Louisville Kentucky SEO Consultant

Many times when I talk to people about optimizing a site for their business, they want to ask me all kinds of questions on my thoughts about an analytics program, tricks for building links, shortcuts to getting indexed, or a slew of other questions that might deal with table-less CSS design.

Wanna know what I really think about it? It’s mainly garbage.

Sure analytics has it place to determine the progress of your campaign and building links is a ‘must have’ chore for getting traffic to your site, but the number one thing you can do is write/have great content. When I speak about content, I am also lumping in your keywords as well as they will be apart of the overall content of your site.

If you have great content ( written for users, optimized for search engines ) that people want to read and enjoy, they will naturally link to you through their site ( a blog, a commercial site, a directory they own, a bookmark, a column in a online newspaper, etc… ) and thus will help eliminate having to build links yourself back to your site. If they don’t have a site of their own, they very well may refer people to your site or become a customer themselves of your services/products.

With all these links coming to you, you will naturally gain trust and authority which will help get you indexed almost daily ( if you are pushing out new great content that fast ) and get your content in the search engines faster for even more people to find.

As you are pushing out new content and getting new visitors from all these links, your stats are for sure going to go up. As long as you are building content people want to read, it is almost unnecessary to log into your stats program for what most common people look at. If you are not looking into logs and checking more advanced features like visitor path analysis and time spent on page/site, then it is almost worthless to check your stats for just ‘hits’ or ‘visitors’ as these will naturally have gone up anyways from all your great content.

When it comes to design, layout and testing are important.. however, you do not need to have a full ‘CSS only’ layout to gain ranking in search engines. As a matter of fact, I mix CSS with tables and have even ranked full table layout sites to the front page of Google for some very competitive terms, outranking sites with full CSS layouts.

Once you gain authority and trust in the search engines, you can pretty much rank well for tons of terms and phrases as you expand your site. You will also get indexed faster and show up quicker for those new terms and phrases, thus driving more and more traffic to your site faster than before.

Content is the cornerstone of optimizing a web site. Without content you have nothing to show your visitors. If you have content and it is boring and generally ‘plain’, then no body is going to stick around and link to you. Make the most of your content and watch the links role in for free. Within time the trust and authority will settle in and so will sales and leads.

Over the 13 years of doing web development and Internet marketing right here in Louisville Kentucky, I have had the opportunity to work with many established local web development firms, ad agencies, freelancers, start ups, Internet marketers, venture capitalist, Fortune 500 companies, small business owners, and what I like to call ‘Snake Oil’ search engine marketing wanna-bes.

Most of the times, these ’snake oil’ types fall into 2 classes:
A. New or incompetent web designers looking to expand their profits by offering more services like Internet marketing, even though they know very little, if anything, about Internet marketing to begin with. Most of the times they don’t even know web design!
B. Start up companies looking to bring in sales and promising the moon to just close the sales and bring in profits to their company. They later outsource the work to cheaper labor such as the above reference point A.

The problem is, neither of these types know anything about Internet marketing or marketing in general, let alone web design or programming in most cases. In the case of reference B., you literally have the blind leading the blind which is also not good for your business.

I’ve ran across people that only talk about PPC or getting you listed in other sites and not focusing on Internet marketing or true SEO tactics to get your site ranked naturally high in search engines. Truth be told, people like this are eagerly waiting to take your money away from you if you let them. Come on, since seven years old? Yeah I laugh about it myself too when I think of it. I also talk to web development firms and ad agencies that claim they do Internet marketing for their clients as well and most of them do not even know what A/B split testing is or even how to do correct keyword research for their clients.

Most of the times, these people copy and ‘ride on the coat tails’ of real Internet marketing professionals and claim the work as their own. Such an example would be researching a real SEO professionals client and finding out what they did to their site and coping the things they find. Sure this is fine, but what happens when trends change? What happens when Google or Yahoo decide to change the way they do things and rankings and result fall and rise for your competitors? The real professional will be able to spot trends and changes and act quickly and accordingly, while the ‘copy cat coat tailer’ will have to research and copy what the real professional did in order to make the same changes.. which can result in wasted time and sales for your company while someone else is in first spot in Google and your not.

The copy cat snake oil SEO will end up costing you more money in the long run as well. While they are charging you money for time spent on researching and reading forums for their answers, the real SEO professional will act on experience and knowledge and implement the correct changes the first time, without wasting time having to look up answers in a forum and billing for that time spent.

Real Internet marketing professionals will also have a very broad knowledge in online advertising and can consult with you on issues regarding SEO, email marketing, social media optimization, online classified listings, local search, online press releases, article writing, link building, paid campaigns like pay per click and banner advertising, and even correct syntax for your HTML code in your web site. If your really lucky, you can find one that has a solid history of building web applications and sites and can communicate with other programmers you may have on your team.

Most importantly, a real Internet marketing professional will have results to back themselves up. I don’t mean results in MSN or a second tier search engine, I mean results in Google and Yahoo where most of the online traffic is really at. Not only will they have results in these engines currently, but also a past history of ranking sites in these engines as well. It is rather easy to get a new site or even a current site ranked in Google for a term and have it ranked well for a week or two, but the real skill is ranking it well for a term ( at least the first page of results in the engine ) and keeping it there month after month as the engines change their ranking variables over time. This shows that not only can the person rank a site well, but keep it there over time and keep up on trends and changes that the search engines may throw out.

Another consideration is the type of terms being ranked for. Anybody ( even you ) can rank your site on the first page of Google for ‘flower shop in Louisville Kentucky on 22nd street’, but is anyone using that term online to find you? My guess is no. Having an Internet marketing professional that can rank you for national and general broad type of searches will effectively bring you in more traffic and sales than someone that ranks you for terms that no one is even using in the search engines. These type of terms would be ‘Louisville Flowers’, ‘Louisville Flower Shop’, ‘Kentucky Flowers’, or even just ‘Flowers’. These terms alone will bring you in more traffic in the long run.

So when looking for a SEO or online marketing consultant in Louisville, ask questions and look at the results when picking someone for your marketing needs. Ask them for proof of their results over a long range of time ( a year at least is good ) that shows the rankings of their site, terms used, and where they were placed in the engine each week for that term. Do they have a history of at least being on the first page of results or is it a wild up and down roller coaster ride? If they can not provide you this data, don’t do business with them. A competent professional will be more than glad to show off their work when requested.

I would also ask other Internet marketing professionals in the area as well. Most of us have worked with one another, talked, and even shared business with each other and if you tell us upfront you only want to know about another SEO professional and their work, we would be be more than glad to share with you our experience and concerns about that person. If at anytime you would like to know about services from another web marketing professional, you can give me a call at 270-422-5593 and I would be glad to share with you what I know for free.

In the end, only you are responsible for your success online. Be sure to take the time to research professionals that work with you ( or for you ) and learn that price is not the only factor in picking a professional.