Archive for the 'New Site SEO' Category
Like a good wine or a wise-man, proper SEO takes time to achieve fruition. One of the most challenging things I have had to accept as a professional SEO is the time it can take to see the fruit of my hard labour. And over at SEOMoz.org they hit this nail squarely on the head.
The engines need time to re-crawl your site. For a lucky few, this might take only days or a couple weeks, but for many large sites and even for smaller sites that aren’t terrificly high on Google’s “must crawl” list, we’ve seen as much as 3-4 months pass before a site’s pages are fully updated. The engines have to crawl all your link partners, too! If you’ve recently launched some great widgets or viral material or a new content licensing system, it’s going to be a solid wait before you experience the full impact of that work. The algorithms reward patience. Even if the engines start to see those links right away, it might be a few weeks or months before the algorithm rewards the full weight and heft of their existence. Why? Because search engines learned years ago that manipulative link building is often temporary, while high quality links stand the test of time. This issue is particularly true of new domains (or newly moved domains), so be aware that you might have to earn some trust over time before you feel all the positive ranking impacts of links. It takes time to attract links. Last, but not least, on our list of reasons is the growth of links themselves. If you’ve just started new content, design and promotion strategies to attract links, you not only need time for those campaigns to reach their targets, you need to wait for the links to start rolling in (and then get counted by the engines). This can be a long, tough slog, and understandably, a lot of site owners and SEOs give up without ever getting the full benefit of their work.
Convincing a client that SEO results take time and that time can vary from a 2 or 3 months to as long as 4-6 months is tough but if done properly SEO results can be well worth the wait!
It is not really a close-kept secret but it is relatively new and is quite powerful as I am finding with my tests. It is the power of image alt tags.
With Google image search being used at a growing rate you can really drive substantial amounts of traffic to your website by utilizing your alt image tags. Make sure they are descriptive but also that they use high-traffic keywords. For image heavy niches they can drive tons of quality traffic as I am finding out with my fashion blog, last month I recieved 12k visits from Google images and my adsense has tripled for that site. It seems three of my images are on the first page of Google’s image search for some very popular terms and those are driving the nice boost in traffic and conversions.
Another great thing that I am noticing so far is that the increase in traffic has not triggered ‘smart pricing’ because the quality of traffic from these image searches are high. So start going through your websites and find all the older images you have that are missing alt tags and add them in. The traffic boost will be well-worth your time.
I am happy to mention that I am now ranking number one for ‘Toronto SEO Agency’, competition is similar to ‘Toronto SEO Firm’ around 90k.
I was also checking the ranking of ‘Toronto SEO Firm’ and I noticed a nice little bonus, that my pricing page is also ranking on the first page of results for that term!
For those of you following my progress you would know that I have been doing SEO for about 3 years but only for in-house clients and my own websites. I recently decided to take on a few new projects, hence the development of this site. www.torontoSEOfirm.com first went live on May 9, 2008, just over a week ago and already I am ranking on the first page of Google results for one of my targeted terms (see image below) – We even have a site-link for our newest post! - This term does not have a lot of competition so it is not exactly a monumental accomplishment but it does give a good indication of how ‘doing things right’ can have a very positive effect, even with a new site.
I am always keeping an eye out for what my competition charges (click to enlarge the image) and here is the price page for an SEO in New York. I won’t comment on whether his prices are too high because I don’t know a lot about the quality of his work. One thing I do know is good SEO/SEM is very valuable and can pad the bottom line of a company more often and at a better value than almost any type of advertising and promotional campaigns
Our SEO/SEM monthly packages are on sale now for 50% off (this offer may end without notice) and start at an affordable $300, take a look at our pricing page for more details. Click here for a free, no obligation custom quote
