In this article I’d like to address two things; one is SEO online tools that give reports on your website and the other is web marketing or promotions companies that use them.
SEO online reports and measurement tools
There are quite a few websites out there that will allow you to put in your website and get a report back that will tell you how well your site is designed for SEO. For the most part you can get some decent information as long as you don’t read into the results more than what is actually there. First of all, the web is constantly changing and the methodology for promoting a website through search engines will change as well. More important is how you approach SEO and website promotion.
There are a whole lot of factors in promoting a website and they need to be taken in consideration as part of a process. Website promotion starts at different levels depending on the website. Here are a few, but the list would go on:
- The website is new
- It is an established website
- There is a lot of pages and it has a lot of text
- There is not very many pages
- Has a lot of pages, but visual presentation requires little text
There are so many more and other factors that don’t even involve the content of the website. That being said, we still believe the main constant and most powerful factor in search engine promotion is website content. The amount, type, presentation and construct of content within the borders of a website still makes content king.
SEO web marketing companies
Here is a little story and I’ll try to just give the points, because the saga is too long and frustrating.
A web marketing company that i will just be nice and say was “misguided” approached a client that we had done a “first pass” web promotion on. They presented one of these reports, making claims on what hadn’t been done and what “they” needed to do. This company claimed “six years” of search engine promotion experience after all (compared to our mere 12+ years).
We concentrate on building a base and take a cost benefit approach. Concentrate on the areas that will give you the most return and build a base from which to grow. Our problem or battle if you will, is that it is so hard to explain to a client that really doesn’t understand “the process.” I’m not complaining about that, after all it’s not the client’s fault, they haven’t been doing it for many years and that is why they hired us in the first place. The challenge is the disinformation presented by a competitor.
We don’t play like that. One of the areas was “backlinks” what we refer to as inbound links that go “to your website.” We should have had more was the claim. Well, we had created a series of links through our network that were relevant to their services with descriptions and proper link text and format. That was just one part of the initial promotion strategy that we completed.
What about the quality of our backlinks?
I can say that we have several link marketing companies that have large firm clients paying us anywhere from $150 a year up to $60 a month for just text links to their client’s website.
Anyway, to cut it short, we sent a report that showed our website compared to the other firms website and ours ranked better. Truth be told, neither was great, we tend to concentrate on our clients more than we do ourselves. We also found a client of theirs that had a testimonial on their web site and ran a different online SEO report tool on it (one that we sometimes use). We compared it against one of our client websites that is on a continuous web promotion program. Ours ranked 90 out of 100, their client’s site ranked 82. Theirs is e-commerce and national, our is local. Now I won’t say they did anything wrong or even that ours is better. Heck, it said they had over 400 backlinks when ours said 133 (I suspect both are incorrect). What our site does have is over 3000 placements on the worlds most popular search engine, versus less than 100 placements for theirs, something that report didn’t show.
Content is king.
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