The Web Authority

Are you one or are you pretending to be one? Don’t monkey around when it comes to your website and search engine optimization. If the person who you are interviewing to help you with your website cannot answer these questions or share with you their approach and process then you may be working with the wrong firm.

Here are the top questions you should ask:

1. How long have you been doing SEO?
2. Where is your own business website in the results page for your keyword phrases you are targeting?
3. What client results can you share with me?
4. Why do I need to pay a monthly maintenance fee and what exactly will I be getting for that?
5. What is the process you will be using?
6. What is your thought on Google’s devaluation of links as part of their algorithm?
7. What will you be doing to the code of my website?
8. Do you believe in using doorway pages and hidden content?
9. Will you be creating special pages just for search engines?
10. Can you share with me the statistical data on searches and competition of the terms you will be using to optimize my website?

If the firm you are speaking with is wanting you to pay a monthly fee as in number four, find out EXACTLY what you are paying for. When we do optimization, we do not need to go back and lay hands on the site pages each month. This may be a ploy to build a sale or pad a project.

If they do not have a good answer for number 6 and 7, you really should not use the firm. If they will be using tactics as in 8 and 9 you really should run away as these tactics may actually get you dropped from the Google index.

Don’t monkey around with search engine optimization get real professional help!

Clients have asked this question “will changing my domain name improve my organic placement on search engines?” The answer is no. It is the content and links to a website that affect organic position not the name of the site. In fact changing the name of an existing website may actually do more damage than good.

Google specifically looks at many factors for organic search position, in fact nearly 150 of them. One of them is the length you have held your domain name. I do not recommend changing the domain name of an existing website, but for new sites I do recommend careful consideration of domains that are memorable or contain keywords.

Recently I had a client who does work for HUD under a large contract ask for help in deciding a new domain name as they had no traffic on their website. The marketing team felt that changing the name would make the site more popular with search engines. A name change will simply not bring the results that a work-over of content and what is on the home page will bring in conjunction with a link and content creation strategy.

So if you are thinking that you need to change your domain name to get more traffic, instead look very carefully at your content and when was the last time you updated your website before you make a change to your domain name.

Where and what are the most important parts or elements of your website for top search engine optimization impact? What things can give you the most bang for your buck?

1. The most important element is your title tag. This is found in your source code between title and /title. What you put here appears on your browser screen at the very top just to the right of the IE icon near the edge of your monitor. It should be keyword dense, on topic to your website and NOT contain your business name.

2. The second most important element is your navigation. If you are using JavaScripted drop down menus, you must supply text based navigation for search engines to follow or they will not move to the inside of your website to spider pages. Typically we will supply text links in alphabetic order in the footer of a page for a site like this. Better yet would be to build a site with navigation using CSS or text and not have to add footer links. But it is better to remediate than to not have your site be search engine friendly.

3. The third most important is the meta description. This is found only in your page’s source code. One of the biggest errors we see is the use of the same meta description and title tag site wide. Each of these elements should be unique for each page. Google did not for a period of time use the description that you created for you meta description tag, but is doing so now if you have header code to tell Google not to use what you have supplied to DMOZ.

4. Everyone asks about the meta keyword tags, but Google and we place no value on them right now. Should you still include them. Yes I guess you could, but I would not waste huge time on them, but I did feel the need to mention them but this field is not important.

If you have another element you think is important, just click comments and leave me one to share what you think is important.

You may be interesting in reviewing our PowerPoint presentation (now made into a PDF) of our speach yesterday at the Capital PC Users Group in Washington DC.

This presentation is a preview of our white paper “The Tangible Benefits of Blogging” that will be published in our e-newsletter in early October.

I think that you will find the case studies and tips on how to be an effective blogger and how to blog for search engine placement interesting and helpful.

Sometimes a customer just simply wants to do a test to see if something will work before they go whole hog. Here is one case study for Pinnacle Executive Center you may find interesting.

This client leases virtual office space in the Bethesda and Rockville areas outside of Washington DC. Now by virtual I mean 100 to 300 square foot mini-offices. But these offices have a special twist, they are deluxe and have reception service, copy center, conference rooms, and even concierge services. That means get your errands and dry cleaning done for you while you are working.

The client did not want to invest in a full blown optimized website and had already purchased a nice online Flash brochure, plus they were testing a Google AdWords program to see if any or all of it would work to drive leases.

What we did was to do a mini site optimization for the Flash page, scroll to the bottom of the landing page linked into my blog post title and you will see what I mean. You can right click to view source and review the meta tags as well. I tried to create some keyword density for them on a Flash site that had no text as he was hoping to get some organic placement as well.

In addition we are using this same page as a Google AdWords landing page, looking for a good quality score based again on a mini-optimization. I’ll let you know how it performs over the next several weeks. It should be an interesting test!