We build search-engine-friendly web pages, and we do so according to both ethical standards and principals gleaned from extensive search engine research and testing. It's not about meta tags, it’s not about a magic keyword density formula. Success comes from the proper combination of more than 100 factors. This may sound complicated, but our strategy is simple - we give the search engines what they want, and they give us what we want.
Our 8-step SEO process typically looks like this:
1. Competitive analysis: We figure out how strong the competition is, what needs to be done, and how much work it will take to do the job right. This step also produces the price quote. Customer hires us.
2. Keyword research & analysis is completed and the customer provides or approves the keyword list.
3. We make a complete copy of the live website and install it on a testing server so as to do the work safely and provide an opportunity for client approval before the work goes live.
4. We optimize the test-version of the website according to SEO best-practices and within the guidelines published by the search engines. No sneaky tricks or black-hat techniques. We do exactly what's needed to obtain top rankings.
5. Customer approves new website, the website is uploaded to server, the optimized site goes live.
6. Link campaign initiated - we recruit an assortment of quality websites to link to the website in an optimized manner. Often linking is started as early as right after step two.
7. Rankings go up. Way up. Depending on goals and budget, all the way up.
8. We monitor your competitive rankings, provide reports and make necessary SEO related code adjustments for a full year at no additional charge. In the never-ending quest to provide better results, search engines periodically tweak their algorithms meaning that sometimes SEO formulas need to be tweaked. And sometimes, clueless or sleeping competitors wake up. Spotting and dealing with these issues is crucial, and it’s the reason our services come with an extended service plan that protects you.
Pricing:Costs vary. National campaigns cost more than local campaigns. Costs are higher for extremely competitive keywords. But don’t worry, we can obtain top rankings for any keyword given a sufficient investment of resources. We have a cost effective program for every budget, with services that range from $3K up to $30K and beyond. We will give you a free analysis and quote you a complete price before any work is started.
Shopping Cart SEO
If your CMS or shopping cart website does not have the search engine rankings it deserves, we can fix it.
Setting up a new shopping cart? Have one of our professional SEO engineers set up your cart and optimize it from the ground up at the same time.
Already have a shopping cart website but have problems with search rankings? Get a free SEO Consultation right now.
We work with hundreds of shopping cart websites every year, most of which had serious problems like accidentally duplicated content, crazy looking URLs that don't use the keywords properly, or URLs that are messy with question marks and gibberish. And many shopping cart sites were unknowingly suffering from a search engine ranking penalty for (mostly accidental) infractions of the rules.
Before any actual SEO can be done, the average shopping cart needs a fair amount of re-engineering to correct poor search-engine functionality within the cart itself. That's one reason why we like to work with osCommerce - because it's open source, we can make it do anything we need it to.
Of course we also perform CMS or shopping cart SEO work on all types of existing PHP,
ASP, .NET, JSP and Cold Fusion shopping carts. We can optimize just about any kind of dynamic content or shopping cart website there is, homegrown or otherwise.
A few words about hosted shopping cart systems: Unfortunately, there is not much room for SEO to work well with proprietary hosted shopping cart platforms like Yahoo Stores, MonsterCommerce, StoreFront, ShopFactory, Volusion or other hosted shopping cart solutions. Substantial improvements can be made, but hosted cart solutions can only go so far. If you are currently hostage to a hosted shopping cart system, ask us about a hassle-free, turn-key migration of your existing content and products into a new, fully set-up SEO osCommerce website that you will own and can host anywhere.
Hiring a professional SEO company like Targetem to set up or reconfigure your shopping cart is a major financial decision. If yours is not a mission critical business project, then a do-it-yourself effort could be a fun and long-term learning experience.
If you need a serious ecommerce website built or optimized for search engine performance and need it done quickly by an experienced team of professional SEO engineers, you should talk to us. Our shopping cart SEO services start at $2500.
PPC Management, PPC Consulting:
Optimizing Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has become much more competitive for most online companies in the past few years, resulting in skyrocketing term prices.
In addition, many PPC advertisers have found it extremely time consuming and frustrating trying to keep up with the constant changes being made to the complex ad ranking and bidding formulas used by search engines.
The good news is our professional PPC management service
saves you both time and money, allowing you to focus on
what’s important - running your business.
Like success in the natural rankings, your PPC campaign
needs to be optimized for top performance. Many people
launch a PPC advertising campaign without thinking it all
the way through, then abandon PPC when it fails to produce
cost-effective results. Others struggle along, making the
same mistakes over and over, victimized by out-of-control
bidding or poor conversion rates.
A proper strategy starts with a solid end-to-end plan that
includes all of the following considerations:
Click the links above for important details.
Use Pay Per Click to:
· Go after keywords that are outside of your SEO focus (or budget).
· Launch a new website or a new product.
· Take advantage of a newsworthy event.
· Quickly test a marketing idea.
PPC works.
We make it work better.
The Importance of Link-Building
The old days of search engines paying attention only to words on the page ended with the birth of Google. Today's search engines use over 100 criteria to rank a website. Linking is a very big one of them. Huge. You can literally get a blank page to rank for a keyword with enough of the right kind of links.
That's partly because search engines rely on the democratic nature of the internet to determine how “important” a website is - they equate links to a site with votes for a site. The reasoning is that if a webmaster points a link to another website, then there must be something worthwhile there. Linking is like voting.
But not all links are equal. Links from important sites are much more valuable, links from lesser sites are worth much less. In addition, links from websites that have content related to your topic are the best ones to get. And be very careful with linking relationships, as sometimes links to or from the wrong places can be very bad for your rankings. Links can have a negative or even fatal value.
For competitive keywords, great on-page optimization combined with strategic, optimized incoming links from good websites is a requirement for top rankings. We can help you get quality optimized links to point to your website. We don’t use any tricks or spam, and we won’t get you involved in reciprocal links (these have lost much of their effectiveness) or blog-spam, link farms, rented links or other shady link building techniques that may give you a penalty.
We use optimized links. That’s because in addition to helping your website become important in the eyes of the search engines, optimized links can also say a lot about the topic of your website. In extremely non-competitive keyword categories, sometimes a few optimized links are all that's needed if no other websites are truly competing for a particular keyword.
For an example of how a quantity of links can affect search results for a non-competitive term, do a Google search for “miserable failure”. You will likely be surprised at the top result. And you can be sure that the webmaster of that website did not optimize the page for those words. It was accomplished by a large number of optimized links pointing to the site.
Don’t let just anybody handle your linking campaign. Linking must be done right to be effective and, more importantly, it must be done safely. You don’t want your website permanently removed from the search engine index because of shady link building.
We can help you get links cost-effectively. Not only that, but we have proprietary competition-analysis tools that let us know, in advance, how many links you will need to get, what kind of links you need and how they need to be optimized.
Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing? Click to find out, or if you are already familiar with affiliate marketing, keep reading.
Contrary to popular belief, it can be a very search engine friendly addition to any Internet marketing campaign.
Targetem uses a recognized 3rd party affiliate system that allows you to completely avoid affiliate "networks" like LinkShare or Commission Junction who insert an extra layer of commission expense and actually "own" the affiliate relationship.
Affiliate programs work. And a SEO-friendly affiliate program provides something extra to both the affiliate and the merchant, a unique side-benefit - it can help improve search engine rankings. All this, while a recognized 3rd party system tracks everything, keeps the merchant honest and provides full reporting.
Here's how a SEO friendly affiliate approach works - first, it uses real links, with no weird looking code, no question marks, no ID numbers, no redirects - no giveaways that tell the world that the links are affiliate links. The visitor is clicking on a real link. The search engine sees a real link.
This means that the link is actually pointed to the affiliate network server, even though a visitor clicking on the link will end up on your website – that’s because at the affiliate network server, the visitor is redirected to your site. As you might guess, the above type of link does not count towards link popularity for the site that it ultimately points towards, and is easily recognizable as an affiliate link by anyone that cares to look.
With the SEO-friendly approach, the link will be a normal link yet offers the best of both worlds - affiliates are protected by having an independent 3rd party track and verify sales and provide reporting, while merchants set their own rules and pay no royalties to the network.
How can this be? Call us to discover more about using a search engine friendly implementation of this widely respected affiliate program. There is much more to this than meets the eye, and for competitive reasons we don't publish everything on our Web site
Picking The Right SEO Company
We generally believe in a positive approach to things, but when it comes to explaining what to look for when picking a SEO company, it's actually easier to tell you what to avoid.
Unethical or “black hat” practices.
We cannot stress this enough. Some SEO consultants use tricks that are prohibited, and can result in total eviction of an entire website from the search engine when detected.
Common tactics are doorway pages, mirror sites, hidden text, cloaking – the list is long. More on this.
Meta Tags.
It's the 21st century. Meta tags are dead. Any SEO company still talking about meta tags is either asleep, or hoping that you are.
Search Engine Submissions
Search engines don't want you to submit, they want to find your pages by following links from other websites that they have already indexed. And if you must submit, use the free Google or Yahoo XML submit, and do it yourself. Don’t make a rookie mistake.
Get Top-10 Rankings In Over 200 Search Engines
We always smile when we see this...we just want to know what kind of search engines these are, and what kind of searcher actually uses them. We only know of a few search engines that matter.
Content Stuffing/Article Submissions
This is the latest money-wasting SEO gimmick making it's rounds. Search engines don't want the same spammy articles indexed over and over again. Duplicate content penalties kill off rankings for article spam.
Listing Their Customers.
Publishing customer’s names on a SEO website is just like painting a bulls-eye on the customers forehead. We say it's a bad thing to do. Competitors, and especially search engines, don’t need to know.
Warranty. Is there a warranty on their work?
Qualifications. Have you noticed that many web designers say they are also internet marketing or SEO experts? That’s like saying the mechanic down at the local garage is an expert at rebuilding an engine. Maybe so, but does he build racing engines, the kind that win the Daytona 500?
Overnight Success. It can take a while, a few months even, to see big improvements at Google. Yahoo, MSN and others take at least one month. Beware of SEO's that enroll you in a PPC or a “paid placement” campaign without being clear about ongoing costs and a full disclosure of how they make their money.
Guarantees. Only an insurance company can guarantee things that are beyond it's control. A good SEO will tell you, based on experience, what can be expected - but it is considered highly unethical in the SEO industry, for a SEO company to guarantee specific results for any specific keywords. A good Yahoo News article spells it out:
"What ranking guarantees do you provide?
If the answer is anything but "none," look elsewhere."