We've compiled some best-practice tips on how we optimize websites so you can be better informed. We hope you will take the time to read through some of our articles, we've written them with 8 years of ranking experience.

According to recent estimates, marketers in the US spent only $238.5 million on optimization this year already (as of April 2008). That's tiny considering that the average Web site gets 73% more total traffic within six months of optimization.

Why aren't marketers spending more? Here are two factors:

• Do-it-yourself syndrome - people think they can do this in-house. Search engines have a vested interest in you *not* being able to figure out how to do this. Google and others have giant tech teams working on changes to the organic ranking systems so you can't jerry rig your site to win. Most webmasters just can't win against them.
  
• Industry Trust - because this field is so lucrative many amateurs can just build a website and claim they can get top positions for $29.95 and it dilutes the industry for firms like ours with experienced professionals. Once burned by a company as mentioned above, it leaves business owners with a bad taste in their mouth about the industry as a whole.
• Intangible Cost - On the other end of the spectrum there are companies charging exorbitant prices and not delivering anywhere near the results they should. Typically you should pay a full time expert no less than $500 a month and really no more than $2,500 unless you have an employee onsite working for you. We as search marketers know the value of what this does to a website and will factor that into the cost in almost every case.
  
• Budget Flooding - Most companies blow their wad on paid advertising, which has really taken a hit in the last 3 years. In 2005 an average of 1.5% of the visitors to your site were expected to follow through to a sale. As of 2008 there is a whopping 0.03% that a visitor will purchase from you through a banner or text link advertisement.

Estimated Time to Completion - Per Phase

• Keyword Research & Analysis - 1 - 2 Weeks
  The most important part of website marketing is determining the keyword terms to be used that will generate quality, targeted website traffic. This process generally takes 5-7 days depending on the level of interaction of the client (time for interaction with the client is taken as 4 days (assumed that keywords for approval are sent and received in 3 days). We will actually visit your competitor's websites and gather information about how they are optimizing their sites to see what efforts we will have to take to perform higher in the rankings than their site currently does.
• Website Optimization - 2 - 4 months
  Assuming that all keywords have been approved and ftp information or alternative method of optimizing the website has been provided, we should have the process started by the 3rd week after agreements have been signed. We will include the option of slowing down our efforts should the traffic become too heavy, and also increase our efforts to drive even more targeted traffic. Pay-Per-Click is a good options to increase immediate traffic that is relevant and can be monitored.
• Submissions - 1 Month - Through Duration of Campaign
  Once the site has been fully optimized and all necessary changes are made, we will submit your site to the major search engines, directories, and authority sites to get your website listed in the top or the web directory results. This process generally takes 1 week but actual inclusion in the organic results may take longer. We know when to submit on what day of the week. Some directories require a fee-based inclusion which is optional according to your request.
• Expected time to see Results - this varies per search engine
  Each search engine indexes pages differently and takes different times to do so. Once submitted our work takes at least 2 weeks to be picked up and then your positions start to climb, continuing to do so for weeks and months to come. This is a process that unfortunately we cannot rush or we would, of course. Google sometimes takes 3 - 6 full months to index our work but we monitor the submitted work and know exactly when it happens so we can begin to see the effects in a timely manner. Once we see how the work is indexed by each particular engine we can then make changes to each submitted page to make it get spidered faster and move higher quicker. If you are in the Real Estate industry you can expect a longer "waiting" period because of Google's sandbox put in place in 2005 for all real estate webmaster link partners.
• Keyword Positioning Report - Monthly/Weekly
  Once each month/week you will receive a keyword ranking report. This report will outline your current positions in each of the major search engines. We can setup more frequent statistics if you would like to stay more involved on a daily basis.

Designing for Optimization

The overall design of your website is important in creating trust with your visitors. The nicer looking your website is and the more authoritative content, the more likely a person is to believe they can find the information, services or products they are looking for. In this area, your website can do pretty well but can do several small things to add content to change the site to become more search engine friendly and get picked up better by the major engines. The homepage needs good quality content so the spiders can grab your website first when they look for websites to place when a query is made.

We also need to utilize HTML pages more frequently throughout your site to increase relevant information that the search engines can see. This process can be the most time consuming and can include the addition of thousands of indexed, searchable, relevant pages. Sometimes we can do this dynamically but we want to keep a well rounded website that has all of the criteria met for maximum performance online.

Candy for the search engines.

We discuss Flash design and it's lack of searchable content, we will have to re-create any template designs to implement the infrastructure for the remaining of the optimization process. However, google has just release their capacity to read text within flash files which makes creating a 100% flash website more of a tangible idea if we can show google all of the text you normally would on a HTML site. You will be involved in this process for decisions and adjustments, as this will not be an exact copy and will need some fine tuning to appear the way you want it to. This process is very similar to creating a website from scratch and involves preliminary setup before we can start the optimization process.

Description / Title Keywords and Meta Tags

The "META Description" on your website is a very important portion of the site and is one of the top determining factors for good keyword relevancy. Many search engine spiders will look at the content of the website and compare that to the title and description to see if the two sections match themes. If they do, the search engines assume that whatever keyword terms they find in the title, description and content of the site must truly match the theme of the website and they will then list your site higher. This is the first real step of optimization, writing the tags correctly and placing them in the correct location in text links, images, tables, and hyperlinks.

How Do We Optimize Your Website?

As part of the optimization process, we will optimize the title and description on each page of your site that pertains to the keywords or keyword phrases that we are promoting. This process allows us to target the correct pages and keyword terms for those pages. We do a full analysis of all major keywords to find the best ones that will drive the most business. We work on acquiring more links for your website to build its overall Internet presence and PR (Page Rank) on Google. We also work on the keyword content on all your pages so it will be spidered correctly before your competition. There is much time and effort that is put into this initial setup phase of the optimization process as it is very tedious work and on average it usually takes at least a month of continuous work to setup your website.

Online Market Approach: Why is it Important?

The search engine industry is an ever-changing entity that is constantly updating its algorithms to provide quicker and more relevant searches. Because of this and the fact that no one, with the exception of the search engine companies, has complete and total control over the outcome of website positions, All Night I.T. has deemed it irresponsible to guarantee exact positions, top positions, or time to inclusion for any keyword(s) or keyword term(s). 100% of the time however we accomplish our goals of getting our clients to the 1st page listings in all the major engines.

Statistically search engines account for 85% of new visitors to websites. If your website does not have top 10 listings, you are missing out on large quantities of targeted website traffic and letting your competition get these important customers. When it comes to promotion, everyone knows that organic Search Engine Optimization is the key to obtaining many visitors. It is a proven fact that 74% of people doing searches use the natural listings more then the paid sponsored ones. Every month, over 450 million Internet users worldwide perform around 11 billion searches. If even a small fraction of these searches pertain to your business, you could potentially be losing thousands of dollars in monthly revenue if your website isn't optimized correctly. That is why this type of marketing is so important for your business.

Search Engine Optimization

+

Search Engine Marketing

=

OH MY GOOGLE!