Many people are throwing the term, SEO, around without fully understanding what it means. While some guess at how to do it, We understand it. We use it. We have been optimizing sites for over 5 years and take the marketing of your web site seriously. We even monitor your site for 1 year FREE of charge after your site is launched!

Below is a information on SEO in general and our methods for getting YOUR SITE ranked.

What is SEO?
Where are people getting their information?
Keep up with some of the latest stats
What does Blu Dove Designs do to get you ranked?
How fast will I see results?
Organic Search Results versus Pay-Per-Click
A Word of Caution

 

What is SEO?
 Definition: Search Engine Optimization – also known as Search Engine Marketing. In a nutshell, this is how to market your site and get it ranked on the first page of the top 5 search engines so people searching for your products and services can find you. There are 2 basic techniques - organic and pay-per-click.

 

Where are people getting their information in 2009?

According to the latest report from comScore, the leading online audience measurement service - Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and ASK are the TOP 5 search engines with a total combined 13.5 billion searches in January and 13.1 billion searches in February! The following is the breakdown for the top 5 search engines & social networking site for January - just to give you a basic idea:

Search Engines:
 Google – 8.247 billion searches
Yahoo – 2.836 billion
MSN-WindowsLive – 1.084 billion
AOL – 520 million
Ask – 497 million		 Social Networking Sites:
YouTube – 2.983 billion, 3% incr. (owned by Google)
Ebay – increase of 8%
Facebook – increase of 21%, 1 billion visits
Craigslist – increase of 28%
LinkedIn - 42 million

The reason you have to be on the first page is that very few people, if any are going to look beyond that first page and if your site is not there among the top 10 relevant results, then you’re simply not going to get the traffic to your site that you need! Take a moment and think about your own search habits…

 

Want to keep up with the statistics & other news?
 Check out our blog! Sign up for our newsletter, or Click on one of the links below!
comScore January rankings
comScore February rankings
comScore (the leading online audience measurement service):
Social community rankings

 

What Does Blu Dove Designs Do?
 Bottom Line - we want YOU to succeed!

seo, google, optimizationNot only do we want your site to look great... we want to drive traffic to your site when people are searching for your product or service! In other words, when someone types in a keyword or keyword phrase, we want YOUR site to come up on the first page of the top 5 Search Engines.

Our goal is for these results to happen WITHOUT our clients having to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on pay-per-click advertising through your local phonebook or through the search engines. In some markets it may be necessary to purchase this type of advertising so we will assist you with that, only if necessary.

At Blu Dove Designs, we apply what is called “Organic” Search Engine Marketing techniques - in other words - non pay-per-click techniques to all of the web sites we develop. . custom SEO is included with all of our custom sites, AND offered as an add-on or as an individual service along side of our other products.

We utilize the development of comprehensive keyword and keyword phrase lists, meta-tags, title tags and well-written content. In addition, we will assist with social networking and explore other creative ways to market your web site outside of the world wide web. During your project, we will discuss our strategy for your site in more detail and what you can do to help.

It is our persistent goal to have your web site presence established on the web increasing exposure to as many visitors as possible through as many means as possible. The more arrows pointing towards the same direction will mean increased odds of success.

 

How fast will I see results?
It can take up to 6 -8 weeks for your site to appear on the major search engines using “Organic” Search Engine Marketing. This is due to their update cycle which we have no control over.

Every site comes with the initial Search Engine Optimization (SEO), installation of Google Analytics Code & User Access, PLUS one year of monitoring.

If your site is not appearing at or near the top of the major search engines AND you are not seeing the results to succeed, then we will tweak our work for you at no additional charge (up to 1 year from initial launch). Our goal is to make your site a success... when your site is appearing on the first page, then we are successful.

Contact us to start your SEO campaignWe can assist you with other methods such as Google AdWords, if you need immediate success or have an extremely large competitive market. It has been our experience, that in a very localized market, those methods are generally not necessary.... see our reasons below.

If you already have a web site and need assistance with your SEO, please call us for a quote. If it has been greater than a year from initial launch and you would like to update your SEO, please contact us!

 

Organic search Optimization Vs. pay-per-click (PPC)
 There are basically 2 options when it comes to SEO - Organic and Pay-Per-Click.

Many of our clients have heard of the pay-per-click advertising; most have not heard or understand that in many cases it is not really necessary to achieve the same, if not better results than a non-paid campaign.

In an ideal world you would use both strategies to maximize your site’s potential. However, due to budgetary constraints this is often impossible and doing both on a limited budget or with limited resource can result in neither campaign producing ideal results.

Since the majority internet users click on organic listings and anyone can pay for PPC listings, we almost always focus our efforts on organic SEO over PPC and here are 5 reasons why.

5 reasons Organic SEO grows your business smarter than pay-per-click (PPC)

Trust
86% more users trust the organic results over the PPC. Top listed organic sites are probably more likely to have been around a lot longer (depending on the field), since new pay sites can spring to the top by just paying more. The longer they have been around the more people trust them.

 

Click Through Rate
Search users are up to 6 times more likely to click on an organic result than a PPC and that only 30% clicked on paid listings - leaving 70% that clicked on the organic results. In other study where they looked at where a viewers eyes starts on a page, found that over 50% start at the top left of the page, varied groups scanned middle left to right and few users started their scanning on the paid results.

 

Visitor Value
Organic search visitors are 17% more likely to become a customer than those who clicked on a paid advertisement.

 

Cost Effective
Spending money on organic SEO is much more cost effective than a pay-per-click campaign. After awhile money may run out to continue the PPC campaign. Cost of PPC is increasing because of supply and demand just as increased demand for magazine space increases the cost for that space.

 

Endures Over Time
While PPC campaigns MAY produce faster results, once the money runs out to continue a PPC campaign, the ads disappear. Whereas with Organic SEO, the results are long lasting and the growth is more effective.

(some statistics cited from Local Internet Marketing)

 

Organic SEO search engine optimization

 

Word of Caution
 Often companies like the phone books, and not very well educated design companies will immediately recommend that you pay for your rankings using pay-per-click, often quoting 100s or 1000s of dollars per month to manage a campaign or dive traffic to your site - this can get very expensive and we advise against it!

If you have any questions, concerns or simply need some consulting in this area, we would be happy to meet with you to discuss a well-though, cost-effective strategy for your business.

We understand the money dilemma of small businesses. For this reason we have put into use Organic SEO as our standard for marketing all of our web sites and have achieved great success!