SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is probably the most hyped service out there. There are many services out there charging significant amounts of money for SEO.  However, there aren't really any tricks with SEO, only best practices, essentially a checklist if you will.  There are little things you can do like add a terms of service page and a privacy policy page.  There are many other things you can do to help with SEO as well, but mostly it comes down to quality content that is in demand.  We've all seen the junk pages out there, but that usually comes with obscure keywords and Google and other search engines usually catch up to them.

You might be asking yourself, if we're so good at SEO, why this site is not ranked better with certain keywords, but the truth is we don't do any SEO with this site other than having clean code and the basics.  We mostly reserve SEO for our clients.  If we got too many client installations at one time, it could be detrimental to our good name and service as we are a small company.  We also don't claim to be SEO experts, but we are competent.

It is also possible to have negative SEO effects on your site.  How's your business going to survive if you're banned from a major search engine?  The answer is, it's probably not.  Therefore, you have to be careful that your content is genuine.  Our guess is that many SEO experts don't do anything. But, what if they put your site on doorway pages or some other shady tactic?  You're going to be very unhappy when your sites doing great and then gets penalized and basically disappears.

So, how do you get your site to the top of Google's search results after you've just setup your site?  The general rule is, you don't.  You want your site at the top of Google's search results and so does everyone else.  There may be some exceptions to the rule, but unless your content has such an overwhelming demand, it takes time and hard work.  The good news is that there's a good chance your competitors aren't doing much work at all, depending on your niche.

Google wants to see that people are interested in your content enough to click on your links and link to your content, among other things.  Fortunately, no two people think exactly alike and it is fairly easy to get your site ranked high with more obscure keyword phrases and that's basically how you get the ball rolling.

One other important note is to never respond to any emails who portray themselves as SEO experts via your website contact form or any other method.  We get this question all the time from clients interested in this spam (scam) and we have yet to find one that is authentic.  If you don't believe us, just google the names in the email and do five minutes of research.

There are many more aspects to SEO, but this a general overview on managing expectations.  We may not be the best sales people, but we simply don't want to promise things we can't deliver.  If someone else is promising things that sound too good to be true, chances are, they are.