Search Engine Optimization

We are often asked how Search Engine Optimization works. Search Engine Optimization, or quite simply called “SEO”, considers the balance between how search engines work and what people search for, using search technology readily available through search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Google, to name but a few. Performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing a website by editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords as well as to remove barriers to the indexing activities of the search engines. CharlesWorks has been at this process over two decades and is very good at all aspects of this process.

We take a really down-to-Earth approach to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process. We have been doing this work since 1998 and have more experience than most in this field. Our experience has enabled us over time to determine what actually works and what doesn’t. The Internet has grown substantially since we first started, and therefore the quest for higher search engine placement has risen dramatically. Competition has become fierce. Through that growth and competition has arisen many myths, scams and outright frauds regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is unfortunate and only serves to generate mistrust of companies providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. Common sense would tell a potential web services client to trust a company that has been continued its growth as CharlesWorks has over twenty years. The fly-by-nights come and go in a generally short time. Look at our Host Institute page for more details about what to look for. Be cautious if some of the scam phrases are used. Protect your web development investment!

When ongoing fees are offered to get you found proceed with extreme skepticism and caution. Another situation we see is where the search engine optimization (SEO) company charges in excess of $1,000 up front to get started. Think hard about that. CharlesWorks can usually accomplish the process correctly for a few hundred dollars. If the SEO company claims fixed ongoing monthly fees to get you found, again, please be very leery of the company. When we do the necessary work for you, we charge you for the work as we go along. No ongoing, unending “forever fixed fees”.

For several decades and going strong you can rely on CharlesWorks to be here for you. At CharlesWorks, we simply don’t take advantage of our clients – most of whom do not understand the intricacies and technology behind what we do. We try to take the mystery out of all this and use our experience coupled with mostly common sense to yield productive results. We’d not have been in business several decades if we treated people this way.

Web visitors cannot see your overall web traffic. Unless you let them do so, this information is only available through the website’s web server. Our servers (in fact pretty much ALL website servers) keep web stats – data that shows visitors to your site – meaning ALL visitors and traffic – on our servers – and these individuals telling you that there is little or no traffic have absolutely no idea whatsoever what your web traffic really is.

Search engines can’t give total website traffic. Connected, in a sense, with the fact that website visitors cannot see your traffic, a search engine can ONLY tell you (if you have gone through the process of setting up an account with them to do so) what traffic it believes transpired as a result of being found in ITS searches. It CANNOT tell you the total traffic to your site (unless there is code in your web site that contacts the search engine directly). For example, Google has no data on how much traffic went to your site as a result of Internet surfers directly typing in your domain name in the address bar. Continuing the example, Google does not know how many Internet surfers were directed to your site by Bing, or by Yahoo, or by Ask, or by any of the other 200+ search engines people use to find things on the web (again, unless there is code in the web site to tell Google, in this example).

All potential business counts. If you had three potential customers standing in front of you – would you tell one to go away because you only want the other two? That’s what you’re essentially doing if you only care about Google. If we look at the three major search engines – Google, Bing (powered by Microsoft), and Yahoo (also powered by Microsoft) – it breaks down that Google is used by roughly two thirds of the Internet users. We have actually had several people tell us over the years that they only care about their Google results. Put another way, that’s like someone saying only two out of three potential sales is worth pursuing. The fickle state of Internet searches makes it even more important to work on being found well in ALL the major search engines. At any moment the rules can be changed and a website’s placement can go away or change dramatically in either direction. In fact, this has happened many times – where one of the search engines changes how it “sees” sites and sites are no longer found until changes are made to them. All your eggs, so to speak, in one search engine’s basket can result in a loss of traffic – and therefore revenue.

Junk backlinks hurts SEO. Junk backlinks are usually pure links on link farms. Link farms are list of links back to a site with no other information about the link. For example having your business name and location and phone number referenced on a site with your business name linked back to your site is a great link to have in as many places as possible. Link farms are popular with what’s called Black Hat SEO. Tons of back links from junk sites – and especially infected sites – appears to knock down a website’s standing over time. This seems to have been a common methodology applied by many “SEO Experts” that has caused site banning and overall lower search engine results. It is often referred to using terms like “black hat SEO” and so on. This is really the only thing these “experts” can do to try and get traffic without making any changes to the website.

Search engines are like artificial intelligence. Think about it. I truly believe if you go to Bing many times every day and do a search for an item, and never click on a choice, you’ve told Bing that the web pages presented were NOT good choices for those words. So you better take the moment to click on your site if you see it come up. On the other side of that is the fact that if you do that continuously the search engine “knows” that as well. Do it right and develop great content so the search engine “sees” a great website!

Sentences of the same repeated words hurts SEO. It is true there is a fair amount of repetition that helps SEO. For example, explaining a word or phrase several different ways and using several different forms of the word is very good. However, the simple repetition of lists of words (and especially the same word) arranged in meaningless fashion and invisible text will definitely hurt your search engine standing. We once had a client who came to us because of not being found whatsoever and discovered he had a single important word repeated in excess of 500 times at the bottom of his home page. Taking those out and developing pertinent content resolved the issue over time.

Always remember that if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process. We have heard many buzz words surrounding the topic. At the top of the list is the “Guaranteed Placement”. No one can guarantee placement except the search engine companies themselves. The most blatant we see are those promising huge, immediate increases in website traffic.