SEO: Doing it professionally

After helping out a few friends and acquaintances with website optimisation, I've been approached by a web designer about doing SEO work for them on an ongoing basis. They would like me to propose a service or set of services I could offer together with a set of prices.

The easiest and cheapest service I could offer is sets of directory submissions. To do these I could use my development version of professional directory submitter, SliQ Submitter Pro. This should allow me to do a hundred or so submissions an hour.

Of course there are a lot of other techniques I could use to do link-building. The more I think about it though, the more I feel a fixed price service won't do the job. SEO is a long-haul activity and needs to be spread over a number of months. Ideally I would spend 6 or so hours a month doing offsite optimisation for a website using directory submissions, articles where appropriate plus other link-building techniques I've become familiar with.

Spreading the SEO work over a few months should give better value and satisfaction to the customer. With a one-off hit at link-building, there won't be time to see any results before the work is completed. It's also likely to be unsuccessful. To do optimisation, you have to be able to monitor the results and make changes over a period of weeks. with newer sites this is especially important as the sites tend to perform well for a period before dropping back.

The other aspect I've got to price up is the on-page optimisation. Do I charge per page? Do I have a minimum charge that makes it worthwhile doing the job in the first place? If I think back to when I was looking for SEO help, I would often get quoted £350 a site or £100 per page. I never felt entirely comfortable with quotes like that since they didn't quantify what work was being done. Now, I've got more experience I can also see that it's pretty hard - or at least less optimal - to optimise a single page on a website.

I'll also have to think through whether I offer any PPC, e.g. Google Adwords advice. My feeling right now is that I shouldn't since I don't think it's a good medium to long term way of getting traffic/ sales, or rather I think that organic SEO will be the most cost-effective after a 6 month to 1 year period.

Tips on Writing Web Page Copy for SEO

The copy or text you write in a web page is vitally important for good search engine results. You need to include a good range of keywords. The keywords will be the ones you have calculated people will use when searching for the services you offer on Google, MSN or Yahoo. There are a number of strategies you can use to choose keywords and to write your web pages to emphasis or highlight the keywords to search engines.

There is no penalty for having too much text on a page and if you have written less than 300 words it is unlikely you will have included a good range of keywords for SEO. When writing the text on the page, always write for a human reader but also bear in mind SEO. Include more text and also include long tail keywords. Long tails are keywords that are searched for less often but if you include more long tails you are likely to get just as many, if not more, hits from the long-tails as your main keywords.

A good way to look for keywords is to analyse competitor sites. A set of keyword analysis tools can be found at www.googlerankings.com. Use the tools to find what 1, 2 and 3 word phrases appear on your competitor's web pages. Include the same phrases, where appropriate, on your own pages.

Here are my tips for writing text on a web page:

1. Include alternative ways of saying the same thing, e.g. an invoice software/ invoicing software/ software to create invoices.

2. Include the words in different orders, e.g. a man’s hat/ a hat for a man.

3. One method of adding keywords is to include a column listing benefits or features.

Good ways to ways of including alternative ways of saying the same thing are:-

a. alt text on images

b. title text on a hyperlink.

4. title tag

Use the title tag to hold as many as 3 keyword/ phrases separated by or -. For example:

invoice software billing software

The page title is probably the most important on-page SEO elements and ensure your most important keywords are at the beginning of the title.

5. h1 tag

This the most important header tag. Place a h1 tag near the top of each of your pages and make sure the keywords agree with the page title, e.g.

title = Invoice Software Billing Software
h1 = Invoice Software

6. h2, 3, 4, 5, 6 tags

Structure your pages by separating the text into topics. Use a h2 title for each topic. h3, 4, 5 and h6 can also be used to emphasise keywords.

7. Place important text near the top of the page, e.g. the first paragraph after the h1 tag should contain your main keywords.

8. Use bold or strong to emphasise keywords - Google picks up this as well as a human reader.

How does Web Design differ from SEO?

Modern web design tools, like Microsoft Expression Web or Dreamweaver, make the process of designing a website relatively easy. Using a template, a simple, presentable website can easily be written and posted online. However, getting a website found by people searching online involves more than just making the website look nice. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, is the activity of making a website rank well in searches on engines like Google and Yahoo.

In some ways making a website look good is of secondary importance: everyone's idea of what looks good is different and nowadays people are used to a reading a range of websites with varying degrees of artistic accomplishment or graphical design standard. What matters most is getting found in the first place and then having content that holds the visitor's interest.

A good web designer will perform both activities – making a good-looking site and making sure the site is well-optimised.

Most website designers will show you their portfolio of websites when you ask them to quote for your website. Good website designers should offer an SEO service too. Ask for examples of how well their client’s sites perform in searches.

If a designer doesn’t offer an SEO service, think twice about using their services – SEO isn’t something that can easily be performed after a website has been written and the pages are online. Ideally, a website needs to be constructed from the beginning with SEO in mind. The choice of URLs, domain names and linking strategy between pages all affect the site’s optimisation and should be planned before the website is written.

The amount of optimisation that can be performed depends on how much time and effort is put in. On-page optimisation (getting the page’s text and internal links to other pages on the same site) can be performed relatively quickly, but off-site optimisation will be an on ongoing task. Off-site optimisation mainly involves getting links from other sites. This can be a very time-consuming activity.

If good ranking in SERPs (search engine result pages) is essential to the success of your site, and you can afford to do so, hire an SEO expert. If you hire someone to do SEO work make sure they explain their techniques to you – at some point you may want to perform your own SEO. In particular, make sure your hired SEO only uses white-hat SEO techniques and will not use so-called black-hat SEO techniques that could result in Google giving your website a penalty or even banning your site in the future.

If you are looking for expert SEO advice and information, I would recommend the services of Four Square Innovations. They helped me with my website and set me on the road to ranking on page 1 of Google for my major search terms.