Our clients frequently utter the words “I admit I don’t understand what you just said” when discussing their search engine optimization.  We want to explain the process so this is the first in a series of posts that will explain what we do and what it all means for your small business SEO.  We’ll publish one new post per day at 9 am EST.

SEO Service Explanation Posts

1. On page optimization
2. Off site link building, directories, listing services, etc. (Tuesday Feb. 14th)
3. Keyword research assistance with KEI values provided.  (Wednesday Feb. 15th)
4. Custom 404 error page directory. (Thursday Feb. 16th)
5. Internal link building. (Friday Feb. 17th)
6. Competitors Analysis + Attack. (Saturday Feb. 18th)
7. “Popularity Contest.” (Sunday Feb. 19th)
8. Monthly Plans (Monday Feb 20th)

The SEO equation

Search engine optimization is very simple in one way.  Ranking higher on Google is only: On site SEO + Off site SEO.  Simple, right?  

Only two parts of SEO are “must-have” optimization tools – on page optimization and off page SEO (inbound link building, citations and such.)  We focus almost our entire effort for most clients on a complete site audit and strong inbound link building.

On site optimization of home page or blog only

Google sees your site as a collection of text and code.  For the best optimization, you need to use the words you want to be ranked for without being too spammy.  You don’t want Google to come visit your site and see the wrong thing because the longer Google believes your site is about one thing, the more difficult it is to change later.  You want to be consistent but first you want to be correct.

What this really means is we need to examine the way your website is built.  What is the title of your page?  What keywords are you using?  Does this match up to the keywords you hope to optimize your site for?  Are the words in your title on the page itself?

On site optimization for SEO means you have also checked into the site code, the speed of your website, etc.  You need your contact information to be consistent across all sites and you definitely want to make sure your site has all the correctly formatted code before Google updates you again.  

When High On SEO does on page optimization we look at over 40 positive and 30 negative factors that influence whether Google likes your website or blog.  (One of the main reasons DIY SEO fails is because small business owners learn about meta keywords and don’t realize there are 69 other seo factors just on-site and that meta tag keywords don’t actually matter in 2012.)  

The first stage of good SEO is to analyze your site, compare your information to a well-optimized site, and figure out what factors your site fails on.  Do you have a sitemap?  Robots.txt?  450 broken links?  Google cares about all of these things.  

How much does on-site optimization cost?

On site optimization is $300 for a homepage or blog page only and $450 for up to 10 on-site pages.  Why would you want more than one?  Most small business owners think of SEO as “getting their domain to #1 on Google.”  That’s good SEO.  Really great SEO means showing up for “long tail” searches, having your secondary pages (pricing, blog posts, vendor information) also show up on Google.  

For instance, if you blog about Venue1 and you create a beautiful (but poorly optimized) webpage for it we can fix that so you rank higher for that venue if you get the 10+ page packages.  If we are only optimizing your main page, we’ll never even see that you don’t have a description on the page and you misspelled their address on the page.

Other SEO companies may call our on-site optimization and analysis an “audit” or “SEO audit.”  This is the same process.  Good SEO firms will look at your page, decide what’s wrong, tell you how it should be fixed (and in our case, normally fix all those problems.)  Some companies offer a free SEO audit knowing they’ll present you with a list of problems and get paid to fix it.   In the end, it’s the same process. 

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Tomorrow we’ll discuss the other half of the SEO equation -  link building, directories, listing services, etc.