How Does Your SEO Company Choose Keywords?

Keyword selection is possibly the most important part of your marketing strategy. Everything you do to your site or relating to your site hinges on how effective your keywords are. If chosen correctly and periodically updated, then the right keywords can really pay off.

You can do keyword research on your own, but using a reputable search engine marketing company that stays cutting edge will increase your chances of having the best keywords possible.

A good SEO company will use a lot of different programs and tools to determine what people are searching for when they could benefit by finding your site. You don't necessarily need keywords that are general or too broad to compete.

Competitive keywords are ones that will not only drive traffic to your site. Competitive keywords should drive people to your site that will actually benefit from being there. They will also not waste your time and money competing for a ranking that could take years to get and even then may not make you any money.

Another benefit of using an SEO company to do your keyword research is experience. This is their primary focus and there is a whole industry built around it. Don't assume that you can learn everything about keyword selection in one day! An SEO company will look for hidden keywords, or words that people are using to search for you and not finding anything useful. It is sometimes very hard to think like a layman when you are an expert in your field.

Your SEO company will help you with your web site content to make sure that each page has unique content centered around the keywords. The keywords really do need to be the focus of the page that you are targeting. There is also a lot of behind the scenes work that can be done to increase your chances of being found with the great keywords that you have chosen.

Once your SEO company has your keywords, they should ask you which ones you consider most relevant to your site. After all, you are the one who has centered a career around the subject, and you know better than anyone which subjects are most important to you.

Don't make the mistake of discounting the collected data, though. Some people are so convinced that they know what is most important, that they don't consider what their users are actually typing into the search engines to find them. The hierarchy, however, may be best decided by you. Ask for an explanation of the keyword order of importance when your search engine marketing company presents you with your keyword list before you decide to change things.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Creating User-Friendly URL’s for Your Site

Improving the URL's of your site may be a daunting task, but the payoff could be great. Hard-to-remember or reproduce URL's are a big reason that a lot of visitors never make it to a lot of sites. They make navigation difficult for users and in turn, can affect your search engine positioning.

Long, complicated URL's can be very annoying to users. Long streams of numbers, punctuation and odd characters are virtually useless to most people. The potential for error in reproducing them is great and can result in a lot less traffic to your site. Partial URL copying is just about guaranteed for URL's that are too long. Bookmarking and linking to your site will be greatly reduced if your URL's don't make sense or are simply too long.

A simple way to structure your URL's is to make it obvious which page you are going to when you look at the URL. It should also make it obvious how important the page is and where it is located on your site. For example, "examplesite.com/home/furniture/kitchen/chairs/" tells you that you are in the kitchen area of furniture, looking at chairs. This can help to improve navigation for your users and simultaneously improve crawlability by search engines.

Make sure that anticipated links also work. If someone sees the above link and wants to go to the furniture section, can they simply leave out the "/kitchen/chairs/" portion of the URL and be directed to the furniture page?

Browsers like Google Chrome have made it a lot easier to type in URL's by hand, but not everyone uses browsers with URL self-correct. Work on making your URL's self-correcting. Consider common mistakes that people make when typing in your URL's. Capitalization, punctuation, synonyms, misspellings, partial URL’s and old URL's should automatically redirect users to the page that they intended to visit.

Breadcrumb links also improve navigation and cut down on people guessing what the URL's of certain pages are. For example, each page should have a breadcrumb navigation trail of links like this example:

Home < Furniture < Kitchen < Chairs

This makes it really easy for people to link to other pages in your site. You can also avoid drop down menus and images that aren’t easily followed by search engines. Two birds with one stone.

Improving your URL’s keeps your site really organized and user friendly. It should help increase the amount of bookmarking and sharing of your information as well. Easy to read and understand URL's make it obvious to search engines how important each page is and where it lies in your site. Improving your URL's is one of the things that your search engine marketing company will look at when optimizing your site.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

SEO vs. Paid AdWords

Google has been aggressively advertising the sale of their AdWords. So, a lot of people are wondering if this could be an option for them. After all, AdWords lets you basically pay to come up when someone searches for your keyword. Can buying up enough AdWords take the place of your SEO efforts? Not likely, according to the research.
AdWords can be purchased through Google and your advertisement will come up under a “Paid Advertisers” section when someone searches for your keyword. You can choose to pay per click or pay per impression. Google has improved this system a little by placing advertisements at the top of the search page instead of down the right side where it is seldom seen. The problem is, it still looks like an ad, even appearing at the top in that fancy blue box, and most people searching are looking for popular search results, not paid advertisements.
Not to say that AdWords are useless, to the contrary. They can drive some traffic to your website, but they aren’t likely to take the place of organic search results. Search Engine Optimization, when done correctly, creates a true interest in your site. It builds your online reputation and gives you a real standing when it comes to social media.
Long term, lasting results have proven to be extremely effective in building your reputation and consistently getting those high rankings that you dream of. It’s not just your reputation, but your actual site that is affected by SEO efforts. When you hire an SEO company, they work with you on getting your site to a search engine friendly state. This can immediately get you ranking higher on all the top search engines.
Some newer search engines are using social media to rank web sites. This seems to be the new trend in search engine rankings and no amount of paid advertisement can compete. SEO is not considered advertising at all. It is the realistic “organic” way to prove yourself to the masses, thus leading to higher rankings over time.
AdWords can give you some short-term gains and some people choose to buy some ad space in addition to their SEO efforts. But, it is pretty much universally accepted that AdWords will not be replacing SEO. With social media being heavily weighted in the search engines and beyond, AdWords simply can’t compete. If you use AdWords as part of your marketing plan, you may need to consider them solely as a sideline objective, not your main plan of action.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

How to Get Efficiently Indexed

When you start out with a search engine optimization company, you will need to adjust your web pages so that they can be properly indexed by the search engines. This includes a few key steps.
First, your SEO company will do some research and give you a list of competitive keywords. You will need to use these keywords in moderation throughout the text of your site, in the headers, in the page titles, and in the metatags.
Using your keywords in moderation ensures that you do not overdo it. Search engines may rank you lower because of keyword abuse and you could incur penalties if you are not careful. You want your keywords to make logical sense in relation to the context around them. You may even decide to narrow down your keywords by page.
For example, if you sell all types of lawn care equipment and you want to optimize your page about weed eaters for the keywords weedeater,weed wacker and lawn equipment. You could use text on that specific page of your site to draw people looking for these items directly to that page, instead of making them search for what they want from your homepage.
You also want your page headers to be labeled with page corresponding keywords. Use your most important keyword for a page as the h1 header. You can add additional keywords under the h2, h3 headers, and so on. All of these keywords should be related to each other and support the information provided on the page.
Page titles are also important for efficient indexing. Create a title that ideally includes your most important keyword or keywords. Do not overdo it; once again, use your keywords in moderation. The title should very accurately summarize the content of the page.
Metatags are a means for your website to allow search engines to easily identify your keywords. Do not ever use keywords that are unrelated to the information on your site or you could be quickly penalized by the search engines. Be specific, descriptive and brief in your metatag creation.
Combining these page design basics can help your search engine marketing company get your site quickly indexed and on your way to favorable placement on the SERPs.

Are Search Engines Going Social?

Search Engine Optimization companies have been focusing a lot of effort towards social media marketing. There are already lots of social sites out there where people can search for popularity-controlled results. These sites allow the masses to rank and comment on their favorite sites and articles. SEO companies use these sites to increase their clients’ sites’ visibility on the search engine results page.


One example of the social media explosion Me.dium Search released by Yahoo. Me.dium basically gives you a search basing results on the real-time activity of the searching masses. Basically, you get results based on what everyone else is looking at and ranking. SEO companies are constantly changing their strategies and practices to keep up with the ever-changing world of search engine marketing, so they are ready to step it up as the search engines have already started to lean more in the social direction.


SEO companies already heavily weigh your online social reputation when coming up with a marketing strategy. Social media efforts can help create a network of inbound links to your site, thus improving socially charged rankings on the big search engines. As social media sites become more and more powerful influencers in the major search engines, your efforts in SEO can really begin to escalate to a new level.


Powerful social media domains such as Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and YouTube have proven to be great forums for launching ideas, getting votes and showing up in the rankings. These along with other social sites give us a platform for reputation management services and social marketing efforts.


Social innovations still to come will ensure that SEO continues to evolve. Search engine results will be targeted to a more defined group of visitors and therefore create more personalized results for the public. Social media is a part of your advertising and marketing approach that you and your search engine marketing company soon won’t be able to ignore.

How Do I Promote My Web Site?

Web site promotion is a part of an effective search engine optimization strategy. Many clients assume that promoting a web site consists of banner ads and paid placement ads in the search engines. There is actually a lot more to it.
When initializing web site promotion, many things are considered. The bottom line is not necessarily getting a flood of site visitors, but getting quality site visitors. The search engines do not just look at how many people visit your page. If they did, search engine optimization would consist of paying people to sit around visiting your site and clicking on your links thousands of times a day.
-So, what is a quality visitor? A quality visitor is someone who is actively seeking out your products or services. This doesn’t include people who accidentally stumble upon your site when searching for your keywords. Search engines look at the quality of the visitor when determining if their visit will improve your rankings.
-How do you target quality visitors? By researching which key phrases are going to be most effective. If your key phrases are completely relevant to your site content and the quality of information and services provided is very high, then your quality site traffic should increase, resulting in more consistent sales. Search engines will rate the quality of your site, how user friendly it is and how closely your content matches the selected key phrase that was used to find you.
-How do you increase visibility to these types of visitors? By determining your target audience, you can research what typical key phrases they are using to look for your services. Your site should be user-friendly and customers should have no problem navigating around your site. Different key phrases should take them to different pages of your site. This will help ease their transition from the search engine results to the product that they are looking for. You should consider directing people to other pages on your site other than your home page, for this reason.
-How is all of this relevant to my key phrases? By manipulating your site to closely match the relevancy of the key phrases, you can increase visibility and narrow down your target audience. Each page should ideally match the key phrase that you are optimizing for. This will help raise the quality of your site in the eyes of the search engines and your consumers.
Web site promotion is a tedious, necessary step that should be taken by your search engine marketing company. Done correctly and diligently, you could increase the quality of your traffic, visibility of your site, and in turn, your sales.