THE FACTS:
Other web design companies won’t tell you this, but not all businesses need a lot of search engine optimization. In fact some businesses, like HVAC companies and appliance dealers are actually better off putting money into old school media like the Yellow Pages. Richmond Media won’t try to sell an SEO package to a business that doesn’t need it.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is what attracts search engines to rank and list your website. But that’s more difficult than it sounds. Search engines constantly change the rules for getting listed, so effective SEO in 2010 won’t work as well in 2013. SEO needs to be revisited on a regular basis, to make sure that your website keeps its ranking.
How Does SEO Work?
Google is pretty much the gold standard for search engines. Here are things that will help Google give your website a good ranking:
- Page Titles: Your page title is what’s displayed in the title bar of your web browser. Google reads approximately the first 60 characters (including spaces) of the title, so attractive search friendly words need to be there. This is a big change from a few years ago, when Google looked at the first 200 characters. A good reason to stay current on modern SEO practices.
- Meta Description: This is text in the code of your web page. Google looks at the first 160 characters (including spaces). In addition, when Google lists your website, your meta description is what’s displayed in your listing. If you have no meta description, Google just displays the first 160 characters of your page’s text.
- Page Content: Google will read the text content of your pages, checking to see if the text uses relevant keywords for your business, and whether that text uses the same text used in page titles and meta description.
- Back Links: This is critically important! If Google sees a lot of other industry relevant websites linking to yours, Google will see your site as an important site in your industry. But not all back links are equal. Those back links need to be to high traffic sites, and they need to share the same kind of SEO. As a matter of fact, Google will even penalize a website that gets lots of back links from sites outside your industry. This is to lessen the influence of “link farms”, which were very popular a few years ago, and that tended to give sites artificially high rankings.
Why Richmond Media?
We are experts at getting traffic to your website. we use all of the tools available, we stay current on the trends, and we follow the site stats of every website we build. For example, Google looks for specific things on a website, like a unique page title, meta descriptions in the code, quality text on the page that is duplicated in that code, backlinks from reputable websites, etc.
In addition, Google loves DYNAMIC websites. These are websites that have changing content, not static sites. Because we build of of our websites with content management, we have this covered from the start. Social media is also a very important ranking tool. We can create and link your social media to your website. We also know that blogging is a factor that search engines look at, so we can not only set up your blog, we can help you learn how to use it.
But here’s a BIG DIFFERENCE between us and other companies. We know that some industries aren’t as affected by search engine rankings as others are. If search engine rankings aren’t terribly important to the success of your website, we will tell you. We won’t charge you for unnecessary work.
And if you’re not the type of person that want to blog, we understand that too. Richmond Media doesn’t ever pressure clients into doing things they don’t want to. we want you to be comfortable with your site, not pressured.
And it doesn’t stop there. We will submit your website to both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. We do the little things, like submitting a sitemap. And we do the big things, like redirecting your old pages to your new ones if we redesign your website. We also offer premium services such as business directory submission, if you are serious about your traffic.