What do I mean by this? Well quite simply does your SEO company have an interest in what they have done positively and perhaps negatively to your site? At TopRankings we send our clients a monthly report,this monthly report shows the client what the current rankings are within the chosen search engines for their keywords. Furthemore clients have the opportunity to logon to their client portal where not only can they see the latest report but can see the initial rankings report of their website before we took over their SEO campaign. This makes our process very transparent to our clients and can clearly see if the SEO tactics we have employed are thus benefiting their rankings.

This report opens us up for critiscim as sometimes rankings do drop but rest assured our highly experienced SEO engineers also have access to these reports and thus concentrate their work on targeting those keywords that may of dropped.

Without these reports we as an SEO company and you as a client are shooting in the dark.

Now is the time to hold your SEO accountable. If you aint getting monthly reports dont think you should be?

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Another great EBOOK we recommend is by our good friend Glenn Murray from Divine Write he has produced what we would describe as the most complete SEO Books around. Glenn goes into the great depth about SEO and includes a range of topics that are sure to wet your appetite.

SEO is a constantly changing landscape and many people simply dont have time to practice with the methodologies in both EBOOKS and thus they employ the services of a SEO firm. However for anyone who wants to learn more we encourage them at the very least to read the books.

To view Google Starter Guide, please click here

To view more details of Glenn’s book, please click here

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We’re often asked “Should our business dabble in Google Adwords?”

There are several answers and theories and many businesses will do both Sponsored Links and ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ at some stage. We find many of our existing clients tried Sponsored Links first and learnt the hard way that Adwords whilst beneficial….is not a long term sustainable approach.
My 3 Step Recommendation:

STEP 1:
Invest in a successful website for your business which should include:
(a) A professional and credible looking website
(b) Simple navigation structure for your prospective customers to find relevant information or products
(c) Content on your site, especially the home page that clearly spells out in seconds the product or service your company provides
(d) A number of ways for your customers to engage including a prominently displayed phone number / hyperlinked email address and web form

STEP 2:
Plant the seed for long term sustainable results at a fixed monthly investment through ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. A significant increase in the website traffic should come through between months 6-12 depending on the competitive nature of your chosen keywords. Significant traffic increase and 24/7 exposure on Google to your target market with the successful website described above should get your phone ringing.

STEP 3:
Let the new business sales and profits from ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ boost your ability to then invest in Sponsored Links….after all there is still an estimated 15% market share to be secured.

CONCLUSION:
Both forms of Google exposure will be beneficial for your business when engaging the right professional company to manage the SEO or SEM campaign.
In our experience however, most of our business clients are unable and mostly unwilling to sustain an ever increasing, costly and very limited Sponsored Links advertising campaign.

These businesses prefer to be found at the top left of Google on a 24/7 exposure basis, not only because this is where most of their prospective customers actually click, but more importantly these businesses understand the buying psychology of their prospective customers. These prospective customers continue to use Google to produce and deliver them with results that are the most relevant and trustworthy for their search.

When you are the one appearing towards the top of the search engine, you’re one step closer to closing that next sale….even if the Googler was searching for you at 1am.

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We love clients who are passionate about their site, they have decided SEO is right for them but now they want results and we want to be the SEO organisation to prove to them that SEO can add tremendous value to any business, but I also hate this questions as usually the answer I give is not an answer they like.

The simple answer is we dont know how long it can take, while some sites has taken less than a week some sites have taken 12+ months to achieve, every website is built different, some are new sites and some are very old sites, because their are so many variables involved it is impossible and unethical for us to guarantee when results will be achieved.

The problem for our clients is we bill monthly, and every month when their money gets withdrawn from their bank account, naturally they are going to ask what did I get for this payment?

SEO is like a house, when you build a house their is much work done in the development in the house before the 1st brick is even laid. SEO is exactly the same, the initial few months we are preparing your site, getting it ready for the bricks, but who wants to build a house with a bad foundation. If you build a house on a solid foundation, you have done your soil testing, been granted your permits etc you know that once you lay the bricks the number of issues you have in the building of the house will be dramatically reduced if you spent the early days getting a solid foundation. SEO is no different.

At TopRankings we are not after quick results we are after sustained results. ie look at www.ittelligent.com.au, the keyword IT support has been #1 for 2 years straight (Google.com.au) and has only been knocked to #2 for a few days here and their.

So where does all this leave you? While we dont offer you guarantees what we do promise is if we dont deliver your results within 12 months of SEO commencment you simply suspend payment until such time we have achieved the results outlined in the beginning of the campaign.

If you are after guarantees and assurances that SEO can be achieved within 3 – 6 months then we will recommend you choose a different SEO firm (hey we are happy to provide you their details if you like), but in 6 months we will see you again as you will soon realise that what was promised to you hasnt been achieved. TopRankings are not the cheapest SEO firm in the world but like anything else in the world you simply get what your pay for.

You will then join our ever expanding list of what we call our 2nd try clients (clients who have tried SEO elsewhere and have finally came back to TopRankings as they realised we are honest and fair).

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While I could sit here and give you a stat of how many users use Google vs other search engines, we all realistaclly know the majority of the population prefer Google above Yahoo and NineMsn.

When we first start SEO on a website we  notice that Ninemsn and Yahoo will index the changes and rank the site (hopefully higher) a lot sooner than Google. Now I could try and explain why Google takes longer than any other search engine to display your higher ranked pages but I will leave that argument/discussion for another time.

In TopRankings eyes we target you for all 3 search engines (not necessarily equally). So why do we do this? Let me explain!!!

When you purchase your shiny new PC and turn it on and goto Internet Explorer what is the 1st site that usually appears? It is usually NineMSN (Channel Nine and Microsoft collaboration web portal/search engine). Would you believe their are many users that dont know how to change the default page so they keep Ninemsn running as the default and thus this is usually the search engine they primarily use. Some users simply prefer Yahoo over Google, after all Yahoo supplies the users with an abundance of information (yes Google can but once again some users dont know how to enable this feature).

We use the rankings we have achieved for you in Yahoo and Ninemsn as a guide, if we have achieved great rankings for you in these 2 search engines we can safely assume given time these results will flow thru to Google (unfortunately with Google, time is the million dollar question). We personally have noticed it can take several months for the changes to appear where Yahoo and Ninemsn is usually days/weeks NOT months.

So in summary their are definetly users who use other search engines than Google. Why wouldnt you want to target these users as well?

Judging success of SEO shouldnt be simply based on what position you are in Google what really matters is how much bigger is your wallet getting? I personally dont care if I am #1 or #3 or what search engines I am top results for as I try and be top for all search engines and not just one. What really matters to me is how many people found me on the web and if I have converted them as a client? And then I always ask myself this question, if I didnt SEO my site would the client ever would of known I existed? If the answer is NO then SEO is working for me regardless of the search engine and/or my ranking.

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Now on the surface this sounds like a ridicilous question to ask but after a while I realised it was a genuine concern from many of our clients. Well the answer forms many parts, their are a list of questions I ask my clients.

. Are you measuring where new clients are coming from?
. Did they actually find you thru the search engines?
. What keyword did they use to find you?
. What is the cost of acquiring the customers? ie does the profit the new sales derive from the internet justify the cost of SEO?
. Should your site not rank highly in search engines what would this do to your bottom line?

Once you know where new clients are coming thru only then can you safely say if you need SEO or not.

The second part of this answer, if you decide to stop SEO; gradually your rankings will fall, this is due to numerous reasons a) SEO techniques change on a weekly basis and not keeping your site upto date with the latest changes will impact your rankings b) Your competitors will often be employing their own SEO techniques thus boosting their rankings which would make your rankings drop.

Everyone knows that the economy is not the best at the moment and organisation are cutting expenditure, however to earn money you need to spend money, it is ultimately upto you to decide if you can afford not to have SEO.

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Anyway here we are in 2009 and what a great real life example I have.

TopRankings took on a new client (client will remain confidential as per our NDA agreement) however client has 2 websites and we were comissioned to do SEO on one of their website. As usual with new clients we do a ranking check of their current rankings before we apply our techniques so we know what effect our techniques has had on their rankings. This ranking was performed on the one website we were assigned and not the secondary site.

So our technical team and myself went thru the site and applied our numerous techniques to get their site SEO friendly. We didnt pay much notice to the 2nd site afterall it wasnt a site we were employed to SEO.

The following month we internally ran an ranking report of our clients site as well as their competitors etc and we noticed that their 2nd website had reached #1 – #3 rankings for the majority of their keywords. Our team were more than surprised at this and at this point we decided to investigate this 2nd website, upon inspection we noticed the 2nd website was a direct copy of the 1st website. Upon making this findings we decided to change some slight text on the 1st website and we then noticed that these changes were instantly replicated across to the 2nd site.

With this in mind we then realised that the subsequent increase of rankings of the 2nd site had to be down to the changes we made to the 1st site.

We then decided to see the differences between the 2 sites to see why the 2nd site suddenly jumped in rankings than the 1st site, we looked at # of links and age of domain, since all on page parameters were the same. The # of links between the sites was fairly even between them so we knew the links we created for the client while having some impact wouldnt of been the main source of ranking increase, however we then noticed the 2nd site was some 8 years older than the 1st site? Could the age of the domain dramatically increase the rankings of a site once correct SEO onsite techniques have been applied.

Furthermore how does this answer duplicate text problems? Well I aint overly concerned as I believe search engines can work out what sites have the same owners etc and discount duplicate content issues.

Are answer is yes age plays a big part in rankings when comparing apples with apples.

So in summary our client should be happy as we will eventually have 2 of their sites ranking well while they only pay for 1 site to get optimised.

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