Have you ever wondered what your SEO (search engine optimizer) is REALLY doing? Is he/she acting correctly on your behalf? Are they TRULY doing “white hat” SEO techniques, or is it closer to “black hat”? Follow along as we debunk a bunch of B.S. of what other SEO’s do that might or might not even be worth the money you spend.

Strategy First

You must absolutely have a strategy before anything else with ANYTHING you do. If you float around like a 3 year old from one thing to another, you’ll never get anywhere. The same goes with SEO. You need to have a road map. If you don’t, or worse, your SEO company doesn’t have a good game plan, then you’ll sink really quickly and waste a TON of money.

At Web Unlimited, we use almost the same strategy with each client. Why? It’s tried and true. Sure we test certain things and tweak them depending on the client’s situation, but we test the waters first with some test websites that we own (a development sandbox if you will) and then roll out the changes in strategy next to the clients websites. This ensures that we know how the changes will affect the client’s site.

Keywords

Your keywords are the foundation of your SEO strategy. Without the right keywords, you’ll be working blindly and working towards the wrong goals. For instance, if you’re a Plumber, you wouldn’t want to get ranked for the keyword “Plumber”. There’s just no way to even get that without a TON of work and even if you did, would it be worth it? What would happen when somebody from Tokyo calls you? Would you be able to fix his or her plumbing problem?

You would however want to get ranked for “Houston Plumber.” You wouldn’t believe the amount of clients we get in that have spent thousands of dollars with another SEO firm and were working for generic keywords that just didn’t even make sense. What a waste.

At Web Unlimited, we take keyword research seriously and we have the tools to not only find the right keywords, but to find what we call Money Words – the keywords that will put money in your pocket as soon as possible.

Content

After a solid strategy is built around the correct keywords, your SEO campaign should definitely involve content. What I mean by content is text – and lots of it. For without content, you will never, ever, ever get ranked. This is the hardest thing to explain to clients, but is a reality as Google and all search engines spider your content and rank it based on several things but boil down to:

  1. Quality
  2. Popularity

The point that Matt Cutts from Google has been arguing for the past 6 years is that if you have quality content, you will be popular and therefore Google will like your website. So focus on quality first.

This just means that you should post relevant and quality content on your site and the back links will come. Plus don’t over do it on SEOing everything. We’ve seen a lot of websites done by SEO firms that are acting like Meta Keywords still matter, so they stuff each page with them. We ensure that each landing page is optimized for one or two keywords — that’s it.

Another point I’d like to make here is that there are lots of SEO firms that will just optimize what you have and not add any new content to your site. I personally think that’s such B.S. as you can never expect to get ranked without new content. The search engines spiders need food – so feed them right?

Backlinks

Which brings us to back links. What are back links? Simply put, they are usually one-way links pointing back to your website. We like to find high pagerank, highly relevant links from places like directories, forums, blog posts, social networking, social news, press release, and social bookmarking sites.

How many back links should you build? That’s the question of the ages as you will find different answers on just about on every blog and forum that is SEO related. Everybody has an opinion right?

Let’s go with what’s tested. There are several rules of thumb that are related to the above two rules for content:

  1. Relevancy
  2. Quality

Relevancy Rules

Regarding relevancy, Google just recently slapped JC Pennys (an obvious big player) on the wrist for building too many back links from the wrong places. Plus they violated several terms of service including buying back links which is a big no-no. You should never ever buy links for a link network. Google will figure it out and will punish your website. Why take the risk?

For instance if you are a plumber (from the above example), then we would try to find plumber blogs and forums. If we run out of resources there, then we will find home building and maintenance blogs, forums and directories. There a literally billions of websites out there so this really should be no problem. Google has announced that relevancy is starting to affect their algorithm more and more.

Quality Over Quantity

With our tests, we see time and time again that quality links by far out measure quantity. This just means that instead of building 10,0000 links from PageRank 0 sites, instead find 20-30 PageRank 5 or higher links to create links from. I won’t go into what PageRank is, but a quick summary is that PageRank is a way for Google to rate how authoritative that a Page is. Why a page? The Internet is made up of pages not websites. So even though you have an authoritative website as a whole, the page that the link is coming from might not have as much authority. Pay attention to that.

Summary

So that was a quick rundown of the Insider SEO Secrets – which really didn’t include very many true secrets. In the SEO industry just about everybody is a so called “expert”. I say, unless your SEO firm has taken a website from scratch and gotten it ranked for very competitive keywords and can prove it, then they really don’t know what they’re doing. Taking a local website and getting it ranked for a local term such as “College Station Plumber” doesn’t count. Getting ranked for “Houston SEO Services” does however.

[Nice plug right?]

Call Us Today for a FREE SEO Consultation

If you’re interested in SEO and getting ranked, Web Unlimited offers Houston SEO Services at competitive rates and has a proven track record with our own websites as well as our customers. SEO is a very important thing and can get very very expensive if your SEO firm isn’t doing their job correctly, so make sure you choose the correct firm.

Email Web Unlimited at [email protected] or call us at 979-696-2500 today to get a free SEO consultation and let us formulate the right strategy for your business.