Q2.
Why are high rankings so important?
A.
As users generally only explore the first twenty or thirty sites in the search
results, achieving high rankings on the search engines will make an enormous
difference to the amount of visitor traffic your site receives. Also,
visitors will be more qualified to purchase your goods and services when they
arrive at your site from a search engine because they have just conducted a
search relating directly to what you offer.
Q3.
What’s the difference between “search engine registration” and “search
engine optimisation”?
A.
Search engine registration is better known as
search engine submission,
or the submission of your site
to the search engines. Search engine optimisation is a proactive service
ensuring your site will be highly visible on the engines your site is submitted
to. Search engine optimisation involves changes to your site design
to ensure it is search engine compatible and additions to your site
code to ensure that you will be ranked highly on the search engines for certain keywords and phrases
relating to your site content. This makes your site more accessible to searchers
and ensures your site is found by your target audience, giving you an edge over
your competitors.
Q4.
What are META-tags?
A.
META-tags are part of the site’s HTML code and if your site has them, they can
be seen by choosing “View, Source” from your browser toolbar. These tags include “keywords” and a “description” of
your web page. Sometimes, this is
where the search engines look to see what your web page is all about. Also
important is the Title tag, although this is not a META tag. But having all these tags is not enough – if they’re not carefully designed
and optimised, the
search engines may get entirely the wrong message about your site content and
rank your site in their “back pages”.
Q5.
Why wasn’t my site optimised for search engines when it was built?
A.
Depending on who developed your site and how it was built, you’ll find a
million different reasons for this. Many web developers believe it is the site
marketer’s job to ensure the site is found in search engines and vice versa.
Most don’t bother submitting your site to the important search engines,
assuming you or your marketing department will do it. Or perhaps it wasn’t in
your original development budget. Consequently, your site can be launched for
many months without the search engines having any idea it exists. Some
development firms don’t include even the most basic META tags in your site
code when building it. Or those that do include META tags without close
consultation with you, resulting in the wrong search terms used and poor
performance. This is quite typical! Remember that search engine optimisation
is a relatively new science and requires constant monitoring and analysis to be
successful.
Consequently, not many firms know how or have time to optimise a site
successfully, no matter what they tell you. If they can’t show you the high
rankings they’ve achieved for other clients, they won’t be able to optimise
your site properly. WEB RANK recently recognised the need to specialise
in this area and now offer affordable seo packages to clients worldwide.
Q6.
Do you guarantee high rankings?
A.
There are no guarantees when it comes to search engines. Most don’t even
guarantee that your site will be listed, let alone placed in the top rankings.
With no ultimate control over the engines, we do not believe in misleading our
clients that we have such control by offering a guarantee for a particular
ranking on a particular search engine.
As members of the
World Association of Internet Marketers, we follow their ethical guidelines in
relation to search engine marketing:
http://www.waim.org/index.html. We believe you’d rather get what you paid
for, so our proof is in the
pudding. We always aim to get you in the Top 10 rankings on major engines and we
often achieve even higher. In fact,
ALL our optimisation clients are ranking in the Top
10 results
for at least ten of their chosen search terms on major search engines,
competing with millions of sites worldwide.
Many of them have achieved the elusive number one spot for highly
competitive search phrases and held that rank for months at a time.
Top
10 results are very difficult to achieve these days - we do it and we can prove
it. The Web Rank difference is that we follow-up with regular ROI
reports and once our clients are ranking highly we work hard to keep them there.
Q7.
Can you demonstrate increased sales from a site that can be attributed to site
optimisation?
A.
Achieving a high ranking on the search engines is like having the best
advertising bargain imaginable. Think about it this way: of the millions of
searches conducted each day, the web sites that appear at the top of the search
results essentially get free advertising. The resulting visitors to those sites
are more likely to purchase products and services since they were specifically
searching for that information. This means you have a very low cost of
advertising with a probable high rate of return, giving you an excellent Return
on Investment. We
have received a number of testimonials from clients that state they have
received more business as a direct result of our services.
We've found that
seo campaign performance can be measured quite effectively via a combination of
site statistical analysis and search engine ranking reports.
This requirement has prompted us to come up with comprehensive
SEO
Campaign Performance Reports as part of our Ongoing Ranking Reporting and
Maintenance services. These reports are in Excel spreadsheet format and
include the provision of regular site visitor metrics and ROI analysis
of the effectiveness of the SEO campaign via measurement of site traffic and search engine referrals. The spreadsheet includes an ROI
calculator so you can also track the resulting sales/conversions your site
achieves per month. Provision of these reports requires access to your site
statistics or raw log files.
We are also happy for potential clients to talk to our current clients if they
want more tangible evidence of success.
Q8.
What about exclusivity? Would you optimise any of our competitor sites?
A.
The WEB RANK optimisation service has always been exclusive for our
clients. For example, we would not
take on any new clients whose sites are in direct competition with existing
optimisation clients. In other words, we would not optimise sites for the same
key search terms of our existing clients. To try and rank two sites competing
for the same search terms would be an obvious conflict of interest!
Q9.
How often will I receive search engine ranking reports?
A.
Depending on which site optimisation package you have chosen, you can
choose to receive ranking reports monthly or quarterly, along with our monthly
newsletter, packed with useful internet marketing tips and advice.
Q10.
How many search engines will my site be submitted to?
A. Your site will
always be submitted to the most popular fifty search engines and directories,
plus the most important search engines and directories in your region. Depending on which
search engine optimisation package you’ve chosen and your target market, we
will also manually submit your site to up to 100 other
regional search engines and directories. WEB
RANK has a list of approximately 1,500 engines & directories worldwide
for you to choose from, so if you prefer, you can tailor your own list.
Q11.
What information about my site do you submit to search engines?
A.
In most cases we only submit your main site URL to the search engines as it is
often the only information the engines require to be able to index your entire
site. Some
search engines will allow us to submit additional information such as a
description or a title for your site.
On directories such as Yahoo! and Open Directory, we must first research and
locate a logical category for your site. The way we submit information about
your site to Directories can “make or break” your position within the engines,
so we do it very carefully. Following submission, most search engines will use
their web crawling agents (often called “spiders” or “robots”) to collect
information from the HTML code on each of your site pages, then rank and display
them according to their own special
relevancy algorithm. Some engines and directories rely on human staff to review this information, which
is why there are often long delays between the submission of your site and
it’s listing.
Q12.
When the search engines show results, in addition to a URL, they sometimes show
a description and title of the site. Can you control what appears here?
A.
Again, this depends on the engine - some engines will take the META description
tag (best scenario), others will take what you submit during registration
process (e.g., Yahoo!), others will take the content of your page and tags and
come up with their own description for your site.
Still others will just take the first twenty words in the site body text
(worst scenario). However, we always use our know-how of the search engines to
ensure that no matter what the search engines use, users will find your page.
Q13.
How often do you resubmit my site to search engines?
A.
Despite those spam emails you may have seen that claim otherwise, regular resubmission to engines is
completely unnecessary. Our
ranking reports keep track of your site every four weeks. If your site is
already ranking highly, there is no need to resubmit it. However on a monthly
basis, we check your site listings in each search engine and directory. It will be resubmitted to any engines that have dropped your site
altogether, or when you have added new content pages that require submission.
This is included as part of your ongoing monthly fees.
The need to resubmit to
search engines on a regular basis is a myth - most search engines index sites on
a regular basis. If your site is already in the database of a search engine,
there is no need to submit it. At best, regular resubmission of your site will
be ignored and at worst, could cause a "spamming" penalty of some kind.
Q14.
When will I see my site ranking jump on search engines?
A.
A variety of waiting periods must be endured before
being listed on each search engine. They all have different time periods for
reviewing and adding your site to their index. Knowing and understanding the
search
engine indexing periods before beginning the process can
eliminate frustration and confusion. Waiting periods can range from two days to
six months on some engines. As a guide, you should be able to see a boost in
your rankings on Alta Vista, Google, Lycos, AOL, MSN, Looksmart and Hot Bot
within three weeks of us submitting your site. On other engines such as Yahoo!
and Open Directory, you may not see results for a few weeks longer.
Q15.
Can I see how my competitors are ranking for my target search terms?
A.
Sure! For a small additional fee, you can have up to three
competitor sites included in your ongoing ranking reports so you can compare at
a glance how you are ranking in comparison to them for the same search terms.
Just ask us for details.
Q16.
What’s stopping my competitors from stealing my META tags?
A.
The law. According to latest research, META tags are technically the
intellectual property of the site owner. We put in a copyright comment within
your META tags we develop to ensure everyone knows the content of the tags
belongs to you. There have been a number of successful court cases, particularly
in the U.S., by firms who have had their META tags “stolen” by competitors. The
offenders were prosecuted and ordered to pay significant fines and court costs.
The results have set a precedent for future cases and act as a warning to anyone
thinking about stealing anyone else’s tags or using anyone else's trademarks
within those tags.
Q17.
Is it necessary to optimise pages other than the Home Page?
A.
It depends on the size and content of your site, as well as your budget. Do you
have a lot of information on your site on a lot of different topics? Is your
site aimed at a wide range of people? Are there areas on your site dedicated to
completely different products and services? Do you want to be found for more
than 5 target keyword phrases? If “Yes”, then there may not be
room in your Home Page to adequately optimise it for all your target terms. Depending on your chosen optimisation package, we can optimise up to
ten individual pages on your site with key search terms tailored for the content
of each page, based on your target audience.
Q18.
What if I want visitors to go to a specific page on the site and not the home
page?
A.
We
would design your various page content and META tags to include logical phrases relating to
the content of that page. Once
optimised content was uploaded to your site pages, we submit your various page
URL’s to the search engines and then (depending on the engine), they assess
the pages and categorise them according to the META tag and page content.
So say your site was an online auction, ideally searches for "car
auctions" would be directed to the particular page on your site dealing
with car auctions and so on. However,
there are some engines that will only direct searches to the main URL of a site,
no matter the search, so try to keep your home page navigation as intuitive as
possible so people can quickly find exactly what information they’re looking for.
Q19.
I have different web sites in different countries. Would you optimise each
differently?
A.
Yes, provided the content was different on each site, we would create optimised
content and META tags for each individual site, tailored to the
different countries. Apart from the
major search engines, we would also ensure each site was submitted to the most
popular regional engines and directories in the appropriate country. Currently,
we have a list of over 1,500 search engines and directories, covering more than
100 countries. We keep adding new
search engines to this list every month, to ensure our clients can reach their
target markets effectively.
Q20.
What about pages that are in languages other than English? Can you optimise
those?
A.
Yes. We generally develop a list of 20 English search
terms to cover each page (assuming the foreign language pages have essentially
the same content as the English). Then we regionalise the search terms for each
market/country and translate the search terms into local languages (using our professional outsourced translation service if necessary).
Once that is done, we
develop and test content and META tags for each page/site and submit to the appropriate
international and regional search engines.
Q21.
How do you handle site submission to non-English language search engines?
A.
Many foreign language search engines provide an English version these
days. For those that do not, our
consultant staff
worldwide are fluent in a range of languages, so we can usually handle
submissions to the most popular non-English search engines in-house. However,
if required, we have access to an outsourced Global submission service that will manually
submit your site to any foreign language search engines that we cannot access
via the usual channels.
Q22.
How experienced is WEB RANK in this stuff?
A. To achieve a high ranking web site, you
have to know exactly the right seo techniques, keep track of current
search engine ranking algorithms, know what format to submit the site in to
every engine and how to design the site for best results. You also need to know whether
your site is technically compatible with search engine robots, what types of
pages the engines will accept and which will be barriers to ranking, plus what
sort of overall “relevancy score” your site will receive from each engine
you submit to. Not only that, but once you’re ranking highly, you have to
monitor your progress and adjust your tags every now and then to ensure you stay
up above your competitors on all engines for your major search phrases. These
are all crucial steps to a high ranking, but very time consuming and not your
core business!
Fortunately, WEB RANK employs specialists in the area of search
engine optimisation, whose full-time role is to place our clients high in the
search engines and keep them there. Our staff have been involved in this area of the Internet for
seven years. During that time they have developed and streamlined a unique
optimisation formula that has resulted in very impressive rankings for our clients on the
major international and regional search engines. Feel free to view some of our
seo client success stories.
If
you have a question about our services that isn't answered here, please
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your enquiry.
