1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Its not easy looking for an SEO company that you think will do the best job for your website. In fact it is probably as hard as signing up to a 3 year course of search engine optimization at a university and learning it yourself (well, maybe not that hard) but it’s certainly not an easy task. Below are a few things that you should consider when looking to take on a search engine optimization company to build, maintain, and optimise your website for the major search engines.

Where Are They?

When looking for an SEO company to optimise your website you should first of all look for a company who is highly ranked for the major search terms themselves, if they can’t show up on the first page of the search engines for their own keywords, how are they going to do it for you?

Where Are Their Clients?

When speaking to an SEO company that you think might be a good bet to take on, there are a few fundamental questions that you should ask them first. For example “where are your clients?” at this point, if they are any good they will offer you a few case studies to call and see where they are ranked. Also to ask them what they think of the SEO companies services in whole, (try to get about 5 different customers to contact to get a good idea)

Are They A Reputable SEO Company?

Type their company name or their website address into Google and see what comes up. Do they have any reviews on any forums or any news about how they operate on any industry related blogs. I know for a fact if you type in the name of certain SEO Companies there are a list of sites that come up with reviews about them that would turn any prospective customer away immediately. (Do your homework on the company first)

Another thing you need to question a prospective search engine optimization company before hiring them is if they are going to do a full analysis of your website, and implement on page optimisation as well as off page optimisation to help you rank highly. Link building is no good if your site is not search engine friendly for the keywords that your looking to rank highly for.

A question that you will also have to put forward to every SEO company before taking them on for search engine optimization work would be cost. I’m sure this is a question that will come naturally to many, however in the SEO industry cost can vary a lot between companies, when the service, and the time spent on the site can be very much similar. You need them to break down that cost so that you know what your getting for your money, and they should justify why they are charging the figure that they are asking from you. Ask for a full written proposal from a few companies and compare not only the price, but also what your getting for that price to help you make your decision on what SEO company to use.

As consumers become more aware about search engine optimization, there are many companies that provide SEO services. To look for an optimization service, you can log on to Google and do a search. You should be able to find a list of companies providing this service.

So the next question you may ask is how to choose the right SEO company to optimize your site? In this article, let me share with you some tips to choose the best one for the job:

1. Conduct a thorough research. You must spend a considerable amount of time on research so that you can shortlist a few companies to ask for quotations. One of the key criteria is that the companies that you shortlist must be credible. Conduct a background check on every company and make sure that they have achieved some good rankings for their own sites.

2. Look at their clientele. A reputable SEO company should have a list of clients that have done SEO with them. Look at the testimonials from the clients and determine whether they have done a good job. If you are still not convinced, do not be afraid to call some of the companies to find out more about the capability of the SEO company.

3. Compare quotes. After you have shortlist a few companies, ask them for proposals. Every company charges SEO services differently. Therefore, it is important to ask for a few quotes and compare them. And also make sure that the proposal states the timeline and key performance indicators of the project. This will ensure that both parties understand the objective of the entire optimization process.

Choosing the right company to optimize your website is very important. If you choose a company that is not capable, you are wasting your money, effort, resources, and most importantly, potential traffic from the search engines.

Search engine optimization is definitely the most worthwhile investment that a company can make to grow the business. With more targeted traffic to your site, it increases the chance to get more enquiries and sales. Good luck.

Here are some things to remember when looking for an SEO Company:

1.) Where are they located? If you hire an SEO company you are going to want them to be close. Many things can be handled through conversation over the phone but there are some things you will want to do in person. Every SEO company worthwhile will provide you with quarterly if not monthly reports or website analytics. These reports should be reviewed in person to make sure you fully understand what it is they are doing for you and so you can obviously see the progress of their SEO efforts.

2.) What is the size of their company? When you are spending the kind of marketing money toward an SEO campaign, do you want to be a number or do you want to be as important to them as they are you. I have heard many people who have signed up with these larger companies that offer “search engine optimization” or Pay Per Click (PPC) and do not receive what they expect. They do not see results, they are not given statistics and worse yet they cannot get a hold of someone to speak to about their problem. Too many times you will find yourself on hold or being transferred from one person to the next. Wouldn’t it be nice to just pick up the phone, dial your SEO expert’s cell number and speak freely about your project or any questions you have? Do not put yourself in a situation that will just cause frustration. Make sure you sign an SEO contract with someone who will give you the attention and support you need.

3.) Do they have proven results? Before you even ask how do you get my site on the first page, you should be asking to see some proven results. Ask to see the results of at least 4 of their clients SEO campaigns. The key here is to make sure all of the examples they show you are not in the same field and are not for long keyword phrases. What I mean here by long keyword phrases is something like “Littleton German import auto repair shop”. This is not a valid keyword for a company to show you as an example for SEO. I say this because it would not be very hard to optimize for this term because it is so specific. You would want them to show you something like “Littleton auto repair” and “Auto repair Denver” for the same campaign. These keyword phrases are more difficult to achieve prime placement and will also generate a higher search volume.

Before I had said to make sure to see results from at least 4 different campaigns the company has worked on. This is important to ensure the work they do is quality and it will prove they are capable of managing more than one campaign that they happened to get lucky on. You want to make sure they have not only worked in a certain field. If they can prove to you good results in many different industries, it proves they are good at what they do. I am not saying however, that they have to prove they have worked in an industry such as yours. If they are SEO experts and can prove to you they have worked in all fields, they will be able to optimize and market your website online.

4.) The last thing you want to do is make sure the company does more than just optimize your website. Now days, it is more important to an SEO campaign what you do off the site than on. Now granted, if they do not talk about optimizing the actual website itself-they have no clue what they are talking about. Make sure they use techniques such as social networking, backlinking and submitting to directories and search engines. If all three of these techniques do not come up in their strategies, you might want to consider using someone else, these are just the basics. Blogging, creating and submitting videos and articles and posting in discussion boards and forums are a few more techniques a company may use.

Hopefully this will point you in the right direction when you are considering hiring an SEO company to market your website. I know it can be confusing but this article should have given you a base of knowledge if not a few questions to ask in your appointment. Remember, find someone who is local or has a local employee you can speak with, make sure they are going to treat you as a client not a number and check their previous work. If you follow these steps, it should ensure you hire an SEO expert that will fit the needs of your company.

Nick Hantge works at a Denver SEO Company and has helped many business owners optimize and market their website. If you have any questions about choosing an SEO Company, he would be happy to answer them for you!

Keep in mind that there are plenty of SEO services on the Internet that you can hire for your own SEO needs and to develop your website to make it accessible and popular on the Net. But if you want to get the best ones in the market, then you might want to plan for it to make sure that you are getting the best ones for the job.

Find A Credible Company

If you prefer quality SEO services then it is best to look for a credible company online to make sure that you will see the best results at the end of the project. You might want to do your research and thoroughly read through the information found on the company’s site. You might want to visit forums or do background check on the Internet on their name to make sure that they are not scammers to steal away your hard-earned money from you.

Check Their Clients

You might want to check the rankings of their client’s website to ensure that they are capable of handling their SEO services. One practical way to go at it is to check the ranking of the company’s site. After all, it would be convincing if they offer SEO services to improve your page rank and accessibility if they themselves cannot do so with their own site.

Install some plug-ins on your Web browser that can show you the page rank and Alexa rank of the sites you have on your screen. It would be best to check out the sites of their clients to see if they are capable for the SEO service you need to improve your own page.

Ask For A Proposal

If you want to know the services offered by an SEO company, you can always ask a proposal from them that details their strategies to improve your site’s rankings on the Web. The proposal will also highlight the timeline for the project, as well as the cost for the entire service. This is also the perfect for determining whether they can quality service so that you won’t have to spend more than you have with the project.

Just the way the process works makes search engine optimization difficult to capture in terms of a rate per hour. It is very possible to get one site to link to your site which can deliver fantastic improvement in search engine rankings, which may only take 10 minutes of work, or spend weeks and weeks link building to get only a small improvement in SEO, such is the process of link value. So this makes it difficult to quantify what exactly is your chosen SEO company doing for you.

The first thing you need to do is a bit of research to understand some basic principles that SEO Companies should explain when you talk to them for the first time. You can decide if they are pulling a line, or actually being very fair with their reasons why it will cost so much and why it may take longer for results than you think. There are a few online SEO tutorials out there and will not take much finding. Just 10 minutes here and there will give you enough basics, just to understand more the challenges a professional SEO company has. It is more than administration work.

All professionals should be looking at search engine mastery in their field, but that does mean they will expect to be paid what their worth, which compared to adverts in high volume sales magazines or newspapers can still be one of the cheapest form of marketing out there. So how do you choose which SEO company to work with once you have done a bit of tutorial research?

You should always employ a SEO Company on what they achieve; irrelevant of the time it took to achieve it. After all you want traffic to your website, which is what you are really buying. A professional SEO company will have a network of sites that can link to your, will never use black hat techniques and at first will probably work on your site for a time well beyond what you are paying them. But when results step in, you may find that it takes much less work to get your results. But now you have the income.

So the first question you ask is what results have you achieve for previous clients? Ask then where the starting point was for positions on search engines and then ask where they are now and what sort of realistic time did it take? If they ask for a 12 month contract, then consider asking for a 3 month target, a 6 month target and then the time you would expect to see your desired position, bearing in mind that the further up the rankings you get, the harder and slower it becomes to advance.

Beware of easy to get search terms that they proudly say they have achieved. Use you basic new knowledge to know that this search was hard to get and must have been done by a professional, but this search term, anyone could have delivered. Just follow these rules and you are most of the way there to a long professional relationship with the right SEO Company.

In this article I will focus on Google as the Search Engine, it has the highest percentage of use over the other Search Engines but the others worth bearing in mind.

The key point to remember is that Google has its users in the forefront of its mind. Its algorithms are in place to ensure that when a user types in a search term, the pages that it displays offer the user the best selection from the internet relevant to the search term.

Google wants to display relevant sites of authority, trusted sources and ones that have highly applicable content. Therefore if someone types in -grey wellington boots Google will display in order of preference sites that have content with the term -grey wellington boots if there is a lot of sites with the term then the results will be rated in terms of:

* Authority - how many other websites are linking (oneway links) to the site, the higher the page rank of those sites, the trusted/authority i.e. .gov increases the page authority (see below for Page Rank PR)
* the content on the site. Whether the site is about Grey wellington boots, whether the page contains a lot of information connecting to Grey wellington boots, i.e the H1 Tag, the title, the content and links in and off to that page and site are calculated.

All with a view to give the search user the highest relevancy to their search term.

Now these are not the only points taken into consideration but I wanted to illustrate that good content is highly relevant and should be used as an SEO tool.

PageRank is only one of many methods that Google uses to determine a pages authority or relevance, but it is an important one.

PageRanks (PR) viewable bar ranges form 0 to 10, 10 being the highest and 0 being the lowest and likely a new domain and no links. However PageRank values doesnt range from 0 to 10 it is a floating-point number with each Page Rank level becoming progressively harder to reach and is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale. Google calculates page PRs constantly, but we only see the update once every few months (Google Toolbar). So there can seem to be a delay.

How does it work?

Google interprets a link from Site X to Site Y as a vote, by page A, for page B.

Google looks at the volume of votes/links but also 100s of other aspects relating to the page that casts the vote. But these aspects do not count when Google calculates the PageRank.

The relevant and quality of the incoming links are important factors, such as link text and the Page Rank/ authority of the site/page that has case the vote.

* All links vary when it comes to PR which depends on many aspects such as the PR of the page, how many links are passing away from the site diluting the PR sent to the linked page.
* If you had a web page with a PR8 and had 1 link on it, the site linked to would get a fair amount of PR value. But, if you had 100 links on that page, each individual link would only get a fraction of the value.
* Ranking popularity considers site age, backlink relevancy and backlink duration. PageRank doesnt.
* Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated but it is important when ranking for keywords and within the Search Engine Results.
* PageRank does not rank web sites as a whole, but for each page individually therefore each page has a different page rank.
* Each inbound link is important to the overall total. Except banned sites, which do not count.

If you would like to find out more information or for SEO in Woking please visit our website. For local businesses in Woking SEO can be fundamental to any online business’s success

Helene Hall is the CEO of iWeb Media. The complete solution to internet marketing exploiting the latest techniques and strategies to design the best possible web solutions for clients all around the world. SEO, website design and multimedia expertise at the highest quality.

Helene has worked within such companies as Toshiba, Lundbeck, Ashfield in2Focus, NHP Plc etc. She draws on 10 years of experience within Web design, programming, sales and marketing from the ground up. Having worked within the Sales and Marketing forces of some hugely successful companies she is able to translate her sales and marketing acrumen into a effective online strategies to increase revenue and profit for her clients.

First, your current website must be analyzed. This is done in two ways: On an SEO basis - Does the website has relevance to the keyword along with its HTML code and meta tags on the page? Also, the site is analyze from the user’s perspective, if the user find it useful then there is a great possibility of customer conversion.

Second, the audience is one of the most important considerations. Determine your target market. Take into account their age, sex, marital status, education level, geographic location and economic status. These will be the determinant as to how you are going to approach and speak to them Make sure that your keywords are going to resonate with them.

Also, you need to consider your competitors. Identify them Try to evaluate your competitor’s website. What makes their sites work better than yours?

Once you’ve made your research, it’s time to evaluate your own website and the SEO service you have applied on your site. Is there a need to improve them? Start off, by deciding what keywords are relevant to your website, to your product and of course to your target audience. Choose the keywords carefully because it will be the cornerstone of your SEO services. After wise selection, make sure that the website content reflect them. You may need to rewrite them as you aim for a 3-5% keyword density throughout the site. But avoid filling the content with lots of this keywords. Going beyond 5% keyword density can ruin the flow of the content and make it sound unnatural. This will alienate the readers. Don’t forget to include the keywords in the HTML code and in the meta tags because the search engines will also scan this to determine ranking.

With rank Optimization , linking will help you improve it. To do so, you may either use non-reciprocal links or one-way links. To get more non-reciprocal links, write good quality content and update them regularly.Many people will link to your site if it is relevant or useful to them. Another way is through directory listings. While in getting one-way links, it is done through article submission.

If you’re really serious about improving your SEO services to help you in generating traffic and maximizing your ranking, consider a PortalFeeder membership. This entitles you to network with money making entrepreneurs online, to undergo training within all aspects of Internet marketing, to avail of their exclusive software products, tutorials and a lot more. Overall, it is by far the most powerful system to get you loads of profit in your online business. Click here to watch a portalfeeder review.

From the top down:

1. What? - Make sure your title element (tag) describes the page and uses keywords. Remember Google will display 66 characters and Yahoo 120 characters.

Why? - The text in the title element is used by search engines for indexing your page. It’s also used in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as the text in the link that links to your page. Make your title element something worth clicking.
2. What? - Make your URL’s (web page addresses) human readable or Search Engine Friendly (SEF).

Why? - Making your URL’s human readable means they can help to describe the page and use keywords. Keywords in URL’s can help you rank for a keyword or phrase.
3. What? - Describe your page in the meta description element (tag). Google will display 160 characters.

Why? - The text snippet displayed in the SERPs under the blue link text can either be taken from the page (by the search engine spider) or from the meta description. If you write good meta descriptions and Google’s spiders use them you can be in control of the words that appear in the SERPs. Google will highlight keywords that match the search and this could mean the difference between getting a click and not getting a click.
4. What? - Use the meta keywords element (tag) for important keywords. Only add keywords that describe the page, don’t add unrelated keywords.

Why? - Although Google doesn’t use the meta keywords information other search engines do.
5. What? - Use a CSS based design and adopt web design best practices for styling your page.

Why? - Search engine spiders don’t see what users see. They have to parse all the code that makes up a page including all your HTML. Make it easier for them.
6. What? - Make sure your page content is correctly tagged. For example if you have a main header make it an H1.

Why? - By tagging your content you are providing the search engine spiders with a clue about what’s important on the page and what isn’t so important.
7. What? - Create an XML Sitemap and feed it into Google, Yahoo and Live.

Why? - To make sure the search engines can find all your pages.
8. What? - Use Google Analytics or something similar.

Why? - So you can measure and see what’s working and what’s not.
9. What? - Sort out any canonical issues.

Why? - So there is only one version of each of your sites web pages.

Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than is shown in this simple check list but if you follow this advice you WILL see an improvement in your site’s performance. If there are aspects of this list that you find confusing speak to an SEO company or sign up to a forum where an expert will be able to assist you. You can also Google any of the phrases used in this article to find more information. To make this easier the important phrases are shown in bold.