagging etc], we find the clients realize both the benefits and the huge amount of continuous work required and start to give more serious consideration to paying for it to be done by someone else. It becomes more obvious how foolish it is to spend all that money with the web designers to build a great site when no one ever comes to visit.
Links:
There are two components to SEO.
1. There is the technical aspects of it. I do not think that portion is too complicated. There are general guidelines that any webmaster can follow. I think a small business owner can educated himself about these or use a webmaster who knows how to implement them. The cost for such operations for a small site should not exceed hundreds of dollars.
2- The second aspects of SEO is the marketing (social, viral, etc) and public relations. This aspect is a much more complex and requires a lot of time involvement. To me that is what distinguishes one SEO company from another. Companies that work in that field can charge up to $400 per hour. The good ones are worth every bit of it.
Of course small business can not afford to spend 400 per hour. But I have worked with SEO companies that can manage small business campaigns starting at around $1000 per month. To some small businesses that might seem too much. It becomes then a question of how much return you can get from spending that money on SEO as opposed to other marketing activities. So the solution most of the time is to find an SEO company that is willing to do performance based SEO. If they do well for your SEO, you will benefit and they will benefit.
SEO for dummies, is actually a great book to reference to.
Links:
Alec E
Digital Strategist
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I'm going to second Alessandro Piana Bianco's answer as it was spot on in my thinking. I'd only add/clarify a couple of points:
Content is king. Tell your client to make the site a rich resource of relevant information and use the right language for their audience. Make sure they use the (key)words people will actually look for in their site - For example, if your client makes wedding videos, people don't search for a "record of your matrimonial ceremony" they search for "wedding video" - so sit down and work out what those words are and to add to it regularly. Then get them to write a few articles about how to commission a wedding video, what to expect, what it involves etc. using as many of those (key)words as possible. We're looking at density and relevance of specific words here though not just quantity so put away the thesaurus and no copy/pasting a hundred times.
Provide links to more information on their subject. If it's weddings, perhaps link to potential partner companies like wedding planners, venues, honeymoons, wedding lists, etc. The search engine will look at your site and find a lot of relevant data referring to "weddings" and "videos" and rate it appropriately. Ideally get links back to your site too and the easiest way is to add your details to a relevant blog or forum about relevant subject.
Don't duplicate content or nick it from another site - if you found it on a search engine, then the search engine already knows where the text you copied came from and it can work against you.
Page titles should be relevant to the content, it's more important than you think, and any metadata in the headers should really be page specific too, not just the same ones duplicated throughout the site.
If the company is called "John Smith Associates" put it at the end of page titles or just avoid mentioning it all together because no-one is searching for "John Smith Associates". If the company is called "Wedding Videos London" then bang it on the page title and include it in the image descriptions and mention the company name whenever possible. Ideally get the URL "WeddingVideoslondon.com".
Forget using Flash for anything other than an animation/entertainment. Never use it for navigation and the same goes for those whoopy little java apps. Search engines simply can't read the links, so they ignore them and only look at one page.
Intelligent, compliant code with descriptive alt tags for images (especially navigation menus) is essential. Loads of resources on accessibility, it's good practice (and law) and some of the same rules apply to how search engines see things too.
And, of course, don't use frames. It's not quite the disaster some people claim but it's not big and it's not clever and it causes more problems than it's worth.
Check server stats regularly and respond to them, especially 404s (Google Analytics is free but you need a gmail account I think).
And finally, tell to talk to thier clients and ask them informally, openly and without prejudice, what they'd like to know about the business, if there's any service that would be helpful to them now or in the future etc. It won't do any harm and it just might it might provide something that can be put to use online.... maybe they could upload the wedding video to youtube as part of the service - on your client's own channel of course.
Wouldn't it be funny if your client really did make wedding videos!
Al
Links:
Olivier:
Another book that we have pointed many small businesses to is:
"SEO an hour a day":
http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-Hour-Day/dp/0471787531/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0002686-6883913?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176943112&sr=8-1
A very solid do-it-yourself book which has some of the strong basics for SEO.
Also, you might consider looking at elance.com - as they have independent freelancers who might be affordable for SEO work.
Last, consider this, SEO is expensive, however, the ROI is also very nice depending on the industries of your clients. SEO if maintained continues to bring results months after months. Our clients since 1997 constantly get ROI upwards of 200% of the original investment.
In addition, if combined with display advertising, there can be a 20% lift on overall conversions:
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3622930
Hope this helps.
I recommend this e-book by Aaron Wall
http://www.seobook.com/buy-now.shtml
and reading this BLOG http://www.seomoz.org/blog.
David
If they have the time, a good place to start is Google's Webmaster Help center - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8524
That said, for most companies SEO is only a means to an end. They need more sales and want to use SEO to do this. There are other online marketing methods that may be more cost effective, some of these are: PPC, Affiliate Marketing, Press Release and more.
It all depends on the specific case.
Links:
You can utilise open source content management systems that have SEO built-in.
Such as Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla.
By far, Wordpress does the best SEO straight out of the box. You would have to wait for the next version of Joomla, which is actually totally recoded.
Links:
just do these three things for small business SEO.
(1) Use reasonable keywords in your text for web pages. Not in the META, but in the actual text. Slightly overdo the keywords, say 2x or 3x as often as in natural speech.
(2) Put out a "press release" once a month on your news section. It should have 4x or 5x density of keywords and should have links to your most relevant pages.
(3) SIgn up for the lowest level of Google Ads and pay $30 per month. Use your own name and a rifle shot keyword list. Then look at the Ad stats once a month tosee where people are searching.
SEO is expensive if you don't know what you are doing. All to often, people target keywords that are simply unattainable. I would suggest going to www.hittail.com and signing up. It is a free service that will tell you what search terms are being used to find your site and what long term keywords that you should use in your blog. Once you find the keywords that are being used to find your site (I am assuming that your site is being found) then you need to hire a copywriter to generate unique copy for your website using those specific long tail key phrases. Then you need to get some one way links from other sites that are relevant to your own.
If you do not currently have any website traffic, invest some money with a Google Adwords professional to find relevant keywords and drive traffic to your site. Using Hittail and Google Analytics you will be able to determine good keywords to use for you SEO campaign.
Hello Oliver!
There's a few pointers for SEO that worked for me:
- content is king (that's all you need to show up on any search engine)
- make a blog (or more)
- get on twitter, Jaiku and the like
- network!
- make your own widgets and share them
No insane amount of money is needed to get good SEO. I've got plenty experience to share and my door is always open for networking.
Dan Berte
Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder
c*free wireless / wirelessisfun.com / *c | creation&media
RO
(+4) (078) 819-5220
(+4) (074) 478-2752
US
(+1) (847) 380-2238
dan /at/ cfree /dot/ ro
http://www.cfree.ro
http://wirelessisfun.com
http://www.cyanad.ro
SEO isn't that complex.
1. keyword research (many tools that are easy to use and free)
2. meta tags (free tools that allow you to input the keywords and get the code spit out)
3. copy. use the top 5 keywords 2-3 times in the first 150 words.
4. alt tags on images
5. url naming. use www.xxx.com/self-publishing instead of www.xxx.com/pub
Dear Olivier,
The best way is to do SEO by your self. I will take my own experience as an exemple. I had no experience at all in SEO and in few months I managed to optimize my website company in order to be on the top 5 of the google results...! There is no need to pay someone to do your SEO, what you have to do is to do it by yourself and be patient, because you must keep in mind that SEO is a long process to achieve your goals (it took me 5 months to be on the top 5 for a 1 450 000 results request... but it has worked...!
My SEO strategy:
- content optimization,
- meta optimization : density of keywords, length of title (those two meta only matters)
- image optimization with code: Alt="description with keywords"
- getting quality link (high pagerank pages) - which generate traffic
- update regularly the content of you pages
- create blogs that link to your pages
- create a sitemap and upload it
- use google tools : google analytics and google tools for webmaster
I recommand:
- read this book : referencement 2.0 (only in french) http://www.livre-referencement.com/
- sitemap creator : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
- seo tools : http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/
Good luck and have fun... enjoy...:-)
Robert N
Managing Partner, staffmagnet, LLC & Publisher, Jobmatchbox.com
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Lots of great ideas here. To make the most of your efforts you could do one or more of the following:
1. Hire someone on a freelance basis to do SEO work for you. Bloggers are great candidates, but you should always check references and check their stats on Technorati. If you want to do it yourself then hire someone to coach you. The saying teach a man to fish comes to mind here.
2. Start a blog about SEO for your small business, or better yet, about your business. There are any number of great books out there, but there is even more great information available online. Visit SEO blogs and subscribe to them. Get in on the conversation. You might find out along the way that there are blogswap communities where you can contribute and get your company's name out there at the same time.
3. Get a library card. Most people these days neglect the best resource at their disposal. If you can't find what you want at your library branch then order it via inter library loan and have it delivered to you there.
4. Check out the link below. Jim Durbin, creator of the site has a couple of white papers that you might find interesting. He might also be someone to consider hiring as a consultant to your business.
Links:
Shashank T
Entrepreneur, Evangelist, Columnist, Investor. Occasionally accused of poetry.
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There is so much drivel in the answers you have received that I find it difficult to believe that these people call themselves interactive experts. Pay attention to Roberto Lino's answer and ignore the rest.
SEO is not about 20 Rules. Google is not everything, it is the most easily gamed search engine, and Yahoo and MSN have audiences in the tens of millions, if not more.
Build a clean, XHTML 1.1 valid website with CSS, use tables for no more than strictly tabular data. Pay attention to the keywords you want to be known for, and use them naturally in your website (don't blindly repeat things without making sense). Meta tags are marginally useful, so include them, but they're not worth getting your hair gray; Google doesn't even look at meta tags. Write content frequently and focus on bits that link to other websites, other blogs, and so on, and get in-links in return. Keep it real, fresh/frequent, clean.
That's SEO for you in 5 minutes and most of what you hear apart from this is not worth the paper it is written. I hate to prick the bubble, but there's no uber-wise trickery involved.
Alice F
UnlimitedPR.net
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I have used the following website and it is free
www.submitexpress.com
to bench mark your site before you submit I use two sites
for both search engine saturation, key word usgage, and link popularity of you site. They are:
www.Marketleap.com
www.alexa.com
To build in 15-25 ey words for search engines to index with your site
I use www.keywordtracker.com
Know your sector, and see what key words your top competitors are using by going to the top of the tool bar, Go to VIEW and then SOURCE CODE.
Google picks up on key word spamming to increase your ranking and may ban you, so be ethical on how you use your key words as Meta Tags.
Make sure your website content has key words within the primary pages
and remember to diversify your key word use on individual pages to match the purpose/content of the page. Include alt tags and descriptions for each page. Change and update your website pages from time to time so you will not be dropped off by Search Engines-as static OLD pages. Keep your site up to date and relevant.
Some of this will help you maximize your SEO process-by hand.
Alice M. Fisher
www.unlimitedpr.net
Hi Olivier
As a purchaser I find these problems very often. I bought a rather cheap internet bassed tool for internet cataloque buying. Some of my suppliers (GE; Perbio: Overtoom) international companies bought this system for several reasons: Easy to connect to internal software like SAP (prox 15 minutes) With search engines over the site and easy for the supplier to connect to the backoffice system.
Check out there website www.tblox.com there are several small films that explain in detail how easy it all works.
Now this will be controversial: is there something like (whitecap) SEO?
My answer to them would be:
Step 1: get a really, really good developer for the website so that the basics are done right.
Step 2: create high quality content made for your customers (because thats what search engines try to match: appropriate content to potential customers)
Step 3: promote and improve your website as you would do with any sales channel in your business.
This should bring you to 80% of what you can achieve. Fortunatly not many companies (and especially small businesses) do their homework so there's a good chance to get some traffic. Except if you are in SEO business ;)
Cheers,
Thomas
Hi Olivier,
you are right about SEO being way too expensive for a small business. Fortunately, there are options. These are the two I would recommend to your clients.
1) Send a person or two on an SEO seminar in your area. They should be able to grasp the most important techniques in just one day. Then they can implement them much more easily and effectively than an outsourced expert would do (because they know your web and they know the topic).
2) Do-It-Yourself. The most important concepts of SEO are pretty easy to grasp and free to implement. These would be:
a) Content. Write relevant text for your target audience. Make updates at least once a week (a great way to do this is a blog).
b) Ensure the page Title accurately & concisely describes your page content. The same goes to the Meta description, except it can be slightly longer.
d) Contruct pages in logical manner for human reading.
e) Don’t be afraid to link out to other relevant pages (your site & others) if the linked page will be of use to your visitors. Or better, try to exchange links with these pages.
f) Wrap your important keywords in "highlight" HTML tags like <h1> and <strong>
Either way, your clients should see a major organic (search engine) traffic increase (10% to 40%) in just a month or so.
Links:
Bonnie B
Consultant: SEO For Web Sites, Blogs, Social Networking. www.twitter.com/ burnsie_seo
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According to a GVU Users Survey, 84.8% of Internet users use Search Engines to find websites.
In today's competitive marketplace, the Search Engine Optimization is the most effective, results-oriented online marketing strategy available. With over 400 million searches performed daily - everyone wants a piece of the action. But just "wanting" top rankings, and knowing what to do and not do to get them is where you can separate yourself from the crowd.
Hard as it may be to believe, there are site owners who are not convinced that they need to use search engine optimization.
Most ofweb site owners need very little convincing that search engine optimization is a necessary part of any website trying to make money or attract attention online. But there’s a good chance that you work for, or with, people who either haven’t heard of SEO, or don’t understand why they need to optimize their website. Maybe they’ve invested money in all of the more conventional advertising methods, and even placed banner ads or other paid ads online. Why do they need to spend more time and money to achieve a high ranking in the search engines?
You might start by asking them where they think the traffic for their website is coming from. Despite what they might think, the majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask. (As of this writing, AOL’s search engine uses Google for its search results). According to various studies, most people prefer to click on organic search results rather than sponsored results, by a very wide margin.
This doesn’t mean that ads placed with search engine programs (like Google’s AdSense) are worthless, but it does mean that they shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a company’s website marketing campaign. Search engine users tend to trust organic results more than paid ads, which means that they’re more likely to click on them – and more likely to convert. There is a catch, though: they have to see you in the results to click on you. A good position in the search engines can’t be bought in the same way as a banner ad or a sponsored listing.
Studies have shown that most search engine users don’t click past the first three pages of search results; many don’t even click past the first page if they find what they’re looking for. Your own experience using search engines probably confirms this. What does this mean? It doesn’t matter how many search engines spider your site; if it isn’t listed in the first three pages, it might as well be invisible. Indeed, getting on the first page, among the top three results, is even better.
Here is a thought that should really give them something to chew on. They might not be doing SEO for their website, but it’s an even bet that their competitors are. In that case, their rivals are getting all that lovely website traffic that they should be getting for themselves. That should make them sit up and take notice if nothing else will.
....and as far as DIT SEO....the clients can save money through just consultants guiding them. but the amount of work needed to do SEO correct and understand all elements is not an overnight process:-)
Links:
Dyanna L
Professional Web Writer
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GNC Web Creations offers a number of free classes on SEO and Marketing in general. Their only requirement is participation and that you NOT be an SEO service provider.
Links:
Coming from a company where SEO is quickly becoming one of the largest parts of our business, I would suggest that you do a time analysis. In other words how much is an hour of your time spent working going to earn you? $30, $50, $200? If the time you spend researching, monitoring, and researching some more to do the SEO yourself is comparible to what it would cost to have a professional do the work more efficiently, then go with the professional.
Christopher S also suggests this expert on this topic:
Devesh D
Let's grow together...
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Olivier,
I completely agree with you that SEO is very expensive and I suggest, why not to design and develop the websites in accordance with the basic SEO guidelines described by Google, and that this SEO guidlines' knowledge should be incorporated as a core competence of our internal Web teams, so that we don't have spend money on SEO.
Please refer to the following two articles on the links provided.
Hope it helps!
Devesh
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Hi Olivier,
A few years ago, I came across a similar problem. In order to achieve the fastest and most efficient SEO in a low cost manner, utilise METATAGS.
Metatags are key words that are embedded into your own web pages and are effectively "the hooks" that the search engines browse over in order decide whether or not your information is relevant. For example, if you put the three words "hot" "dog" and "sausage" into your metatag list, search engines given the the search string "hot dog sausage" would provide your web page to the searching party. Your web page needs to be intially authenticated to a cache in a search engine. For further information on how, please google "white hat" and also read the short article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization#.22White_hat.22.
Kind Regards,
Keith
