SEO Fort Collins : the most-sought after web service in Northern Colorado. This article is designed to assist you in your search for a company that implements SEO in Fort Collins.
SEO isn’t rocket science, but it can be an intimidating topic if you’re unfamiliar with HTML or even how Google ranks sites in their search results pages. But relax, this article will break SEO down into an easy-to-grasp concept so that you can confidently interview a company for SEO in Fort Collins.
So what is SEO? It’s short for search engine optimization. That just describes the process of making your website search engine friendly. You see, if you design a site that Google likes, they’ll reward you and push your site up in their rankings. In the industry, we call Google’s results pages SERPs. That means Search Engine Results Pages. If you’re not in the first page, particularly at the top of the first page, frankly, your site won’t get any traffic. Google has become so popular that they now account for 73% of the Web’s searches. You have to pay attention to Google or your site will fail.
So let’s assume you have a small service-oriented business in Fort Collins. Okay, let’s just use ourselves as an example and pretend you’re in our shoes. You’d like to be found when someone searches Google for ” SEO Fort Collins .” How exactly do you do that? Well, you start by creating content on your site that’s about SEO in Fort Collins. You could write articles, create blog posts. It doesn’t really matter as long as you’re creating content on your site so that your site is filled with the phrase, ” SEO in Fort Collins .”
Next, you’d want to get a bunch of other sites to link to you. And forget about asking them to link to your site and hoping they do it right. Here’s exactly what you need to ask them:
“Will you please place a link to my site on your site? I’m more than willing to link back to your site. Here’s what I’d like you to put on your site, ‘ SEO in Fort Collins ‘ and make that a hyperlink linking to https://www.redrocketmg.com/strategy-seo.asp. Just send me your linking information and I’ll post your link right away. Thank you.”
Do you notice that we didn’t have them make a link that says, “click here” or something worthless like that? It’s the same phrase that we want to be found for. That’s called anchor text. Make sure your Fort Collins SEO company gets that. Otherwise they may not be on top of things. People waste countless hours getting other sites to link to them only to get a link that says “click here.” All that does is raise your ranking on Google for the phrase, “click here.” I suspect that that phase won’t do your Fort Collins business any good. Afterall, you want to be found when someone searches for ” SEO in Fort Collins .” Also notice, that we didn’t ask them to link to our home page. It’s a link to the page that talks about SEO. That way the link leading to the SEO page talks about SEO. That’s a good thing.
If you get a thousand sites to link to your home page with a phrase like ” SEO in Fort Collins ” but your homepage doesn’t really talk about SEO, then Google will wonder what’s going on. They figure that a link that says ” SEO in Fort Collins ” should lead to a page about SEO in Fort Collins. If it leads to the home page, then they wonder if you’re trying to pull a fast-one. Cause any confusion, and Google is likely to penalize you.
Also, be on the lookout for SEO companies that are using SEO methods that can harm your site’s reputation. I wouldn’t assume that they’re intentionally trying to harm your reputation but there are a lot of companies that claim to understand SEO when in fact, they’re fairly naive. They simply don’t know better and the techniques they use are actually pushing their clients’ sites down in Google’s ranking, having the exact opposite effect of what they intend.
Here are a couple things to watch out for:
Ask them to see some of their clients’ sites. Look at their home page. Go to the top of your browser and pull down the “view” menu. Look for “Page Source.” This will show you the code for the page. If you look at the top of the code, you’ll see a line, usually around line 3 or 4 that says “meta keywords.” After that there’s a line of phrases that are used to tell the search engines in a nutshell what the page is all about. Here’s the problem. Many naive web developers and SEOs just use the same line of keywords on every page. That’s a huge no-no. Each page has to have its own keywords. It’s better to leave that line out of the code than to include the same line on every page. Last year BMW.com was banned from Google for making a minor mistake. I won’t go into the details. But if I were you, I’d look at the source for a couple different pages on your SEO firm’s client sites and see if they are making this error. You don’t want your site kicked off Google just because your SEO firm was lazy and copied and pasted the same keyword string into every page. In my mind, whether it’s intentional or not, that SEO malpractice.
This one’s not as common as it used to be but several years ago there were a lot of SEO companies in Fort Collins that were putting white keywords on a white background so you couldn’t see them. That way, they could fill the background of the page with text that repeated the same phrase over and over. It might say ” SEO FORT COLLINS , SEO FORT COLLINS ” again and again. The reader never saw it because the text was white on a white background, but Google did. They caught on and have banned sites for doing that. If your site is more than a couple years old, it’s probable that your web design or SEO company used these techniques so you may want to look into it to make sure that you’re not being punished right now for making this fatal error.
This post is getting pretty long. We’ll pick up on this again in the future. For now, I hope this has helped.
Chadd Bryant