March 22, 2012

SEO

What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimization.

You see a lot of companies selling SEO. They promise to get your placement in a search engine somewhere on the first or second page of returns, or even higher.

That’s all well and good. But do you know your market? Do you know what people are searching for in your region? How often they search for your service? Do you know how far you are willing to drive to provide a service? Are you a nation wide provider or a local provider? Do you know your target market?

The point of all this is that there is much information you need to know about yourself and your market before you can have a company optimize your search return possibilities.

The game is pretty simple overall. Improve your website structure, improve your content, and distribute your information on every media platform available over and over. They will focus you on social networking.

But be smart.  A quote excerpt from Wikipedia for SEO:

As a marketing strategy

SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals.[44] A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site’s conversion rate.[45]

SEO may generate an adequate return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.[46] Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website’s placement, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google’s CEO, Erick Schmidt, in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes – almost 1.5 per day.[47] It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.[48] Seomoz.org has suggested that “search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.[49]

Social networking can be a useful tool, in that you have your own group of evangelists distributing your information for free. This sounds great: but how many of your FaceBook friends have you turned off because they inundated you with posts of no interest to you?

We offer SEO optimization tools to help you tune your site for satisfactory search returns. These tools are free with every account we provide.  That is the Armored Planet difference. Other hosting companies do charge for them, and charge for setting them up and maintaining them. Ouch.

If you are paying a lot for SEO…well, we wish you the best of luck. Just do your homework – know your business.