Website Positioning or Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
INCREASED TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE MEANS MORE MONEY FOR YOUR BUSINESS!
We proudly serve the Piedmont - Triad area of North Carolina and Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada).
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of obtaining the best positioning possible on Search Engine Returned Pages (SERP). SEO is part art and part science requiring a website designed technically correct, and including Marketing Strategies. The much coveted top positions on search engine results pages are acquired by first reworking the website to make it search engine friendly. Typically, SEO strategy involves the optimization of both internal (on page) factors and external (off page) factors.
On Page Factors:
Each and every page of the website must be compliant with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) rules. This is not strictly required for SEO, but is very beneficial, because if a website is compliant, search engines efficiently and effectively run their indexing scan on your website. W3C compliance also means that the website has properly written code; sloppiness is not a good practice in general, and with SEO in particular. All pages require that the main elements are properly designed with SEO in mind, such as the meta-data, headers, file names etc.
Content is King. This is probably the most common phrase you will hear about SEO. Search engines (in particular Google) give more relevance to frequently updated and rich content; many website pages never change. Content MUST be relevant from a Marketing viewpoint as well. If you are reading our pages, it is because we put tremendous emphasis on both SEO and Marketing techniques. Your website's visitor must find relevant and useful information in order to be stimulated to buy services or products from your website.
Off Page Factors:
Search engines evaluate the popularity of a website in order to assign relevancy to any search performed. If you have relevant content you will gain popularity among other websites. This so called 'link exchange' does not work well anymore, because it is abused by 'link farms.' Many companies (especially overseas) still offer this kind of service. It is usually a cheap service, but basically useless. We suggest you invest your money wisely in techniques that WILL yield a better return.
White and Black Hat Strategies:
Less than ethical SEO engineers, go for the easy and cheap route. They use the so called Black Hat strategies. These are short cuts usually involving spamming search engines. This is not only the best way to get banned or penalized by search engines, but it is the quickest way to throw away money (zero ROI).
White Hat Strategies follow ethical principles for SEO. These are the best solutions, because SEO efforts tend to be persistently long-lasting. We have one website that was designed in 1998 with SEO in mind. Despite the many years that have passed, that website is still very well positioned on all major search engines. Why? Because a well designed website, using ethical SEO strategies, will always be rewarded with higher ranking by search engines, no matter how many times they change their algorithms. This example sheds an unflattering light on 'SEO specialists' who claim that you must pay a monthly fee, to 'catch up' with continuously evolving SEO algorithms. This is simply not true! Search engines change algorithms to avoid tricks from unscrupulous SEO 'specialists' and to improve user experience.
Due to the above mentioned factors, it should be clear that SEO is a long-term yet expensive process. You cannot expect quick results nor to get an effective job done for a little amount of money. You CAN expect more traffic with a better return on your investment as opposed to the PPC (Pay Per Click) strategy. For more on this subject we suggest you read our page titled SEO FAQs.
Triad-websites emphasizes good and compliant design of websites with professionally written content. This is all you need to get your website out of 'cyber-fog.' Anything else is a waste of your SEO efforts and money.
