Choosing the Right SEO Company for Your Website

If you have been working with the (SEO) search engine optimization of your own site for quite a while you tend to find that afterall your effortsyour site either does not rank well or your sites ranking is good but your SEO tasks take all your time and efforts and you don’t have the time to perform your other day-to-day tasks.  In this case then maybe it’s time to think about hiring an SEO company to do your search engine optimization tasks for you. But with so many SEO companies out there providing different prices and different variations of SEO services (or at least wording it differently) then it’s hard to know which company to choose from and which companies are reliable.

Even though there are so many scam SEO companies it doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t any reliable SEOs out there and if you know exactly what to look for when making your choice then you can reduce the risk of hiring a fraudulent SEO company. Better still, if you have a substantial knowledge of search engine optimization you can easily decide whether their goals are realistic or whether they are simply leading you along to get your business. The following list issues important points that you should cover when selecting an SEO company:

• Is the company promising you a number 1 ranking? If so then this is a good reason to doubt their competence. No SEO company can guarantee you a number 1 rank on Google, even for the least competitive keyphrases.
• Have you asked about them in forums? Asking about an SEO company in a webmaster forum is a great way of checking. There are some good webmasters forums out there, but beware that some posters are SEO companies pitching for your business.
• Do they come with recommendations? Recommendations from friends or business partners are very important as word of mouth confirms the credibility of a company.
• Have you Googled them? Yes some people never even think about this approach to finding out whether a company is a fraudster or not. But if they are then chances are then they will have plenty of negative comments about them on the web.
• Do they show examples of the websites they have optimized? There are trustworthy SEO companies out there with customer data bases and happy clients who aren’t afraid to sell the company’s SEO services for them. Some websites even have cases studies on their websites with links to their customer’s sites and details of what they have achieved for them.
• Do they have good PageRank on their own site? A PR of 3+ is a good sign of whether the company is worth hiring or not.
• How did you find their website? If you find the SEO company that you are thinking about hiring in the paid search results then don’t even go there. A professional SEO company never pays to promote its own website and should rank high for competitive keywords and keyphrases.
• Do they have payment links? Stay away from any SEO company that has payment links to SEO services on their site. A good SEO company gives you a consultation and a quote for the services they provide and gives you the payment method with your contract.
• Do they use black hat SEO tricks? Get to know black hat SEO tricks in advance in order to judge whether the methods they are using are ethical or not.
• Do they offer their services on a subscription basis? Paying for organic SEO services has its benefits and once at the top is cheaper than Pay Per Click advertising. Because SEO is a constant process it is necessary to keep up efforts so select a company that offers post-optimization maintenance to cement
• Where do their own site’s backlinks come from? Backlinks are an important factor in SEO and shouldn’t be collected at link farms. This can cause you a Google penalty and even a ban.
• Are their services expensive? You don’t get more just because you pay more for their services. The main reason why a company’s prices should be high is for their high quality of service. If their site offers you the world it’s a fair guess that their work workmanship is shabby and they are trying to make up for this.
• Are their services cheap? Professional SEO companies offer realistic prices. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. So if they are cheap revert back to the questions in this check-list.

The list we have put together here covers the most important issues you need to look at when choosing an SEO company but each case is different and there are of course many other points you need to consider before even consulting with an SEO company. And whatever you do even after the initial consultation take time to go over the strategy they are offering before signing the contract.

SEO 2 Marketing not only specializes in search engine optimization and web development but we also act as SEO consultants. During our free consultation periods we help you to recognize the difference between good SEO and bad SEO so that you will be successful in your search for the right search engine optimization company for your site.

Free Hosting and Domains for Your First Web Presence

First Time Web Presence

Most web design training companies including ourselves, offer their students project based tuition teaching their students all aspects of web design using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash based on the students own projects, whether it be an exist project, one which their company has asked them to develop or a personal project that they are building in their spare time.

If students would like to have project based tuition but are not sure of the kind of project they would like start our consultants work with them to help them find a project that is both interesting and suitable for our training in order to get the best out of our courses.

Offers of Free Hosting

In order to learn every aspect of web design including buying and managing a domain name, changing name servers, managing their hosting accounts and uploading via an FTP server most training companies offer their students a free domain and free hosting from two weeks to two months so that students can be taught how to upload and get to know the CPanel but are then pitched to buy the hosting from the training company a short time after the course finishes.

Free Hosting Accounts Forever

At IT and Web Design we encourage our students to use free hosting and free domain names for their very first projects. There are some very good companies that offer banner free web hosting with their own control panel and in our experience the only negative side of using free hosting is that they lack good stat report facilities like Awstats and Webalizer but these days it isn’t really a concern as Google Analytics used on your site is a very good substitute.

One company that we tend to use for free webhosting and would refer to anybody is www.xtreemhost.com which offers 800mb of free hosting, their Vista Panels are very simple to use and supports Mysql and Myadmin. The only downfall we have found with using Xtreemhost is that if you have broken links on your site or links to pages that don’t exist or you’ve forgotten to upload your audience will find themselves in unchartered territory browsing round Xtreemhost’s sponsors’ websites.

Free Domain Names

For free domain names we recommend www.co.cc you might be put off from using a domain that ends in co.cc but to be frank we aren’t and it is well worth paying their site a visit and seeing what domain names they’re giving away. Co.cc domain names are great for getting to your targeted audiences but don’t expect grander names like ww.carinsurance.co.cc to be free. Prices on their site range from free to very expensive.

Do Free Domain Name’s and Free Hosting Affect Your Site’s Performance?

The answer is a simple no. As long as your free web hosting has its own FTP account then the only factor that can affect your sites performance is if your site isn’t search engine friendly or if you perform your sites SEO duties badly.

Conclusion

We have numerous partner sites that have been created with a free domain name and hosted on free hosting and all have a first page position with excellent page rank that get thousands of unique visits per month. Proving to us that free hosting and free domain names are well worth using.

www.itandwebdesign.com and www.seoservicesbangkok.co.cc are in no way affiliated with www.xtreemhost.com or www.co.cc .

SEO - Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

Optimizing Your Website the Easy Way

Search Engine Optimization sounds difficult to most. One reason being that search engines are very technical things and the other being that the word optimization has five syllables. But in truth Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science, even though the companies that advertise this service will make it out to be. The steps that are outlined in this article will help you to optimize your site correctly at the design stage of your website.

Selfish of me I know but when I design a site I think of the Search Engines first and people second and I set out to design a site that search engines appreciate. Optimizing the site as much as possible anyway I can without cheating my way to a first position or over optimizing. To be quite honest I’m not upset if I don’t hit first place but I do expect to hit the top half of the first page, as most people are too lazy to scroll down.

The following steps should be taken after you have taken care of your Keyword Research.

The Pyramid Method

The Pyramid Method is a term which I like to use to describe the way that I optimize a website to amplify my chosen keywords so that the search engine gives me a nice placing among or above my leading competitors. The Pyramid Method starts up at the top in your title, spreading through your description and Keywords then onto your page body, headline tags, first words, links and then onto the pages that you link to.

The Head region

Page Title

When writing your page title remember that a good page title doesn’t have to be 100% grammatically correct but should be a readable sentence, while using as little stop words as you can. Stop Words are words that are not important to a search engine’s search i.e. and, if, on etc. These words should be used as little as possible.

The title should be no more than 12 words long, descriptive and clear involving as many of your chosen keywords as you can cram in. When submitting your links to certain sites if your description is too long to be allowed on the link submission site then your title can be used in it’s place.

On www.itandwebdesign.com we used this as our title.

‘SEO Bangkok, Web hosting, Thailand. Website Design Consultants and Website Design Courses.’

Meta Tag Description

A grammatically correct description of no more than 24 words is needed here involving all your main keywords that you used in your Title tag plus 12 more keywords or your main keywords again in different collocations (different word order).

On www.itandwebdesign.com we used this as our description.

‘SEO/website design consultants Bangkok, Thailand. Web design, search engine optimization, Adobe CS3 training courses, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash lessons and private computer classes’

Meta Tag Keywords

No more than 48 words should be used here in as many different collocations as possible. If you do have more than 48 keywords or too many keywords to put on one page then put the appropriate keywords on the appropriate pages.

We used 48 Keywords in 17 different phrases, but only 24 niche words were used.

Finally your Title and Meta Tags should be in the following order.

1. Title
2. Description
3. Keywords

Not!

1. Title
2. Keywords
3. Descriptions

As most people are lead to believe.

Headline 1 Tag

A nice descriptive text title in h1 at the top of your page or under your banner containing your main keywords is needed to catch the search engines attention. Headline tags show the search engines the importance of these words. A grammatically correct title is needed on your page as humans will be reading this one too. All subtitles on the page I wrap with h2 tags over use of h1 tags can have a negative effect. The problem with Headline tags is that the text is massive and it leaves an automatic line break underneath. These problems can be quite easily solved using CSS styling.

Our h1 heading on our index page reads like this.

‘Itandwebdesign.com Computer Training Bangkok - Thailand Website Design, Web Design Courses, SEO Company and Link Campaigns’

First Words

There’s no point opening your page up with a bunch of words that sound really good to read but contain nothing but your company name and a bunch of adjectives. The first words on your page should be a nice paragraph that contains your main keywords which is very important for the search engines so take advantage of the first words on your page. Make it a readable correctly punctuated paragraph not just a bunch of keywords separated by commas; this would get your website penalized for being over optimized. Repeating your description with a few extra keywords all wrapped up in nicely written sentences would be a good idea here.

Body Text

The niche words you have used in your Title, Description and Keywords mean nothing if they are not referred to in your body text. Google does not like liars so do not throw keywords into your Meta tags and Title if you are not going to refer to them in your body text, we only used 24 niche words so it‘s not an impossible task. Optimizing your web page should be as smooth and simple as possible and keeping everything related holds the page together and improves performance. Break the text up into small descriptive paragraphs with a hyperlink close by to point to the different sections or products on your site. An h2 sub heading for each paragraph can be added if you choose to do so this will also help to increase performance.

Anchor Text, Link Labels and Hyperlinks

Last but not least. Anchor text (or Link Labels) is ranked highly by search engines, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as more often than not, hyperlinked words are relevant to the landing page. However I also suggest that there be anchor text on each page pointing to the page that it is on. On our site www.itandwebdesign.com we solved this problem by using the same navbar on every page, meaning that every page has a link pointing to itself. When creating a hyperlink use a title for your link which will create an alt text description on mouse hover and will also be picked up by the search engine spiders.

For more information on how to resize your Headline tags and correct use of hyperlinks using Dreamweaver please check out our article ‘Optimizing in Dreamweaver for Dummies’.

Mark A Smith
Chief SEO and Area Manager

IT and Web Design – SEO Training Programs and Web Developer Courses, Bangkok, Thailand