When Allied Internet collaborates with you as you market your website online, you get the benefit of our years of experience with Web design, content development, programming, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization — as well as our experience working with tech support and account management personnel on behalf of our clients, including those at IT companies, Web hosting companies, and at advertising and marketing agencies.
We begin with a conversation about who you want your business website to reach. We'll collaborate with you to list your primary and secondary target audiences.
If your website offers more than a few products and services, it’s ordinarily best to begin your search marketing with just the most important keywords (search terms). Think about which of your products and services you want to emphasize; this will often be because of their profit potential.
Careful competition research will allow you to market your site intelligently. Your goal is to identify your online competitors who are doing well on search engine results pages.
You especially want to know why they are doing well. Because we’ve been dealing with websites professionally since 1994, we can help you evaluate your findings and make expert recommendations to you. Your analysis of your competition can guide your search marketing efforts for months to come.
Allied Interent can also help you analyze the content, the graphic design, and the text design of your own website, and evaluate it based on what you’ve learned about your competition. Unless your site has too many images — which can compete for a visitor's attention and even cause confusion — we don't ordinarily suggest changes in the graphic design of your site unless you are unhappy with it.
We can help you check the structure of your website to make sure that the files and subdirectories on your Web server are named and organized in a way that helps you with the search engines.
The sites that are near the top in search engine research pages are almost always doing well because of their content, but there are sometimes additional significant factors, and we will discuss all this during a phone conversation with you.
Our recommendations may include suggestions about the text on your site and suggestions about metatags (title, description, and keywords) that we think will help your site do better on the search engines. If we see structural problems with your site, we will explain your options.
A discussion of our recommendations with a client often results in further edits to the suggested text and metatags. We will then work with your Web designer to implement any recommendations you accept. If you prefer to have Allied Internet make the changes to your website, we will give you an estimate of the cost of modifying the site.
After your website has been modified on the basis of our recommendations, we can help by generating a "sitemap.xml" file configured to Google specifications, put it online with your other website files, and notify Google that it's there. We also generate a file called "urllist.txt" for Yahoo and some of the other engines.
We can also help by submitting your site to the most important search engine databases including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search, and DMOZ.
Part 5. Link Development
The development of appropriate incoming links to your site is still important, but note that the emphasis is now on the quality of the links, not on the quantity.
Google has downgraded reciprocal links as a measure of a site’s popularity. Reciprocal links — “you link to us and we’ll link to you” — are artificial. They are not real indicators of a site’s value, and we therefore avoid link exchange sites, systems, and schemes.
Linking guru Eric Ward sums up the problem: "An artificial link is any link that you obtain or create with the goal of fooling a search engine's algorithm into thinking that link was freely earned. A link that is paid for, swapped, bartered, or otherwise engineered is — at least from an algorithmic standpoint — less trustworthy than a link that occurs with no strings attached. The link may be a great source of direct traffic, leads, etc., but for rankings, it's likely to have no value at all."
Ward recommends that "sites that are already engaged in artificial linking activities" should "either remove those links or accept that your site's ranking is on borrowed time."
Your focus should be on building strong one-way incoming links, and you should carefully evaluate a site’s suitability before asking for a link to yours. If links are going to help your standing with the search engines, a site that links to yours must be relevant to your site.
Allied Internet can help you do all of these same things for your site. There is no quick way to accomplish any of this, but it’s a strategy for long-term success, and as experienced writers, editors, and researchers, we’re prepared to help you make it happen.
Part 6. Web Site Traffic Analysis
Even if you already have an account with Google Analytics or one of the other website traffic logging services, if you become our client, we will add your site for ninety days to our own account at HitsLink, the premier website traffic tracking and analysis program, and give you access to your statistics. If you already have HitsLink tracking your site, we'll ask your permission to access your account so that we can help you monitor the progress of traffic on your site.
Our analysis of the traffic on your Website enables us to review your content and metatags, and to make new recommendations to you if there is a reason to do so.
Every couple of months we will have a phone discussion with you while you're looking at your statistics on HitsLink. We'll look at many indicators, including exactly which search engines are sending visitors to your site, and which search terms visitors are typing into search engines to find your site.
We'll also discuss the weekly and monthly traffic totals, and we'll take a look at the geographic distribution of visitors to your site.
Part 7. Content Development
The single most important factor in improving your standings with the search engines is the regular addition of genuinely useful content to your site.
Google wants you to "create a useful, information-rich site," and Yahoo looks for "original and unique content of genuine value." We can help you do this, or we can do it for you.
Because we are experienced writers, editors, and researchers, many of our clients ask us to share the responsibility for developing fresh website content several times each month. We can serve as your creative coaches and support team to whatever extent you request.
Because we have already worked with you as you researched your competition, and because we have analyzed the content on their sites and on your own site, we already know quite a bit about your business and the online competition you face.
Combined with our Internet marketing experience, this means that, we can help you make intelligent choices about the new content that will gradually improve your standings on the search engines.
Call us at 303-935-1820 and we’ll discuss collaborating with you on search marketing for your website. We are almost always available Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. Eastern until 5:30 p.m. Pacific.
Allied Internet Productions, Inc.
303-935-1820
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