Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a natural way for your company to turn up on the 1st page of Google.com, Yahoo!, Bing or any other search engine without having to pay for pay per click advertising (PPC). The advantages are numerous. If you are paying for all your traffic you are missing out on the huge value of Search Engine Optimization. And guess what – if you are not looking at doing optimization work on your website then your competitors probably are. Don’t leave things too long before you take a serious look at how leveraging on the search engines can help you grow your business in a significant way.

Who can benefit from SEO?

• If you have a website and you are wanting more business
• If you are paying a lot for Google or Yahoo! pay-per-click advertising and want to save money
• If you want more traffic without paying a single dollar for each visitor
• If you want to leverage your brand off Google’s brand to gain market leadership
• If you want to attract the media, trade groups or new staff

Some search engine optimization myths

• It takes months and months to see results : It can take several weeks to see the full value but you should expect to see results after a few weeks depending on such things as the age of your site.
• It’s expensive : What is expensive! As many marketers will say, it is more expensive not to promote your company than to promote it. The ROI for search engine optimization is initially lower than pay per click in the first three months, then after that the ROI compared to pay per click advertising is significantly higher. If you keep investing in search engine optimization you will see incredible returns once you start reaching the top 3 spots on the page. The top three search results usually take most of the traffic.
• It can be dangerous – you can get blacklisted : If the company that you engage is following the webmaster guidelines from Google there are no issues at all. This is a natural process that if you developed a website over many years you would achieve the same results.
• Results cannot be guaranteed : It is not possible to say how long your website will take to rank on the first page, yet, unless you have a brand new website and you are wanting to rank in a very competitive market, six to eight months is very realistic time period to get a first page ranking result in a local search engine such as Google.com.sg or Google.com.au if you know what you are doing. Results for less competitive keywords using our SEO.SIMPLE. service usually can been seen with in one or two weeks.

PPC drug vs SEO Freedom

Pay Per Click (PPC) or Adwords is like a drug. Initially it gives you a good hit of traffic for what initially seems like a small amount of money but as time goes on you pay more and more and you even pay for your competitors to visit your site! Not only that you can open yourself up to abuse of your adverts with your competitors clicking your ads (yes they can get around the Google daily click limitations if they know how with Proxy Servers) and draining your budget so that your ads won’t appear and theirs will.

SEO is not the instant magic bullet that PPC seems to be because it takes focus, time and initial investment to get the right results. However it will pay off in free traffic if you keep focused with it and invest wisely.

We always suggest our clients to invest a small amount today, see the results and then invest more as you get an actual return on investment from sales and increased business. We always tell our prospective clients that SEO is a long-term investment so don’t expect instant results. But SEO will deliver but expect it to take 6months+ before you see the full blown benefits start to kick in.

SEO Consultant | Singapore | Asia Pacific

The best way to discover the best SEO Consultant to work with is to see their results. It takes a few years of trial and error working with many clients across many different web platforms to learn the full SEO optimization picture. Because the web is constantly evolving as well then you want to work with a SEO consultant that stays ahead of the IT curve.

We have experience of working with clients across many industries, with different website types including full flash, CMS, shopping carts, dynamic PHP and ASPX and of course bare bones HTML. We are aware of most of the issues that stop a website from ranking on the first page and can fix all your issues.

SEO Team

It takes a focused team of SEO Professionals to get the results for many clients across many industries all on different web platforms. Our team of 12 SEO professionals including our own in-house SEO writers is dedicated to get the results for you. Our team is led by our IT veteran David Anttony whos IT career spans across 29 years and six major industries.

Our focus and passion is SEO. We don’t do anything else despite always being asked. We keep to what we do best – rock solid SEO – day in – day out. We work in partnership with other web design professionals to provide our clients with a full service such as Breworks.com.

Our SEO Ranking Results

We are currently ranking for a number of major SEO keywords. Here are our current major ranking results as at 11 Oct 2009. We are also ranking on the first page for numerous other SEO keywords.

SEO

Getting search engine optimization results

Getting a first page result on Google and Yahoo! for competitive keywords is an art form. It’s a equal blend of skill, IT internet knowledge and experience, with a tiny sprinkling of luck.

Many of our potential clients ask us how we get the results we do. We of course instantly say magic!

Once the giggles have finished we then explain that what we do is just what they would naturally do if they knew the basics of SEO.

In specific terms we do two things – one – optimise the website so that it is ‘Google friendly’. By that we mean we give Google (and other search engines) what they are looking for such as good page titles, great headings and keyword rich content. This is called on-site optimisation.

When we first work with a new client we do not rush in and get the client to change their website all at once. Instead we make some simple changes (mainly page titles and meta descriptions) and then we see the results. Over time we improve the website stage by stage so that it is constantly getting better results at a pace that is easy for the client. As time goes on we recommend to the client to add hot SEO components like a blog to enhance and stabilise the results.

Our major work though lies in the second thing that we do – building back links. This is called off-site SEO optimisation. A back-link is a bit like a referral in the real world. The more Internet ‘referrals’ that you have the higher you can rank for a keyword.

The challenge with working with Google especially, is that it is rightfully ‘fussy’ about the links that it considers worth taking note of. All links are not the same. A text link off the home page of a high PR ranking site that has a similar focus to your own is of far greater importance than a back-link from a blog comment.

Content Driven SEO Service

We are a Singapore leader for content-based SEO. Most SEO companies still rely heavily on back linking to get the SEO ranking results. Total reliance on back-linking for SEO 1st page ranking is very risky seeing Google knows backlinks are controllable. Google will always rank a high-SEO-focused-content site with good back-links above a low content site with a lot of links. Google knows that content is King because that is what people want.

Our SEO.SIMPLE. service is our proprietary content-based SEO service that delivers strong results fast. Using content (via a blog) is so much faster than traditional SEO.

The initial investment for this SEO service starts from just over SGD $1000 for a six month agreement which includes creating a new blog for you and integrating it into your site. Contact us for further information about our SEO Content service.

SEO never ends

So often clients ask us so what happens if we stop using your services. If SEO is getting you good results and providing good ROI then you would be smart to continue your online marketing investment. If you want to stay ahead though you need to continue your SEO investment. Just like if you were a doctor you would continue investing in you study even after you have qualified, the same goes for SEO. Competition never stops so you should not stop either. The great thing about SEO is it delivers you results over and over again.

SEO Tips

We are so often asked for special tips so here are a few web tips that will help you get and keep on the 1st page of Google and Yahoo.

When you engage a web designer to create or modify your site, ask them to tell you specifically what they will do to make your site search engine friendly and optimized for search engines. Ask them to give you a list of the web elements that they will build into your website to make it search engine friendly. If the list they provide is very vague and fuzzy then you may want to select another web vendor.

Search engine optimisation is not just a matter of adding a few keywords to the page content and images. It is a delicate blend of many interactive components based on and off your site.  So never underestimate the skill needed to do it properly. For example, if you are running a dot com site hosted on a US based server, it will not show up easily in a local search engine such as Google.com.sg. Move your dot com site to a Singapore based host, and with your new Singapore based IP address,  Google will anchor you to Singapore easily, as long as you have some basic content on your site linking you to Singapore. Alternatively if you rank well on Google.com but not well in a local search engine, which is your main market, if you know how to use the Google Webmaster tools, you can tell Google which country you site is linked to, as long as your site content reflects the same scenario. Web developers are not search engine optimization experts, they are the ones most of the on-site SEO issues in the first place! So the tip is – go to the right people for the right services. Creating a website is very different to marketing it in search engines.

Many of our prospective clients think that website traffic volume is a component of search engine optimization ranking. There is no connection at all, except that when you rank well on the 1st page of major search engines for high traffic search terms, you will get better traffic. What is important is 1) website optimisation 2) back-links – the links to your site from other websites 3) website page content. We work with these three elements to get first page ranking on Google and Yahoo for our clients. We are very unique in our industry because we are very strong in content based search engine optimization. We practice what we preach and provide our clients through our SEO.SIMPLE. service, regular weekly content updates to their site via blog articles custom written to rank for single keywords.

Most search engine optimisation companies use back-linking as their major strategy to get a 1st page ranking result. You may think that it does not matter how a ranking result is created but it matters a lot. Google especially, changes its ranking methodologies a lot. Google in its latest ranking algorithm update, has moved to adding more weight to on-site page content. On the last major Google change we noticed that many of our older low content clients lost rankings when the algorithm changes took place. Our content based clients  (those on our SEO.SIMPLE. platform) did not get affected. In many cases their ranking results went up a little. At the end of the day the content on your site is what your visitors are looking for. If it is top quality then it adds value. Google is always looking for the best quality page to display at the top. Content matters 100%. Not only having good content on your site is important, it MUST be updated regularly, at least weekly, to gain points on Google’s ranking radar.

Contact us today for a free SEO consultation and meeting to discuss your website optimization needs further.