JACKSONVILLE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Vision Networks is a Jacksonville search engine optimization firm. We provide search engine optimization and search engine marketing services for a broad range of clients in Jacksonville and throughout the United States. Our search engine optimization services are tailored to help clients capitalize on the unparalleled popularity of the Internet and key search engines to replace pay-per-click advertising and expensive yellow page advertising. We employ a detailed program of search engine optimization and search engine marketing to dramatically improve search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Contact us for a free initial consultation.

Jacksonville: (904) 482-0246
Toll Free: (800) 541-8638

SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS ON SEO

If the main underlying purpose of your web site is to market your organization or expose a potential customer to your products or services, the need to rank well and be found on at least the first page of the Internet's top search engines and directories is obvious.

That being said, the question now becomes: How? How does any company, be it small or large, achieve reasonably good search engine rankings? Some of the answers may surprise you...

The first thing you will have to commit to is hard work. Like so many other things in life, achieving high search engine rankings takes a conserved effort. There is no free lunch in search engine optimization. Your web site will need to be updated with new content regularly, keywords and key phrases must be monitored regularly, link building is a must, and, and, and....

We often describe SEO as a constant game of cat and mouse. Search Engines and Directories such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are constantly adjusting and improving their algorithms and weighting criteria, which affect how sites they are aware of are ranked. And we, the web site administrators of the world, are constantly monitoring results and adjusting our efforts to keep up with these changes.

Before we get into details, let's look at our basic strategy. Every search provider (Google, Yahoo, etc.) has a different way of ranking web sites. So if we want to garner as many visitors as we can, it makes sense to focus our efforts on pleasing the search provider who is performing the most searches. We monitor these important statistics regularly and here is a recent look at the facts:

U.S. Expanded Search Rankings according to comScore for August 2007

In the August 2007, analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the pack with 6.8 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with nearly 2.5 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Time Warner Network (937 million) and Fox Interactive Media (571 million).

For more information on comScore qSearch 2.0, please visit http://www.comscore.com/contact

Since you cannot please all the search engines 100 percent of the time, we elect to focus our search engine optimization efforts on the top search provider, which for the time being is Google. The idea is that if we can achieve good rankings with one particular search provider, it is generally safe to assume you will rank reasonably well with the other leaders. Now that we know Google is king with more than 50 percent of all search traffic, let's get down to some key points that will have a reasonably significant impact on how well any web site will be ranked with Google.

Each of the subjects below are worth discussing in considerable detail but for now, we have attempted to give you a basic understanding of them. If you are just learning about search engine optimization, this information is suggested reading.

Also, if you are considering a new hosting firm or would like to discuss a new web site, we will explain these and other aspects of search engine optimization in great detail when we meet.

General Understandings about Search Engines

The rules change daily: First you should understand that search engines are enhanced every day. What I mean by this is the folks at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the other major search providers out there are working hard every day to improve the quality of their search results. This results in constant adjustments to how they find information, store it and rank it among many other adjustments that are being constantly applied.

How they operate: Search engines (also known as spiders and crawlers) crawl the Internet constantly by first visiting the web sites they already know of, then following links. They collect information by following the links from page to page and site to site looking for new information. As they gather information (text and images, etc., from the sites they visit, generally referred to as content), it is reported back to their main databases where it is compared and updated if necessary. In doing so, they employ their "Algorithms." Think of this as "today's rule book." In short, it determines everywhere they go, what they keep or cache and how often they do everything they do. But most importantly, it determines how they rank your web site based on keyword and key phrases, page titles and how they compare to page content, the theme of your site and how the text content substantiates that theme and many, many other criteria.

Search Engine Algorithms: Make no mistake, search engine algorithms are highly complex. And everything that they are and do affects your page rankings. Our experience is that almost nothing is off the table; keyword and key phrase saturation, tags, titles, how content matches those tags and the theme of your page, and site, information such as how many searches were performed that resulted in searchers clicking on your link in the search results; how many links on other sites link to your site, and even how valuable those links are based on the sites where they are found. The upside to all of this is that the top search engines do a good job these days in providing us with quality information. The downside is that you will have to spend a considerable amount of time developing a high quality, extensively detailed and informative web site to garner their attention and achieve high search engine rankings.

In short, SEO requires constant attention to both your site and the industry, so be prepared to give some quality time to achieving good rankings, it doesn't come easy.

Caution: We recommend that you disregard the advertisements from services and software providers that guarantee great rankings by submitting your site to hundreds of search engines. Automatic submission software does nothing but resubmit your site over and over to the same search engines. Google, for one, clearly asks that web masters not do this. This slows the submission process for legitimate "manual" submissions and can cause your site to be punished with lower rankings. They already know you're there, there is no need to keep telling them over and over.....

Create a "Valuable" Web Site

Today's search engines, such as Google, are more focused on providing "valuable" information and search results. What we mean by this is that they want to provide results or sites they think are going to be the most informative and helpful to the person performing the search. So what does this mean to us? Over all, it means we need to make sure our web site is valuable and loaded with information about or related to the subject matter. Don't expect to receive good search rankings unless your site offers detailed information about or related to the subject matter, not just images and information about your organization, product or service. We mean quality information that would be helpful to people who are searching for information about or related to your "type" of organization, product or service. Here are a couple of examples:

• If your site is a recipe site, you might also list helpful hints or ideas about the best cookware for a certain recipe with a link or two to where the searcher could learn more about that cookware or even purchase it.
• If your site is designed to sell expensive products, you might also offer links to companies who provide financing for those products.

The bottom line on this topic is simple: Create a web site that is designed to help your visitors find everything there is to know about your products and services by either offering the information within your web site or providing links to sources of additional information.

The Psychology of a Search Engine

Now let's look at a few other important general understandings. Since we know that search engines are now placing more weight on the overall "value" of your web site, we need to look at a few key ways they determine the value of your site.

Organizing your home page: Your home page is by far the most important page of your site when it comes to achieving good rankings. And its content and how it is assembled and organized can make or break how well your web site is ranked. When you begin to consider what will be on your home page, consider your future visitors. Your goal is simple: to help anyone who visits your web site to find detailed information as quickly as possible.

Links to your web site: The more, the better. This is hands down, one of the most important measuring tools utilized to value your web site. The idea is that if there are hundreds of links to your site, in other words, many other web sites that feel your information is worthy of a link from their web site, your information must be better than average or than sites similar to yours that do not have a large number of links to them. Think of this as a third-party endorsement.

Good links and great links: The placement of or types of links to your web site is also important. A link to your web site from a directory listing is good, but not as good as a link embedded in text on another site that is about the subject of your web site. For example, say there was an article about how to build a wooden table. And in that article, the author makes reference to and recommends a particular type of saw that you happen to sell on your web site. If there was an embedded text link to your web site in the middle of that paragraph allowing anyone who reads the article who may be interested, to find that saw and possibly purchase it, that would be an embedded link. Embedded links are great links and weighted considerably more than other links. Believe it or not, search engines can actually tell if the embedded link is related to its surrounding text.

Keywords & Key phrases: You might think you know the words and phrases everyone uses to search for the subject of your web site, but not so fast. The industry lingo and words you and your peers use every day in describing your services and products may not be the key words or key phrases "most" searchers are using when performing a search. When composing and optimizing your web site's text content, take the time to verify that the keywords and key phrases you think are the most popular, are in fact, the top keywords and key phrases. Google offers a very useful tool that can provide some good information on this. Enter any word or phrase that you think is good at: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en and Google will let you know how often it appears in sites that are listed with Google. This can be used to determine how popular a keyword or phrase is, and also to determine how stiff the competition is for that keyword or phrase. We use other software tools to clearly identify key words and key phrases when performing search engine optimization.

Let us take a look at your web site

At Vision Networks we don't make wild claims that we can guarantee top rankings, but we do spend a lot of time on search engine optimization / SEO and have been doing so for more than five years.

We would be happy to review your web site and provide a free initial consultation to give you an idea of what needs to be done to improve your web site's rankings

Contact our offices for a free consultation at:

Jacksonville: (904) 482-0246
Toll Free: (800) 541-8638