Choosing an SEO company

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a process by which a website can be made to be more easily found in search engines. Since google is the most commonly used search engine (about 70% of searches are currently made using google) as SEO engineers, we tend to concentrate more on getting the website better placed in this search engine. The way google determines which sites are on the first page (the top 10 results) is quite complex and much of the technical details of how it judges the relevence of a webpage to the search phrase (that's the bit you type in the search box) is a closely guarded secret - much like the recipe for kentucky fried chicken. This 'search engine algorithm' is frequently tweaked to make the best possible results for the search phrase. Note- google treats each page separately, so if you optimise each page for different phrases relating to that page, you will normally achieve more traffic than if you try to optimise your site for a single phrase. The exception to this is if you are trying to optimise the home page of your site for a highly competative phrase, then you might use your interior pages to bolster the home page's relevence by having related phrases in the interiour page links to the home page. Generally this is decided on a case by case basis and there are no hard and fast rules determining when you should use the spear head tactic (optimise for one hightly competative phrase) or use the umbrella tactic (optimise for a different but related phrase for each interior page).
 
What we do know from experimentation and experience is that there are 2 types of factors that influence your search eninge rankings - on-site and off-site factors. On-site factors include how many time the search phrase appears in your webpage - in the title tag of the page, the metatags, alt tags for images, anchor links and heading tags. If you dont know anything about HTML or how webpages are constructed, then you won't know what html 'tags' are, but suffice it to say, the more times the search phrase appears on your website, the more relevent the page is deemed by google to be. You can also do things like streamline the coding for the site so the code to text ratio is lower, and use keyword rich filenames - eg you could rename /services.html to /relocation-services.htmlto improve the relevency of that page to the phrase 'relocation services'. there are many other tweaks and fiddles that you can do to improve your page's relevancy, most of which only have a small effect on their own, but collectively, if you optimise every aspect of the website, you can end up with making a good deal of difference.
 
The second group of factors are off-site - that is links and references from other websites that relate to yours. One example of this is if you have lots of links from other websites, this tells google that your website is of higher quality and has a higher 'trust rank' than sites with fewer links. Therefore to improve your rankings you need to get relevent links from other websites. Link building is a time consuming and labourious task which is why SEO can often be quite expensive for highly competative phrases.
 
I often get asked which is more important, off-site SEO of on-site SEO and I have found that off-site SEO accounts for about 70% of your rankings and on-site about 30%. Therefore when doing SEO, we concentrate on on-site work first, to lay the groundwork and then do more off-site SEO. That way, the search engines will not crawl the unoptimised pages and cache them before you have had a chance to improve the metatags and on-site work.
 
There are also other tools that SEO engineers can use to help your rankings. There are google webmaster tools which you can use to affect the way google spiders your sites, and other search engines have similar tools, eg yahoo site explorer, Bing webmaster tools etc. We use these tools to help search engines find all the pages of your site and to monitor any issues that might arise eg if a page has duplicate metatags with a another page.
 
Since SEO is targeted at a specific phrase, we tend to concentrate on a smaller number of related phrases rather than trying to maximise the number of keywords that you site will be listed under in the SERPS (search engine results pages). This is because if you dilute your SEO with too many different keywords, you will not get good rankings in any of them. I would suggest 5-6 keyword targets for your website - eg relocation to russia, russian relocation services, relocation russia, moving to russia, emigrate to russia. that sort of thing.
 
Finally, SEO also includes monitoring of site performance to measure the relative success of the various SEO activities. I use google analytics which I have found to be the best website monitoring service available, and with the added benefit of being free to use (although you need to set up the account and add the tracking code in each page of your website)
 
As mentioned earlier, SEO requires quite a skilled engineer to do it well (although you will find many people who purport to be SEO experts but are little more than marketing managers who know all the buzzwords but none of the techniques of SEO - beware of these companies). I would recommend that if you are serious about increasing your website's traffic through SEO, that you do a cost benefit analysis first. SEO can cost anywhere between £100 per month and £10,000 depending on the size of the company, the amount of work and any pay per click advertising - eg google adwords. What you should do is work out how much each visitor to your website is worth, this is calcualted by working out how many conversions you get per visits, then multiply that by the profit per conversion. eg, if you get 0.5% of web visitors to sign up for your service and you make £500 profit per signup, then each website visit is worth £2.50. On this basis, you can estimate that if you had an extra 100 visitors per day, this would be worth 2.5 x 100 = £250 profit per day. Over 30 days, this would be £7,500 profit. Therefore, your SEO should cost less than this and should generate more than 100 extra visitors a day to be cost beneficial. If you find that the conversion rate is too low and that the profit margin does not justify the SEO expense, then you should not pay out for SEO until you have either improved the profit margin, or increase conversions.
 
Once you have decided on a realistic budget and traffic target, then you should select your SEO engineer carefully. It pays to shop around and always ask for examples of SEO work and ask challenging questions about what they would do for your site. Some SEO companies offer copywriting services to add more relevent content to your site. Others might claim to have special agreements with google or to be able to guarentee top rankings for specific phrases - do not trust these though. No one can guarentee top rankings and no one has special, exclusive access to google services.

Also be aware, SEO can take quite a few months to show good results, and you are unlikely to shoot up to page 1 overnight. Often companies use adwords initially while the SEO is in it's early stages to generate more conversions in the short term, however in the long term, organic SEO is much more cost effective than adwords but takes time and patience before the results are realised.