Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Overview - What It's All About!

Location, Location, Location
Before 73% of North America was using the Internet, most savvy business owners knew that it’s all about “location, location, location!” Common knowledge says if you sell a useful product or service and are in a visible location for the public to see, chances are, you will drastically increase your sales. Guess what? It’s still about location, location, location, even in the virtual world of the web.  Imagine starting a business, branding your product, and then buying a location without any roads leading to it or any way for people to see it. That would be pretty pointless and a huge waste of money. That is essentially what companies are doing when they create a website and ignore online marketing.  

Almost half of all internet users use search engines on a daily basis to find information.  If you have a website and do not do not market that website online, you are likely missing millions of potential customers on a daily basis.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and this is the solution to your invisibility problem.  SEO consists of changes that can be done to your website and to factors affecting your website position, to make your site accessible for search engines and, ultimately, accessible to internet users.  

Right Time, Right Place
What if someone said they could help your business appear right in front of your target customer, right when they are trying to find exactly what you sell? This is what OuterBox Solutions does when performing SEO services on your website.  We help you move to the top of the search engine results when your target audience searches for terms related to your product. However, that is only half of what we do.  Optimizing for search engines only goes so far. OuterBox understands the importance of optimizing for users as well. Our firm has had years of experience developing hundreds of websites, and we are experts in user-friendliness. 

What does this have to do with SEO? Well, a search engine’s job is to offer searchers the most relevant information when people come to them looking for a product, service, or information.  If search engines are constantly offering users irrelevant, hard-to-read, hard-to-navigate websites to choose from, users will stop looking to search engines for answers.  In response to this, search engines strive to offer searchers quality information, factoring in user-friendliness, popularity, and relevance. Being number one in the engines means that Google, Yahoo, Ask, or whatever search engine you show up in, thinks that your business is good, and they want to refer people to you. Imagine search engine rankings as being a popularity contest, and you have just made friends with the prom king. 

Popular By Association
Our clients have reaped the benefits of increased visibility, increased traffic, and constant updates to make their sites optimal for conversions. No longer do you have to worry about your SEO company getting you a little bit more traffic, but not knowing what to do with that traffic.  We have helped our clients move to the top of the rankings for competitive keywords, increasing their traffic, by over 100%. Through our optimization, we have helped our clients increase sales by drastic numbers.  To us, it is simple, but ever-changing. We guide our clients along the road to a better website, leading to better rankings, leading to increased sales in the end. 

Our road is circular instead of straight, and SEO is a never-ending cycle that keeps our clients happy and well-informed of the benefits of such efforts.  What we do works because we are constantly learning, constantly adapting to changes in the world of the internet, and never losing site of the ultimate goal – your company’s profit. 

Streamlining Your SEO Efforts
You may ask, “Why would I do SEO when I am doing all of this other marketing?” You may want to ask yourself this question instead: “Why wouldn't I do SEO when I am doing all of this other marketing?” Part of SEO at OuterBox is looking at ALL traffic and analyzing ALL of the avenues that your visitors take to get to your website. We can see if that magazine campaign you just ran last week actually worked in bringing people to your site. We can see if you got more conversions from that extra traffic.  Why not have someone watching your back – and your other marketing efforts to let you know if that money you spent advertising on someone else’s site actually paid off? We are here to keep an eye on where your other marketing money is going and if it is paying off for you. We can streamline your marketing efforts by using tracking programs that track where your traffic came from (not just from search engines) and how much traffic and conversions you received from each avenue.  You are about to see how SEO can be the link that connects all of your marketing efforts, making them work for you instead of the other way around.  Let us show you what good SEO can do for you.

Why Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Important?

Think of it this way. A web site is your business' ad, and before your ad can be effective, you have to send it out. By performing search engine optimization on your website you will allow web surfers to find your site and see what your business has to offer. An outstanding website is great to have, but not if potential customers can't find it!

How Do You Perform Search Engine Optimization?

There are many ways we work to boost your rankings. We must first research your businesses market and develop a marketing strategy. We work to find the best keywords for your business and use these keywords in the sections of your website most viewed by search engines. We also build the structure of your website in a way that search engines can easily detect and list all of your pages. We'll also work with you to create web partners. The more relevant websites that link back to your website brings your sites credibility up. For more information, contact us for a free estimate.

How Long Does It Take To Receive Quality Search Engine Rankings?

The time can vary for a search engine to see the updates we make to optimize your website. There are many variables, and these can also vary based on the search engine. We'll keep you up-to-date on the progress of your search engine rankings by providing you with reports on a regular basis. The timeline for results also depends on many website factors such as domain age, amount of content, current rankings and more.

How Can We Begin Search Engine Optimization For My Site?

Let's discuss your needs. You can fill out our free estimate form by clicking here or give us a call at 1-866-647-9218. We'll explain our SEO service and give you more information based on your type of business.

eCommerce Website Marketing: SEO For eCommerce

An e-commerce website needs to be developed in the proper way to be search engine friendly. A search engine frienly website is much easier to integrate a complete eCommerce SEO plan. Many e-commerce sites are disregarded by search engines because they have been put together poorly and search engine optimization basics were not taken into consideration during development. OureCommerce websites are built to optimize your site and allows buyers to find your site. This will drive more traffic to your site which will create more sales!

One of our main search engine optimization tactics is using a feature called "dynamic titles". Dynamic titles will use your database to change the title of your web site to match your products. Every time you add a new product, the title will automatically be created. Search engines look for variations in page titles and the more unique titles, the better. When you have more titles the search engines see your site as a bigger site. The more content you have, as long as it is relative to the searched keyword, the better your search engine rankings.

Our e-commerce web design stands above the rest. Click here for our full list of web design and marketing services. 

With Google continually rolling out Panda algorithm updates we’ve seen changes in the way eCommerce websites are ranked. Panda updates seem to be focusing heavily on content and on-site optimization. Google is looking for website owners to make their website better, not just build links. Google has said their goal is to make the web a better place and this change is pushing website to become more informative and offer higher quality content.
Content: We’ve seen effects on eCommerce websites that have minimal content, especially on ranking specific product pages. Many eCommerce websites, especially sites with a large amount of products, have weak product descriptions. We’ve seen these pages begin to drop. Other issues arise when sites have a large amount of products with duplicate content. Often similar products may have an identical description as another product on their website. Not only can duplicate content on your own website effect rankings, but also copied or supplied content. For example, many manufacturers provide product databases and product descriptions are sometimes supplied. If you’re using the same product description that other websites are using your chance of ranking is greatly diminished.

To learn more about duplicate content read Google’s page http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

Category Pages: Many times large amounts of products in a category will create a type of duplicate content. For example you have category A. Now category A has page 1, page 2 and page 3 as you’re showing 15 products per page. Google often ends up seeing this as 3 different pages optimized for the same keywords. This will give 3 pages a third of the weight that one page could possibly have. There are ways around this that we’re not going to get into for technical reasons, but the easiest fix is to show all products on one page. Sometimes this is easy, as in the example above with only 45 products in a category. If you have hundreds of products showing all of them on one page may not be the best option.

Link Building: We hear so much about link building, especially from clients. It’s old school SEO and everyone still wants to submit 100 articles a month and blast content out to the web with their links embedded. Remember, often these articles end up on a page rank 0 page and the incoming links probably means nothing. Our suggestion is instead of blasting large amount of content to other websites, write great content for your website. I’d rather a client post 4 great article a month on their own website instead of sending out 100 questionable pieces. The content on your website can last forever and bring direct traffic to you!

So, what is our link building strategy? Build good content and people will want to link to you. If you can get other people to link to you because they want to you can then focus on making your website better. It then becomes a circle of developing good content, building your brand and letting others link to you.

What makes for the best search engine optimization company and how do you know if they are the right company for you? The best way to know if an SEO company is a good one is to see results. Results are everything and it's what you are after. If they can prove that they have done for other clients what you need done, they should be a good pick.

Guarantees (Watch Out!) - As the saying goes, "if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is". If an SEO company guarantees results, be suspicious. The best search engine optimizer will tell you, there is no exact way to know where your website will be ranked in the search engines after optimization is complete. Search engines do not reveal the exact way that they choose which website is better than another, so know ones knows exactly what will place your site above another. 

Examples - Ask for examples of websites that they have optimized and which keywords they optimized for. They should be able to show you where in the search engines that client is appearing. If they can't give examples, they probably don't have them!

SEO Prices & Value - As with web design services, it's not always how much you're paying but how much you'll get in return. Paying $3,000 a month for search engine optimization that produces results is a much better value than spending $500 a month on optimization that does nothing, of course. Just be sure that the company you go with can produce results. The search engines are powerful tools and your website will gain traffic and business if SEO and website marketing is implemented correctly.