First page SEO guarantees are lies

By Tim Priebe on December 29, 2009 at 6:49 am in Search Engine Optimization

SEO salesman lying“Can you guarantee I can get on the first page of Google?”

That’s a question I often get when discussing search engine optimization (aka SEO) with clients and potential clients. The short answer?

Nope. Nobody can. Anyone who says they can is lying.

Let me clarify a bit.

Optimizing your website for search engines involved improving its content with words and phrases that research and common sense shows your target market might be typing in. It’s more than just picking one single word or phrase you want to rank well for.

How people search

Let’s look at a hypothetical situation. Say we have someone with a company based in Edmond, Oklahoma looking for a website. If they are unfamiliar with web design companies in the area, but know they want to hire a local company, they’re much more likely to search for “web design Edmond” than they would be for “T&S Web Design.”

Okay, you caught me, that’s less hypothetical and more something we deal with every day. So we chose to optimize our site more for “web design Edmond” than any other phrase. But search for the phrase “web design” by itself, and we’re somewhere past the 200th listing.

Remembering the competition

Also, there are competitors to think about. We are very careful to explain to those in certain industries like insurance and real estate that their chances of getting on page one of the search engine results are low at best. Realistically, the chances are pretty close to zero, unless they’re in some niche that has a realistic chance of less people being able to fill. “Castles in New York” might be one such area.

We aren’t Google

Finally, the simple truth is that we’re simply not in control of search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo because we’re not them. As any parent can tell you, no one person can tell exactly what another person (or company) will do.

So if you run into one of those companies that “guarantee” first page placement for search engine optimization, just remember it’s a scam. So don’t fall for it.

But don’t take our word for it

Feel free to check out Google’s advice on SEO, which also warns against placement guarantees. Yahoo! also gives their own SEO advice. Finally, if you really want to, you can read Bing’s blatantly biased SEO advice.

* If you were not aware, Google, Bing and Yahoo! are the top three search engines out there currently. According to some sources, over 96% of searches done online are performed on those three sites.

Google Names T&S Web Design a Favorite Place

By Tim Priebe on December 16, 2009 at 5:07 pm in General, Search Engine Optimization

We're a Favorite Place on Google

We’ve long thought of T&S as our favorite place. It looks like Google agrees with us. Well, Google users, anyway.

Google recently sent us a small package with a decal and letter in it to let us know that we’ve been selected as a Favorite Place on Google. Apparently less than 1% of the businesses in the United States were selected, based largely on their popularity on Google results.

Here’s how Google describes it on their FAQ page on the topic:

The list was determined based on the popularity of a business’ Local Business Center listing, as determined by how many times Google users looked for more information about a business, requested driving directions to get there, and more. Google users “decided” based on their actions, and we sent the decals.

…

Over 100,000 businesses were identified as Favorite Places, representing less than 1% of the 28 million U.S. businesses. We believe that our standards for selecting businesses are as selective or more selective than other companies which have run similar initiatives.

We're a Favorite Place on Google with BarcodeVery cool! The decal actually has a QR barcode pointing to our Google Business Listing.

Interested in an enhanced Google Business Listing for your business? We actually provide that as part of our SEO services. Contact us if you’re interested in knowing more.

Easily increase your search engine visibility

By Tim Priebe on March 30, 2009 at 6:30 am in Search Engine Optimization, Social Networking

Google, LinkedIn and FacebookFor a long time, search engine optimization has been a feat that required a certain level of experience and technical skills. And it still is. Fortunately for the average business owner and freelancer, you can increase your search engine visibility using just social networking websites. Since they’re the most effective, I’ll specifically talk about Facebook and LinkedIn.

Make sure that you actually go through a complete your profile on both of the websites. On LinkedIn, put mostly professional information, with just a tiny bit of personal mixed in there. On Facebook, it should be a healthy mix of personal and business.

On both, use some form of your actual name for your username. On LinkedIn specifically, make sure you take a look at your profile and customize your Public Profile address. It will generally start out as something generic like www.linkedin.com/pub/12/62a/4a3. Simply click edit next to the link, and you can change it to something like www.linkedin.com/in/yourname

LinkedIn Vanity URL

Tim Priebe results on GoogleOnce you have those social networking websites filled out, make sure you link to your website!

Naturally, you should do similar things on MySpace, Plaxo and Twitter. But Facebook and LinkedIn have been proven to have a good effect on your search engine rankings, and should definitely be taken care of first thing.

Need proof that this works? Just Google my name, Tim Priebe, and you’ll see both Facebook and LinkedIn on page one out of 80,000+ results.

TD Automation

By Tim Priebe on December 2, 2008 at 1:04 am in Client Plug, Search Engine Optimization

TD Automation is an Oklahoma City based home automation and home theater company located in Edmond, Oklahoma. They feature lighting design, energy savings, audio-video installation and much more. A relatively new client of ours, Mark Tatarian at TDA has us maintain his website and recently had us perform search engine optimization on his site as well. You can see in the search engine results to the left that the website appears on the front page for one of his search phrases.

Interested in checking out the site? Click the image below to visit TD Automation.

Home Automation and Home Theaters in Edmond and Oklahoma City

The two ways to get into search engines

By Tim Priebe on September 19, 2008 at 6:30 am in General

There are basically two ways to get listed in search engines. You can pay to be listed (sort of, I’ll explain in a bit), or you can optimize your website to appear higher in the listings.

One good analogy to explain the difference is to look at the websites like books in a bookstore.

Paid Listings

With the modern search engines, you can have a paid listing, though you’re technically don’t pay to be listed. Instead of paying every time your ad is shown, you only pay every time your ad is clicked on. This system is referred to as pay per click, or PPC. This does not involve ranking, but involves bidding on keywords and key phrases.

The image to the right shows some paid advertisements highlighted. You can see that they’re in a different position than the “normal” search engine listings.

This option is similar to a publisher paying a bookstore to have a display up front. In our hypothetical situation, a publisher could arrange with a bookstore for the store to be paid every time a book is sold, but not pay for the display itself.

Optimizing Your Website

The “natural” way to get your website listed in search engines is to just have good content that gets picked up for specific words and phrases. Maybe you set out with those specific phrases in mind and write your content with the goal of being listed for those phrases. That’s what we refer to as optimizing your website, though there’s a bit more to it than that. This is the option that involves search engine rankings.

You can see in the image to the left that the natural listings are highlighted. These make up the majority of the search results pages.

This option is similar to a book being written to be appealing to readers, and hitting the best seller list. It’s a self-feeding cycle. The more people that read it, the more people hear about it and want to read it. So they buy it and read it, and the cycle continues when they tell their friends.

Which Is Better?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. However, you can do some optimizing yourself without spending a lot of money, simply by blogging. There are a couple of guidelines to keep in mind, though.

  1. The blog must be installed on your website. For a blog to significantly help your search engine rankings, you can’t just link to a free blog on Blogger or Wordpress. However, Wordpress and others like it can be installed on your server. This means the search engines will see that your website is updated every time you blog, which helps your ranking. And that leads us to…
  2. You must blog frequently. The whole point is that it’s much easier to update your website often. So both for your readers and the search engines, you should blog on at least a weekly basis. It’s even better if you blog a couple times a week.

If you have the budget and it’s really important to you, you should probably try both of them. However, you should track which of the two produced more (and better) traffic, and then shift your spending so you spend more money there.