SEO - Is your company executing the job?

 

On SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is an action that makes your product or services website more visible in the search engines.  The higher the ranking, the more likely the potential consumer will go with your product or service because they have found you first due to SEO.

 

It really depends on where you are looking to have your company found, and what key words, meta-tags and phrases you would prefer people are looking up to find your company. To answer your questions in a general sense:

 

 

Q: How long should it take to optimize a website for SEO? Is 6 months really a stretch, or is that standard?

A: It usually takes at least two months for a websites SEO to become effective. Depending upon how much you have spent, and if you have paid for strictly organic SEO, or PPC ad campaigns, I would say that you should re-evaluate your contract with the company or firm that you hired to do SEO for you.

Q. Many people seem to promise "#1" or first page ranking. Who really is effective in doing this? Wouldn't this smell a little of scam?

A. You are absolutely right, I would say that at least 90% of the SEO companies that you come across promise #1 on the first page ranking. But the company's that are actually effective in doing this are the ones that a great track record, and are willing to show you a portfolio of at least 5 previous (recent) SEO projects that were actually executed in a timely fashion.

Another thing to factor in; Local SEO as opposed to whether it be national, or international. This is also a big difference. Usually, local SEO is much easier to execute getting a company on the first page, and sometimes the first slot of a search engine. National page rankings would depend on what your competition is in your target market. Maybe your product is not like the others? But do you offer the same service of product? This is when it can come complicated. And the same goes with international SEO. The more area that needs to be covered, the more competition there usually is.

What is a "HIT" to a website?

Have you ever see the claim, "We get 80,000 hits a month" on a web site? Or the scrolling counter at the bottom of a page? What does it all mean and is it accurate? What is the difference between a hit and a visitor?


A "hit" is not a visitor to the web site, but a hit on the web server. A hit on the web server can be a graphic, java applet, the html file, etc. So, if a site has 79 small graphics on the page, every visitor to the site registers as 80 hits on the server (79 graphics plus the html file). In this case, 80,000 hits translates to just 1,000 visitors.
As webmasters, designers, business owners, SEOs, etc., we are not concerned with hits to a site. We want to know the number of visitors to our site. And we don't just want to know about every visitor--we want to know about every unique visitor. So if we can't count hits, can we use a counter?

The problem with using counters to track our visitors is they are set up to measure page views, not unique visitors. Everytime someone views your page, whether it's the first time or the twentieth, that visitor is counted. And if the page times out for some reason and they "Reload," it counts them again. And if someone just wants to have fun with your counter, they can exit and enter the site several times and are counted as a visitor each time, even if they never look at a product.