A Car Without An Engine? Website SEO Part 1

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As a full service web development company, we have the opportunity to see a wide range of customers with unique website issues. One of the most common reasons that customers come to us is because they are disappointed in their previous website designer, web host, or custom programmer created a beautiful website for $5,000, far more than we charge, but no customers show up. The website design of their site chocked full of all of the latest bells and whistles. However, the problem isn’t what is included, it is what isn’t included! If you’ve paid a website designer to create a site but you’ve never heard about search engine optimization, SEO for short, then you just bought a “car” without an engine. An engineless car can’t drive 90 miles an hour and a website without proper SEO won’t generate traffic to the site in most cases.
What is search engine optimization (SEO)? In an attempt to keep the article easy to understand, I’m going to keep the information at a high level, which will leave out some details – information we will be happy to provide if you contact us. SEO is a series of techniques that make your website easy for search engines to understand and position properly in search results when potential customers type in key words important to your online business. It is a no brainer to understand why it is important to have search engines properly understand your website because being on the first page of search results means thousands of dollars of business, if not more. Search engines are the primary way that customers look for help when customers don’t know someone or haven’t watched an ad on TV. Each search engine, Google for instance, considers key words used on your site, percentage of keywords used (too many is just as bad as not enough) on the site, key words provided within the programming that is behind the scenes in the programming, links from other sites to your website, consistently having fresh content on your site, traffic to your site, and many other factors. To keep this article focused, we will now concentrate on “links” that many companies offer services for.

Not a day goes by without at least 5 unsolicited spam messages coming into my nvhost.com email box that guarantees first page search engine rankings in only a few days – most doing so for only $99. The technique most of these companies use is called “linking” and is an SEO technique with a goal to “prove” to search engines that your website is so important that hundreds of other websites want to have links to your business. Unethical SEO companies will sell that your website will be linked to 1,000’s of sites in minutes. If you see this in their sales copy – RUN AWAY!! Search engines are very smart software packages that are not only the goose that laid the golden egg; they can also be the Grinch that stole your internet business! If you hire someone that creates thousands of links in minutes, called automated submission, many search engines will BAN YOUR WEBSITE so that you NEVER SHOW UP in their search results, let alone show up on a page that isn’t the first one. While search engines view links as a measure of importance, they would like to see the links show up naturally, over time. Search engine companies view thousands of links created in a 5 minute period of time as cheating and that is why they ban those websites from their search results. Hand submission is the key to ethical search engine optimization success and customers should expect improvement in search engine ranking to take place over a 6-12 month period of time. In the, “you get what you pay for’ - $99 isn’t a realistic price for hand submission. Staying on top of search engine results requires constant effort that all online companies must proactively pursue.

So how do you know that a company is using ethical hand submission techniques? We find the best proof that companies use ethical tactics is the amount of time the company has been in business. Any company can put up a new website tomorrow after ripping off customers under a previous website name. Our recommendation is to work with companies that have been in business for at least 5 years, if not more, because longevity is the best proof that a company is doing business the right way. While they might tell you something different, Alexa.com is a great site to see the time history of website and the website design for the company. Another great source is whois.sc that will also detail website ownership history. While less reliable, daily reports for the sites submitted to can be another method to show hand submission.
Search Engine Optimization is a complicated topic that we make easy at nvhost.com. Feel free to contact us at our website or by phone so that we can provide additional information and answers to any questions that you might have. Likewise, please be on the lookout for the next article in our series of SEO articles to gain further insight into the topic.