The term “SEO” stands for search engine optimization. SEO refers to the process of getting your site primed and ready for the search engines. There are things you do to your own site and things you do on other sites that will effect your SEO. In this post we will go over a few of the different factors.

First we will go over the different things that you can do to your own site which will effect your search engine placement. Everything I’m about to say are basically educated guesses because with the exception of Google engineers, nobody knows exactly what works and what doesn’t.

The main parts of on site SEO are: META tags, page titles, and text

Page Titles

The most important part of on page SEO is the page title. If you want to rank for “keyword 1″ in Google then your page title should ideally be “Keyword 1″. Sometimes a client will want to have their company name in the title as well as the main keyword so it may look something like “Company Name | Keyword 1″ which isn’t quite as good as the first variation but it’s still pretty good. I’m sure we have all seen page titles like this:

Company Name | keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 keyword5 keyword6 keyword7 keyword8 keyword9

One may think this is a superior page title because it contains so many of the desired keywords right in the page’s title. Unfortunately the more keywords the title contains to more watered down and less important each keyword is. You want to keep all your page titles short and sweet and make sure each page title accurately describes the page that it represents.

META Tags

Today META tags aren’t nearly as important as they were back in the day. Years ago the search engines would pretty much take META tags at face value and rank you according to what you had in your META tags. Of course you can probably guess how that worked out in the end so today there is much less importance placed on the METAs.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore the METAs, you should always write unique keywords and descriptions for each page if possible.

Text & Content

You must have unique content if you plan on ranking for any terms which are worthwhile. The text should ideally contain the keyword or phrase that you want to rank for at least once or twice. For example if you want to rank for “naples web design” then you would try to get that phrase into the body of the text once or twice, put it in the page title, and even make sure you get it in the META tags too.

You can never have enough unique content, ever. Think of it as fishing and you’re fishing for leads, sales, or new clients. Each article or post on your site acts as the fishing pole, the more content you have on your site the more poles you have in the water. We all know that the guy with 20 poles in the water is probably going to catch a lot more fish than the guy with one pole.

That pretty much sums up the major parts of on page SEO. The factors above are certainly not the only parts of on site SEO but they are the main ones.

The main parts of off site SEO are: external links, the authority of the external links, and the anchor text

External Links

The art of getting other websites to link to you, without a doubt the most important part of off-site or external SEO.  You can do this by tricking webmasters using link bait, creating blogs or profiles on their sites and doing it yourself, blogging on 4rd party sites, exploiting security holes in the script the host is running on, and various other ways.

Authority

There is a lot of debate on how important this is. There is no question that a link from a site like microsoft.com is far better than a link from napleswebdesign.net. What is open for debate surrounds how much effect low authority sites have on ranking. Many people say that it depends on the site being linked to. For example, if you took microsoft.com and pointed 500 low quality links at it you would probably rank for the keyword you were going after because of the trust and authority microsoft.com already has, so Google is going to take that into account. Now if you were to go to GoDaddy and register a brand new domain and then point 500 low quality links at it, it will probably raise some red flags with Google because you have an untrusted site getting lots of backlinks from other untrusted sites.

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the text that the actual link is made up of. Here is an example of Anchor Text. When you get links to your site you should definitely try and get your keywords in the anchor text but don’t always use the same anchor text, mix it up some. When I get links to this site I may get 20 links with the anchor text of “naples web design” then 20 that say “naples website design” and so on. The words you use in your anchor text directly effect how Google ranks you so you should be sure to choose your anchors wisely.

If you don’t have enough time or patience to do your own search engine marketing I encourage you to contact us and see how we can help you.

Naples Search Engine Optimization is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

How to go about finding a good SEO company in Naples, many people have asked this question and few have found the answer they’re looking for. I can’t tell you how many times we have disgruntled clients coming in with a bad taste in their mouth because of what their prior “SEO company” did to them.

Many SEOs will promise the client the stars and fail to deliver, why scamming and lying are so common in the SEO field I can’t answer but there are definitely more sad stories than happy ones when it comes to SEO. Part of the problem, I believe, is that nobody wants to tell the customer what they don’t want to hear. You have a client come in and say that he would like to rank for some national search term like “used cars”. Instead of explaining to the client that the SEO doesn’t have the skills and resources to take such a term, the SEO will lie just to get the clients money. After a few months the client starts to realize this “SEO” lied to them and their site is never going to rank for “used cars”.

At RT Design we will tell you right off the bat if your desired terms are feasible or not. If you come in asking for crazy search terms that we can’t get or that you can’t afford, we’re going to tell you. Usually we don’t take anything national because of several reasons. The main problem with national terms is the client about falls out of their chair when they get the pricing, they don’t truly understand what they’re asking for. That’s not to say we can’t do national terms, we do and can. It’s just that usually the client isn’t going to have the money to pay for such SEO.

When it comes to local SEO we very rarely turn down any SEO. We have stopped accepting real estate clients because of the long sandbox period. It takes a new site months before they start ranking for real estate terms and during the sandbox time the client is calling and demanding to know why they aren’t ranking. When you try to explain to them that there is a sort of waiting period it doesn’t go over too well. They paid and now they want to rank, they really aren’t interested in hearing about sandboxes or wait times.

With the exception of real estate search terms, we take and finish pretty much any Naples/Fort Myers keywords within 3 months. Prices vary depending on how competitive the niche is but you’re looking at a ballpark of a couple hundred dollars per keyword you want ranked. Typically we offer top3 or top5 placement depending again on the niche and the competitiveness. We have had clients in the past who prefer to pay a little extra to guarantee a #1 spot.

Naples SEO Company is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Have you ever seen or heard the term search engine marketing or commonly called “SEO” which is the easy way of saying search engine optimization? Well if you’re a business owner you need to know about it because it can literally turn your struggling company into a monster, even in these rough economic times.

When you hear people talking about search marketing, SEO, search engine optimization, or any of the other terms that are out there, they are talking about getting your site ranked at the top of the search results for a list of given keywords or keyphrases.

I’ll try to explain this for people who don’t really get the internet, search engines, and how it all works. So let’s say you own a lawn service company in Naples or Fort Myers. Now put yourself in the shoes of your customers who are looking to hire a lawn service company. More and more people turn to the internet to find what they need. If you go to Google and type in naples lawn care, does your company site show up? Is it #1? Is it on the first page? Maybe it’s on the second page? The point is that if you are unable to find your site then how are your potential clients supposed to find your site?

That’s where we come in, we can take your site(if you don’t have one we are also a full service web design company) and put it at the top of the search results for the search words or phrases you want most. I don’t need to tell you how bad the economy is right now and we both know companies, especially small local companies, need all the help they can get when it comes to finding new clients and leads. Being at the top of Google search for your desiered search words is crucial to your online sucess.

So what are you waiting for? You can come by our offices or give us a ring Monday – Friday 8am – 8pm and see how we can help you realize your online dream.

Naples Search Engine Marketing is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Everybody wants their website to rank highly in Google. The higher SERP you have, the more exposure you get, which equals more visitors who should translate into more customers.

We all know about keywords and their impact on achieving a higher SERP placement. If the word or phrase you are trying to rank with is a competitive one then this is where quality comes in. It doesn’t matter how many times your keyword of phrase appears on a page, Google has moved on from there. It got wise quite quickly to keyword stuffing, Alt text and all the other black hat tricks that webmaster were employing to get ranked higher.

Now the overall quality of the site is judged. Both by how often the site is updated, and how many inbound links there are. Those links are then in turn judged on how relevant to the site content they are and ranked accordingly.

If you want to give your site the best start possible there are a few things you can do.

Write a good page title between the tags for each page. It should accurately describe what’s going on each particular page.

Try and create new content each week. If you or the site owner can’t do that, get someone to do it for you. Continually evolving sites, with value being added regularly appear much higher on SERPs. Make the new contact good quality content, while wanting to appeal to a robot, your site also needs to appeal to human traffic.

Link to good quality relevant sites, and try and get reciprocal links back from them. Each relevant link to you is counted as a “vote” by Google. Every single one will count in getting the site higher.

Lastly, don’t be tempted to trick Google into placing you at the top. They employ teams of very, very clever people to program out as many tricks as possible. They also have a policy of “blacklisting” sites they think are trying to play the system. If you want to use Google, play by its rules. There are still plenty of legitimate ways of getting what you want.

The main thing to remember when designing a site to rank well is quality. Ignore the SERPs and concentrate on creating a useful, useable site with quality content. The quality is the element that will make it a success or not. It’s like businesses who concentrate on good customer service instead of the bottom line. Look after the customers, create a pleasing experience for them and the money will follow.

Thinking like Google for a moment. If you were a multi-billion dollar business whose reputation and profit came adverts shown with search engine results, would you want to be known for showing quality websites that fulfil the search criteria, or for returning sites that knew all the tricks? The reason Google works so well is because you get what you search for. If that changed and all of a sudden your search just returned amateur sites that you didn’t want, you would stop using it.

The key to a good SERP position is quality, not quantity.

Quality over Quantity. is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

I used to use the free tool at forums.digitalpoint.com which is a huge webmaster forum. Unfortunely the tool is broken and the owner of the site is being sued by Amazon for cookie stuffing so he doesn’t really have much time to mess with his sites.

I’ll take a few screen shots of the tool for you to see below

What do you use to check your ranks? is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Anyway, as of now, RT Design holds #1 and #2.

RT Design moves to #2 for “Naples Web Design” in Google is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Some of you may have read the post I made a couple weeks ago about taking #1-#10 for “naples seo” in Google. As of right now I think we’re holding #1 – #7, it’s hard because everytime I get it straight 1-8, some other site pops up and breaks the chain. It seems the sitepoint and netmedia ones are what’s messing it up for us. I actually think I don’t want to waste anymore time on this project because the payoff isn’t worth it. Let’s be honest, I’m not going to see an increase in traffic or leads by knocking out the last two spots for the search phrase, so why waste the time and effort?

Anyone, that’s about all I have to say for this post. I think I will create a new video blog today too, not sure what the topic will be though.

Fort Myers SEO is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

SEO is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Our SEO leads are going through the roof now, people want to be ranked high in the search engines for their specific terms. If you’re a plumber in Naples, you want to be ranked 1st in Google for “naples plumber”, and that’s where we come in. You tell us your business and then we sit down and figure out what people are searching to find you.

There are really two ways of helping people find your website. First you can go with PPC which stands for “pay per click”. PPC is the ads you see along the right side of search engine results pages. It’s a fast way to jump to the top of the search results but it comes with a small issue, every time someone clicks you have to pay. Depending on what niche you’re in it may only be 3 or 4 cents per click. However, if you have a health related or legal related company you’ll find that you’re paying between $1 and $10 per click…yes EACH time someone clicks to your site you will have to pay that much money no matter if they buy something or turn around and leave. If you have deep pockets this can be a great option to go with where you will see immediate results.

For those of you who don’t have the kind of money to pay $1.00 or more for each visitor to your site, there is a second option. The second option is called “SEO” or search engine optimization. Basically its involves a few different things. The main goal is to get your site ranked in the top 3 search results for a given search terms. Again I’ll use the Naples Plumbing term. Say someone searches for “naples plumbing”, obviously you want to be the first site they see because the first site receives about 44% more traffic than the number 2 spot and the percentages keep falling from there. We will get you ranked for your term, different niches will cost different amounts. In other words, getting ranked for “naples real estate” is going to cost much more than getting ranked for “naples plumbing” because not only is the spot worth much more, there is a ton more competition. The attractive part of SEO is that you don’t have to pay everytime a visitor comes to your site, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

If you’re interested in learning more, please visit our contact page and setup a free phone or in-person meeting and we will help you decide exactly what’s best for your situation.

What are you doing to earn extra during these times? is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design