Search Engine Optimization - The Process

Be Careful Out There

For many SEO companies, the formula for Search Engine Optimization is:

• Make outlandish claims.
• Hide behind ridiculous mumbo jumbo.
• Charge outrageous prices.
• Cash your check and laugh all the way to the bank.

How CMEwebsites Does SEO

At CME, we've developed our own, common sense approach to search engine optimization.  Depending on your company, your goals, and your needs, we may do some or all of the following to help your website show up in online searches: 

Keyword Research

At CMEwebsites, we use the services of Keyword Discovery to find out what your potential customers are actually looking for online.  If you optimize your website for "bookkeeping," but your audience is searching for "accounting services" or "QuickBooks Pro Advisors," showing up in Google for the wrong words isn't going to help you.

Contact CMEwebsites today to learn more about our SEO process. 

Competitive Research 

Most of your online competitors are already using keywords in some fashion, even if theirs is an ineffective, ham-handed approach.  As part of our research, we can isolate the keyword sets from your competitors' websites and feed them back into our own Keyword Research to enrich the available pool of information.

We'll isolate other identifiable SEO factors from your competitors, including age-of-site, size of site, page titles, page descriptions, site maps, inbound links, and more.  This effort builds a foundation of understanding, like scouting out your competition in a race.  What training and effort is necessary for you to have a chance against them?

Website Reconfiguring or Redesign

SEO is not magic.  Websites have to be built for it, and yours may not be.  We've seen many websites that seemed designed from the ground up to block the search engines and make themselves almost invisible to Google, Yahoo, and the rest.

We have to evaluate your site code to see if your website can be made search engine friendly, or which optimization techniques have a chance of working with the existing code.  It may mean some minor adjustments, or it may mean scrapping everything and starting over from scratch.   

Website Content Development

Words on the page do a lot of heavy lifting in Search Engine Optimization.  At CMEwebsites, our chief writer (and owner) Scot Noel has 30 years experience as a professional writer and a decade of experience writing for websites and search engine success.  We can write for your business and use the words on the page to successfully attract both searches and the interest of customers. 

Recommendations for "Off-Site" Optimization Efforts

Depending on what we find in our research, or after evaluating the results of actual optimization, we may recommend "off-site" SEO and web promotion techniques, including: link building, social media, blogging, a Facebook business page, YouTube videos, Pay-Per-Click ad campaigns, and more.  CME is not expert at all of these, nor do we have the staffing to do social media or link building campaigns; however, we can usually get you started in the right direction and make referrals to some of the industries best practitioners. 

Results Tracking and Analysis

Looking for your website in Google is NOT how to tell if SEO is working.  You may achieve some dramatic search results, but they could be illusory.  Search Engines are advancing every day, with more and more personalization of response.  That means soon your site may be number one on your computer, simply because the search engines have figured out that you like to see your own website in the search results.

The way to tell if SEO is working is with web statistics.  At CMEwebsites, we use SmarterStats as a part of our Professional Hosting package.  This allows us (and you) to see what is actually happening when people visit your site.  Are the numbers increasing?  Are the visitors exploring the site more deeply?  Do they stay longer?  Do they take some action to make contact with your company?  In general, we can even tell if they are coming from your service area.  And every time a change to your site is made, we can review its affect on web traffic.

Even more fundamental than statistics, you participate in tracking SEO success by seeing if business improves, more customers come from the web, and more profits are made.  To learn more, contact CMEwebsites today.

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