Website Design & Search Engine Optimisation in Cabarete Dominican Republic
Our SEO Campaigns
Improving your rankings in the search engines is a combination of processes. The days of tweaking a few Meta tags are long gone, although oddly enough it is still important to make sure the Meta tags are correct and accurately describe each web page on your site.
The SEO processes we use are a combination of all or some of the following:
Meta Tag Optimization
Each page on your website should have correct and unique 'title' and 'description' meta tag as many search engines use these tags to describe your website. Most search engines do not consider these tags when ranking your website, but unoptimized tags could allow potential visitors to not click onto your website from a search engine.
HTML Validation
A basic process but often overlooked. Although the page may look ok to you, any HTML errors may cause search engine spiders to halt and not register your website correctly. We can validate every page on your site and fix any errors.
Broken Internal Links
As a website grows and you put on more pages, it's quite common for links between pages to get broken when you move pages about. This causes your website to 'lose' pages, as even though they may still be there, search engine spiders need links to get to each page. If the link is wrong; the spider won't find the page. We can check and fix any linking problems.
Sitemaps
A well organized site doesn't always need this, whatever people tell you. The two things to consider are: 1. Can visitors to your website easily find the page they want; i.e. is the structure and layout efficient? and 2. Can search engine spiders easily reach every page on your site?
The key to this is a good internal linking structure. Links in JavaScript and Flash will not be used by most search engine spiders, so if your website uses a JavaScript or Flash navigation menu, for example, the spiders will not index your pages correctly. This is where a sitemap can pay dividends. A sitemap is simply a page which links to all the pages on your website. It can be in HTML, text or XML format or you can have all three. The important thing is that visitors and spiders get to every page in your site.
Browser Validation
Most visitors tend to use their favorite browser software such as Internet Explorer or Firefox to surf the web. But your visitors may use another browser. Different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera may render the page differently meaning some visitors may be put off. We can check your website for any errors and compare in all the major browsers.
Optimized Content Building
Does your website have enough information in its pages to accurately describe to visitors and search engines exactly what services and products you offer? Is your geographical location clear to search engines? For example, people often use place names in their search terms, e.g. "Condos for sale in Cabarete". Your website needs multiple pages (articles) describing different facets of your business to catch all the possible search terms (keywords). You can provide us with your own articles or we can write them for you. There is a well known expression in the world of SEO - "Content is King!"
Link Popularity Building
For some time now, search engines have used link popularity as a key factor in deciding how important your website is. If many other websites link to yours, it is likely that your website is useful to visitors and therefore search engines will rank it accordingly. And vice-versa, if very few other sites link to your website or most of the links are from spammy directories and pages with hundreds of irrelevant website links, a search engine will consider your website less useful.
Search Engine Submission
This may seem a bit basic, but do all the main search engines already include all of your pages? We will ensure that Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Ask and all the big sites spider through all your pages.
Keyword Research
Keywords and keyphrases are the likely words that your prospective customers will use when searching for you on the internet, for example, prospective purchasers of a new vacation or investment property on the North Coast might use the keyphrase ' Condos in Cabarete for Sale'. We can research and identify a number of these which we can then employ in optimizing your website.
Many powerful keywords are not always the most obvious. We also look for niche keywords that will bring you qualified visitors that your competitors may have overlooked. This is an area where quality can be more useful to you than quantity.
Competition Research
Identifying how popular your website is compared to your competition is vital not just to improve your website but useful in your business as well. Your competitors may be doing well in keywords you hadn't thought of, or getting traffic from sources you hadn't considered. Are they getting more traffic than you or less? They may be getting a hundred times more leads from their website than you are, meaning their cost to acquire new customers is much less than yours.
Internet Marketing Strategies
There is always more than one way to skin a cat, as my Grandmother used to say. Tell us what you want to achieve with your website and we will offer you some solutions within your budget. You may have some unique aspects that lend themselves to a unique plan of action. No need to be 'run of the mill!'
A well formed strategy means that you, in conjunction with us, set desirable and achievable goals. We then create a plan of action detailing how we will achieve those goals. SEO without a strategy is like building a house without an architect's plan and without detailing the costs. Sure it can be done, but you'll waste much more time and money and there will be no sure way of evaluating whether or not you've succeeded.
A strategy must also be achievable. Don't ask us to get you to the number one spot in Google for the term 'real-estate'. You'd be wasting your time and money because the budget required would rule this out for all but the biggest names.
Web Site Analysis & Reports
You may already have a statistics package included within your website hosting package. Awstats is a popular stats package and is free on most Linux based web servers. We also use Google Analytics which an extremely valuable tool in identifying what is happening to your website visitors. Using this and other tools we can identify:
- What keywords visitors are typing into search engines to arrive at your site?
- Which other websites link to yours?
- How quickly visitors leave your website?
- How many pages they look at on your website?
- Many other aspects vital to understanding how visitors use and react to your website.
Monthly Ranking Maintenance (MRM)
After an initial search engine optimization campaign, regular maintenance, roughly every three months will aid in keeping and improving your rankings. It is likely your competitors are also trying to push their way up, so you need to also.
Pay Per Click Optimization (PPC)
Pay-per-click advertising can be used to get immediate visitors to your website and generate immediate awareness. If your website is not properly optimized for this you will be throwing away money. To make this work effectively, multiple adverts should be designed to cater for different keywords. Each advert should send visitors to a specially optimized page on your website to grab people attention based upon the advert they saw. This may not necessarily be your home page.
Getting us to plan and arrange this could save you a lot of money particularly in the long run. We can get the same visitors to your website for less per click, and make it more likely they will continue to your desired course of action, i.e. contact you. We've come across a number of companies who have been burned by this sort of advertising, simply because they thought it didn't need any expertise. A bit of time and money invested in setting up a well-managed Pay-Per-Click campaign will repay itself many times over.
Article Syndication
A great way to get extra links to your website is to create interesting articles which we can submit to various article directory websites. This will encourage other websites to include your article on their website - with a link back to your website. Your website then appears to be an authority on the article subject. You can write the articles or we can do this for you.
Directory Submission - Paid for and Free
Dmoz was the original authoritative directory, but now there are thousands of directories. It's lost its impact now, but getting your website listed by some good (not spammy) directories will provide extra links. Search engines rank directories on their usefulness and some are considered useless and spammy. One such term for these spammy directories is a 'link farm', i.e. it's not a real directory on the basis no actual visitors would use it - it's purely there to provide links. Avoid them - they may cost you rankings rather than build them.
SEO in Conclusion
Bear in mind this is not an exhaustive list of the service we provide, but more of a quick overview of some of the aspects that need to be considered. Talk to us to find out more.
Things to consider when requesting SEO
What is the SEO company'sr track record?
Ask them to show you websites they have optimized and ask them for what keyphrases or terms. Check out how these websites are now performing. Consider whether you think the keyphrases are applicable and would be used by genuine visitors to the website. Some so-called SEO experts choose keyphrases that would rarely be used and are not competitive so that getting to the top spot was easy!
If possible contact the administrator or owner of the websites listed as references to verify that the SEO company’s claims are true.
There are no guarantees
Some SEO companies will promise you the earth. As long as you pay them several thousand dollars, they will get you on the first page of Google for a range of keyphrases. In real life, there are no guarantees. Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and SEO experts cannot force Google to put a site on page 1. Most usually these SEO companies are just after your cash and will do very little work. Or, as previously mentioned, they use irrelevant or meaningless keyphrases to get a result, which doesn’t help you.
Want more ‘Hits’ to your website?
If an SEO company talks to you about ‘hits’, then run away – very fast. ‘Hits’ is a meaningless term in SEO, but is often used by rogue SEO companies instead of the term ‘unique visitors’. Unique visitors are what you want on your website, i.e. an extra 100 visitors a month might get you some more business.
‘Hits’ refer to how many graphics or sub-components there are on a webpage when a visitor looks at it. It’s quite possible for one new visitor to your website to look at one page and then leave, and yet generate 500 new ‘hits’ on your website.