Our Search Engine Optimization Process

SEO in Plain English

Rising online competition for rankings has created a very singular need in online marketing. Search Engine Optimization helps websites rank better for keywords that draw the most interested visitors to their site. Our entire business in devoted to helping our clients achieve higher rankings and get the focused, targeted traffic that will easily convert.

We are one of the few search engine optimization agencies in Pittsburgh that boasts a totally transparent process. We tell you exactly what we're doing every step of the way and let you know where your links are coming from. Following is a diagram of our SEO process:

The first and possibly most important step of our process is the website review. In this initial review, we analyze the on-page elements that affect SEO the most:

• Inclusion of Title and Meta information
• Unique Title tags for each page
• Proper Robots TXT to allow search engines to scan the site successfully
• Amount of text on the page
• Keyword inclusion
• Broken Links
• Duplicate content issues
• URL and Site Architecture issues.

We ascertain any problems and use that information to prioritize our forthcoming efforts. Good SEO always begins on the website itself. Once we make the actual website, all other efforts become more effective.

SEO Analysis

The second phase of optimization is analysis. We do significant research into the industry's online presence, search out online competitors, and search volumes for very general keywords associated with that industry.

We look at what online competitors are optimizing for, where they get their links and take a look at their PPC campaigns and what SEO-specific efforts they have made. All of the resulting information helps us decide what we need to focus on first in order to become competitive quickly.

Keyword Research

The next important step in the optimization process keyword research. We take a look at industry trends and use Google's keywords tool as well as several others to ascertain the value of key phrases and keywords that prospective visitors would use when looking for the material on your site. Then we compile a list of approximately 200 keywords for which we will optimize your site. It is around these keywords that we will focus all of our link building and on-page optimization efforts.

On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization is the practice of raising the relevance of your website to the keywords that will most likely bring the most amount of traffic there. We take the information we gathered from the website overview and apply our keyword list to it. We gradually update the title and meta information on all of the web pages on the site, making sure that it is optimized for the proper keywords. We will also rewrite copy to better reflect the keywords, thus increasing the relevance of the website to the words and making link building more effective.

During this phase in the work, we will also do what we can to correct code problems and fix any access issues.

Off Page Optimization

Off-page optimization involves a lot of link building to the website. A link from another site is like a vote for your site. We need to gather as many as possible. Sometimes, the industry makes getting links easy. Sometimes it's very hard. We have a number of link building techniques including

• SEO friendly directory submission
• Social Bookmarking
• Article Submission
• Press Releases
• Question and Answer
• Forum Commenting

We customize our off-page link building efforts depending on the industry in question and the individual needs and restrictions of each client.

Results Analysis

At the end of each month, we put together extensive and easy-to-understand reports outlining our success in each phase of optimization and our efforts. This analysis includes:

• Traffic analysis
• User behavior analysis
• Conversion analysis
• Keyword Ranking improvement
• Overall industry activity
• General SEO progress analysis

The results of this analysis are compiled into reports which are sent to our clients for review.

Website Monitoring

Throughout the entire process of your SEO campaign, we monitor the website for typical problems like server downtime, search engine robot access errors, inadvertent blacklisting from the search engines, online reputation monitoring and much more. We promptly report, diagnose and deal with problems as they come up.