[thelist] Search engine Optimization Questions

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Polina

Search Engine Optimisers (SEOs) do a number of things which may be
worthwhile:
1) Media buying - buying banner ad space (on general sites as well as SEs).
Like
   all good media buyers, a good SEO will be able to get prices much better
than
   ratecard (you should never pay ratecard prices)
2) Keyword choice - while you don't need to register keywords, an
understanding
    of how SE users in your audience think compared to what concepts you
want to
    convey will enable you to tweak your site to target it towards your
users
3) Reporting - telling you how well you're placed with your chosen keywords
4) Design of gateway pages - pages on other domains which act as gateways
    to your real site. These can be very keyword rich, and contain lots of
links to your
    site. And if there are a lot of them and they crosslink, your Google
ranking will also
    improve.
5) Ongoing management of the above without your hands-on intervention,
based on
    the reporting.

Now I'm not saying that any or all of these couldn't be done better by
someone else.
And it's probably a good idea to have reporting done by a different agency
to the
one being paid for results. But these things can be useful.

The key elements, though, you can do yourself:
1) Be what your audience are looking for
2) If you can do it with text, then do it with text
3) Code structurally and semantically (SEs give higher importance to <h#>,
<title>, alt
    attributes and so on)
4) Never resort to trickery (see point 1)

Cheers
Martin



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Subject:  [thelist] Search engine Optimization Questions


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A small design house I work with is pondering using the services of one of
those Search engine placement agencies where for a fee they guarantee you
results.

my questions are this:
1. have you used one of these services. What were your results? was it
worth the money to you
2. does anyone know what they do differently from the usual stuff web
developers do.
3. my theory is for certain kinds of sites. (small vacation homes for
example) you would do better to spend your time researching places where
they lists such things. Getting into search engines is one thing getting
hits is another. what do you think?


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