There are a large number of factors involved in SEO, including the keywords you want to rank for, your website’s title and meta tags, the competition in your market, the age of your domain, the relevancy and quality of your content, the internal linking structure of your website, the quality of inbound links to your website, just to name a few. Because of the amount of factors involved and the complexity of search engine algorithms, SEO is anything but simple. It takes a considerable amount of knowledge to do properly, and this is only achievable by obtaining SEO services from a company or individual with expertise in search engine optimization.
The main misconception with SEO is that it is easy, anyone can do it, and it is a quick and effective way to increase revenue. This is not the case, as SEO is neither easy nor quick. It can take weeks, months, or years to be effectively listed in a search engine and it is not something that can be done once and forgotten about. SEO is an ongoing process that requires maintenance in order to increase long-term success.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It has been around since the mid-1990s and is an effective way to generate traffic to a website, increasing business over tenfold. Whether a website is selling a product, spreading a message, or advertising a service, it can and will become more successful with the help of SEO.
What are SEO services?
SEO services can also involve the implementation of effective linking strategies, which can increase the level of inbound links to the site across the web. This is because inbound links are considered to be one of the most effective ways to increase a website’s rank in search engines. There are many different methods in implementing an URL at a time, and it is important that a method that is consistent with the marketing goals of the customer is chosen. As aforementioned, the goal may be to increase revenue from new customers, and so an SEO services provider may be asked to approach that yields long-term results. In this case, the method of implementation would be one that increases inbound links slowly over time. An example of this would be directory submissions, which very often yield the best level of one-way traffic in inbound links to a website.
SEO or search engine optimization services allow for internet marketing in different methods. It clearly involves implementing elements and making changes to the client’s website in order to make it more attractive to search engines, thus gaining higher positions in the results of search engines for specific phrases and terms. While search engine positions are important, it is also clear that the ultimate goal is to increase the customer’s revenue. A higher position in a search engine does not always directly increase revenue, but it does attract more visitors and it is the revenue from the new customers that really makes the difference. It is in identifying the specific marketing goals of the customer that SEO services can be a significant benefit.
Importance of SEO services
In the present millennium that began in the year 2001, everybody is living on the net whether they are seeking any item/service or seeking out any information. Organic SEO services are a very powerful means to supply your customers with all the travels and catch them to the eventual result that would be a purchase, an answer to their question, or an attitude towards something. The declared objective of the SEO process is to be thoughtful of all the degrees and ways in which a possible customer is searching for. Tail Copywriting believes that SEO is the most powerful means of generating ROI for clients and enabling sustainable income for a business. This is because once your website is ranking for a particularly high traffic keyword, the traffic is almost free contrary to the costs of a PPC campaign. This is one important assertion to SEO’s vitality and Tail Copywriting’s motive of targeting high traffic low competition search terms for customers. The best thing about having SEO services is that it is trackable and you will know just how vivacious your effort is. Through a compendium of Google and Bing webmaster tools and third-party SEO tools, you can monitor the progress of your site and identify strategies that have been conducive and which ones need alteration. An SEO professional will methodically guide you through this process and make suggestions on how to decipher the data. If you are managing a business online and investing in SEO, your customers are used to cosmos answers and solutions to problems. A company that routinely pursues SEO advice will hark this echo and improve their online attendance for the ultimate user experience. This is a win-win.
Misconception 1: SEO services are a one-time fix
The first misconception about our search engine optimization service is that it can be done one time and there is no need for SEO work in the long term. The misconception is rooted in the view of SEO as a one-off activity with immediate results. This is in contrast to a view that sees SEO as a marketing investment deserving of time and budget over the long term to achieve the best results. SEO, like any form of marketing, is something that needs to be monitored and built upon in order to get the best results. Search engines are continually changing and updating their algorithms, so in order to maintain high rankings, SEO work must be continuously done. Using the metaphor of a diet and exercise program can help you to understand why ongoing search engine optimization is important. The goal of a diet and exercise program is to improve and maintain your health for the long term, not just a quick fix. Like a healthy diet, SEO done with white-hat techniques will lead to gradual and lasting results. SEO work that is a quick-fix like steroids might have a dramatic effect quickly, but will likely harm your ranking and could potentially lead to a ban from the search engine results page. Just as it takes time to improve your health with the diet and exercise program, SEO results take time. And just as you must adjust your diet and exercise program to match your continuing health needs, your optimization needs to be monitored and adjusted in light of ongoing results.
Long-term benefits of ongoing SEO services
It has been common for people to view SEO efforts as a failure due to finding no immediate results. They thus compare it to a one-time ad, in which once the money has been spent there is no reason to keep it up. In contrast to this belief, a successful SEO strategy can help customers find a business and its products/services at any time when they are looking to buy. This is achieved through a combination of on and off page efforts, the on-page activities providing the sustenance, and the off-page activities increasing the situation. The activities that lead to higher rankings are often very time-consuming and need to be maintained over a long period of time. The results of these activities are cumulative, with the most dramatic results usually occurring between the 4-6 month period. Each different vertical search engine (image, video, local) also provides a plethora of traffic that can be harnessed through these activities. Sustained high rankings on SERPs for these vertical engines will provide a steady flow of traffic in addition to what can be obtained from regular searches on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
Sotavento Medios’ approach to SEO services
At Sotavento Medios, we guarantee that our SEO practices are continuous and ongoing, contrary to the common sell and forget SEO services frequently provided. We use ethical search engine optimization strategies and deliver a reliable, sustainable search engine marketing service. We offer the following ongoing SEO services to book project-based SEO campaigns. Deploying our SEO specialists to work on-site proves to be the most cost-effective solution for ongoing SEO services and often produces the best ROI. This is due to the fact that an on-site search engine optimization campaign is very hands-on for both the SEO specialists and the clients involved (where the client can see their SEO progress with their own eyes). The first few steps of this campaign are that the on-site SEO specialists require client approval on the keyword research and analysis, recommendation reports, and initial on-site optimization changes. Once client approval is received, the on-site search engine optimizers move to implement all changes to the website. Step 3 is the ongoing on-site optimization changes. This is very important as it ensures that the client is getting a return on their SEO investment and the on-site search engine optimizers are staying up to date with the search engine algorithm changes. Ongoing SEO services retain a higher ROI than project-based SEO campaigns as it is an outsourced campaign. Oftentimes, highly competitive verticals or businesses that have complex websites in need of on-site issues resolved require a mix of on-site search engine optimization and ongoing SEO services.
Misconception 2: SEO services guarantee immediate results
This is a common misconception that SEO results should appear immediately after implementing SEO strategies. With changes to search engine algorithms and competition between websites, it is possible to rank for competitive search terms in as short as 3 months. However, it is more usual for the most valuable search terms to take between 6 months to a year to achieve a top ranking. This is especially true if the website is in a competitive sector. It is still possible to see some benefit from search terms that have less competition, or with strategic targeting of a search term designed to direct traffic to a specific product or service page. The time frame of results can vary. For example, new content pages may achieve expected ranking results much faster than optimizing previously existing content.
Understanding the time frame for SEO results
In the excitement of the online marketing age, some search engine marketing players are interested in their share of voice (SoV), attempting to ‘own’ as much of the space on a SERP (search engine results page) as possible through SEO service companies in the quest to affiliate market. A healthy point to consider is that if you demand top placement and expect measurable ROI in the short-term, SEM marketing may be more what you are looking for. Simple website by Kemper Furniture has been successful in their internet advertising campaign for wood furniture, effectively taking searchers by the hand from research to purchase. After optimizing keywords for “unfinished furniture,” the site owner has seen a steady traffic increase over the past 18 months. This eventually led to a full website redesign around specific keywords and optimization, resulting in higher quality traffic. An important aspect here is to optimize around keywords that Kemper Furniture’s competition has not yet discovered. For a smaller online entrepreneur, Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool can be utilized as an effective means of determining the most popular search terms within any given time frame, providing approximate CPC cost data, competition level, and global volume statistics for various keywords. Step one of a successful SEO campaign is to find an uncompetitive keyword, and one that the client can effectively tell a story around. This will allow the firm to own a greater share of voice and build traffic in the long-term. Step two is to integrate high quality link building and visitor relationship development around said keyword.
Misconception 3: SEO services are all about keyword stuffing
Contrary to popular belief, keyword stuffing is no longer a valid SEO tactic. Google’s 2012 Penguin update targets websites that have been over-optimized. This is in direct conflict with keyword stuffing. SEO in 2012, and moving into the future, is an evolving practice, often reshaping to keep up with changes in search engine algorithms. An effective and relevant strategy is now favored over a mechanical one. An oversaturation of keywords can devalue a website, hinder user experience, and in the worst cases, have your site removed from the search index altogether. This is a far cry from the desired outcome of increased rankings. Changes such as these are often misinterpreted or overlooked by other SEO providers, possibly an underlying reason that keyword saturation is so prevalent among today’s low-quality websites. It is not a case of ignoring these changes, it simply comes down to the quality of the SEO provider. Sotavento Medios researches the current state of search engine algorithms and has a clear understanding of what valid tactics are required to rank your website. This is then directly conveyed to our clients for their understanding.
The evolution of SEO practices
Search engine optimization was established as a crude science. Webmasters willing to undergo search engine optimization often thought about how they can trick search engines to display their links at higher rankings. In that time, relevancy was largely determined by the content items such as keyword densities and simple to develop on-page techniques. If a particular keyword was mentioned a lot on a page, it would without fail achieve a higher ranking. This led to a multiplied effort by SEO specialists to add those exact keywords to a page, leading to an overflow of the same search term in the content. This practice is commonly known as keyword stuffing. As algorithms evolved, search engines became smarter at understanding the content and relevancy of pages. This was achieved through advancements in natural language processing, latent semantic indexing, and comprehensive research into understanding what users want when they type certain search terms. It resulted in webmasters and SEO specialists no longer needing to focus on the numerous occurrences of a keyword to rank, and gave them the opportunity to write about those search terms and more in high-quality manners.
Importance of quality content and user experience
Today’s search engine algorithms are incredibly advanced and are focusing more and more on simulating human search. With the implementation of features like Google’s Wonder wheel and related searches, the future signifies a great importance of content readability and relevance and a further understanding of user intent. This has been demonstrated with Google’s farmer update, which sought to lower the rank of low-quality sites and increase the rank of high-quality sites. All these changes are indicative of search engines trying to move away from keyword searches and approximate human cognition.
As algorithms were refined, keyword relevance grew less and less effective as it did not account for the quality of content and user searches. A misspelled word in a search would return results with no relevance. It could even be argued that the search algorithms had become ‘gaming’ by SEOs as unrelated sites would often rank highly based on keyword relevancy alone. Modern search engines combat this with semantic searches in an attempt to match search results to the context and intent of the user. The first landmark in modern SEO was the shift from keyword use to LSI (latent semantic indexing). This was a system used to increase the relevancy of a search to the content on a page. Although this was more effective than keyword use, it was still open to abuse.
Firstly, to consider the importance of content and user experience, we need to understand the evolution of SEO practices throughout the years. Traditional SEO was all about identifying a targeted phrase or keyword and repeating it over and over again to manipulate search engines. This was very effective for a time. It was easy, required little effort, and the returns were good. At the time, the search engine algorithms were not as advanced, and they ranked websites primarily on keyword relevancy. This led to webmasters and SEOs focused entirely on content manipulation. If you could repeat a keyword often enough, a top ranking was virtually guaranteed.
Sotavento Medios’ focus on holistic SEO strategies
Ultimately, the great thing about holistic SEO is that it becomes more and more likable to clients as they come to understand the real value in the long-term changes we make to their site, as it evolves into a snowball effect, increasing in speed and size and delivering results that are fully maximized. This is a far cry from the “quick fixes” that many clients seek from SEO agencies, unaware of the potential detrimental effects to their site from “black hat” techniques.
As a company with the definite goal of becoming the best SEO provider in the world, we’re also entering into building our own web properties to learn from our own SEO experiences to use as case studies, as well as to maintain some experimental search engine playgrounds to keep abreast of the ever-changing search engine landscape.
On a real-world practical level, it’s about implementing changes to a website and its promotion, making use of the on-page and off-page factors, in a way that attracts more targeted visitors from search engines. Usually, this involves improving the website’s design and usability (on-page) as well as getting links from higher quality sources and improving content readability, relevancy, and accessibility (off-page).
Digital marketing agencies out there may have different ways in which they approach SEO tasks but at our agency, we always have a focus on holistic strategies. This concept might be foreign or ambiguous to many but this is the essence of a good SEO strategy. The reason for this is the belief that all of the individual aspects of SEO are interrelated and cannot be utilised to their full potential if executed in isolation. In simpler terms, it’s the belief in the “sum of the parts being greater than the whole.”
