Search Engine Optimization FAQ - General Questions

At SearchXCEL, we know Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a new technology for many. We hope these FAQ pages become a valuable source of information for you. If there are any questions not answered directly by this FAQ, please contact us via our Contact Us Form.

• What service does SearchXCEL offer?
• Why should I partner with SearchXCEL?
• When can I expect my traffic from the search engines to change?
• What about traffic statistics and progress reports?
• What information does SearchXCEL require in order to work with my website?
• What are my payment options?
• How does SearchXCEL safeguard my personal information?
• What exactly is search engine optimization?
• Why are search engines important to me?
• Why the need for SEO?
• What can SEO do for me?
• What is Pay Per Click vs. Organic Search?
• What is my site ranking dependent on?
• How often will my site be optimized?
• Why is natural search important?
• When will I see results?
• Is SEO costly?
• What Are Meta Tags?
• What is the most used search engine?
• What are spiders, robots, and crawlers?
• What are Meta Description Tags?
• What are Meta Keywords?
• What is link popularity?
• What are Link Farms?
• Can you guarantee a number #1 position in the search engines?
• How do I achieve top 10 search results?
• What is Ethical SEO" White hat SEO Vs Black hat SEO?
• Do I Need Keyword Research?
• Any other questions?

What service does SearchXCEL offer?

SearchXCEL specializes in the development of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (link to Why SEO Optimization Page)  technologies and strategies for the promotion and marketing of websites to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

SearchXCEL service packages are designed as a 'one stop shop' optimization service. To reach your site's best search engine visibility, it's recommended you have as many optimized pages as possible. Optimized web sites done right receive better positioning within the search engines and obtain more relevant web traffic.

Why should I partner with SearchXCEL?

Our professional SEO Technicians perform all the work to optimize your website's content and correct errors for you - throughout the year. SearchXCEL believes in one-on-one, personalized customer service - an absolute necessity in today's rapidly growing SEO industry.

Our SEO Technicians are extremely well versed in identifying any SEO roadblocks that exist on your website, and we will remove those roadblocks for you, so you can concentrate on running your business. Once optimized, your website is submitted by SearchXCEL to the world's top search engines, directories, and data suppliers, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

When you choose to partner with SearchXCEL, you are partnering with a highly successful and respected organization for your Search Engine Optimization needs. You are choosing a company that consistently delivers successful results and a tangible ROI to its clients.

When can I expect my traffic from the search engines to change?

You will see some tangible results within four to six weeks, but typically it takes 3 to 6 months to see significant search engine traffic occur after optimization. This time frame is often reduced if a site already exists within the search engines, combined with the implementation of our SEO services.
As the search engines change their ranking methods or if competitors mount their own optimization campaign, your search rank may change. Companies often retain SEO firms on a monthly basis for monitoring and maintenance. If much of your sales or sales leads come from the web, then continual maintenance is strongly recommended.

What about traffic statistics and progress reports?

SearchXCEL will provide a baseline SEO ranking report before we start your project to show you how you rank prior to our optimization. These reports are updated on a bi-weekly or monthly basis depending upon the SEO program chosen.

 Each report will include valuable metrics such as:

• Search Engine Visibility Statistics
• Keyword Visibility Index
• Listings For Top 3 Search Engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo)
• Listings For Top 5 Keywords
• General Statistics
• Search Engine Queries
• Current Ranking Position, Previous Position & Change in Position (Up or Down)
• Trending Data For Ranking on The Top 3 Search Engines

SearchXCEL's SEO Progress Reports allow our clients to stay well informed regarding the ranking movement of their website's on the major search engines. This will enable our clients to gage the progress of their SEO Campaign and clearly see the trending improvement in their overall keyword rankings.
Rankings, site traffic and other key metrics can then be compared to pre-optimization levels, giving measurable results to the SEO campaign.  The specific metrics used in an SEO plan will depend on the goals of that site.

What information does SearchXCEL require in order to work with my website?

At a minimum, SearchXCEL requires the following information:

• Website URL
• Personal contact information and email address
• Web server FTP and/or CMS login information
• A list of the web pages you would like SearchXCEL to optimize

The above information allows SearchXCEL to deliver our minimum level of service for your campaign.

Sign up is initiated by completing our Free Search Engine Ranking Report

When completed, a SearchXCEL SEO marketing consultant will contact you to finalize the transaction.

What are my payment options?

SearchXCEL currently accepts American Express, Visa or MasterCard. We also accept personal check, however, service will not commence until payment has cleared.

How does SearchXCEL safeguard my personal information?

SearchXCEL has taken precautions to protect your confidentiality and security. All of your sensitive data is encrypted and removed from our web server to a second server for your protection.

What exactly is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization is the process of overseeing the development or redevelopment of a website, so that it will naturally attract traffic by securing top ranking on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN for selected search terms and phrases.

Why are search engines important to me?

85% of all website traffic is driven by search engines. The only other online activity more popular than search is email.  91% of the consumer never search past the first page of search results.  42% of users click on the no.1 result. For the under-40 age-group, the Internet will become the most used media in the next 2-3 years.

Why the need for SEO?

Having your web site is like having a banner out in the desert, no one is going to see it unless they are going there.  Instead of potential buyers looking through the yellow pages online under a particular category they are using search engines to type the keywords that fit their search criteria.   Studies have shown that most search engine users don’t click past the first three pages of search results; many don’t even click past the first page if they find what they’re looking for. Your own experience using search engines probably confirms this. What does this mean? It doesn’t matter how many search engines spider search your site; if it isn’t listed in the first three pages, it might as well be invisible. Indeed, getting on the first page, among the top three results, is even better.   The question becomes, is it better to be on the front page or 100 pages or more pages back?  More importantly, failure to do search engine optimization and marketing will put your competitor ahead of you in search engine ranking; thereby, creating lost opportunity costs.

What can SEO do for me?

Search Engine Optimization can drastically transform the growth and profitability of your business by increasing the visibility of your website and directing targeted web traffic to it. Whether you are a pure online marketer and rely completely on selling products or services through web portals or an entrepreneur using the Internet as an ancillary tool, SEO is essential for sustained long-term gains. A top-10 ranking as compared to a Top-30 ranking has a considerable difference in the number of visitors to a site. With a Top-10 rank you can expect 300-400 clicks per day for a popular product or category. However, the clicks may reduce to 10-15 only if your website ranking drops from top-10 into the top-30s. The difference is drastic. Proper Search Engine Optimization methodologies can reap great profits for your business with an exceptional rate of return.

What is Pay Per Click vs. Organic Search?

In search engines, "natural" (link to sponsored advertising vs organic search) or "organic" search describes the "editorial" search engine results on any particular search engine. These results are purported to be completely non-biased - meaning that the engine will not accept any amount of money to influence the rankings of any individual sites. This is quite different than the paid advertising that appears in "sponsored" (pay per click) (link to sponsored advertising vs organic search)  or "featured" search engine results, in which higher positions are rewarded for to the companies willing to pay the most per visitor.

Sponsored advertising is paid advertising that is either at the top of the page in a shaded area or on the right hand side of the page.  It is based on a pay per click (PPC) model with the advantage that you are only paying for the “click-thru’s” to your company’s web site.  The disadvantage of PPC is that it is not always accountable and “click-throughs” do not always translate into sales; thereby, reducing your ROI through increased costs.  In addition, according to recent studies 80% of the sponsored ads are ignored by those conducting research.

This doesn’t mean that ads placed with search engine programs (like Google’s AdSense) are worthless, but it does mean that they shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a company’s website marketing campaign. Search engine users tend to trust organic results more than paid ads, which means that they’re more likely to click on them – and more likely to convert. There is a catch, though: they have to see you in the results to click on you. A good position in the search engines can’t be bought in the same way as a banner ad or a sponsored listing.

Natural or organic search employs the use of search engine optimization maximizes three critical factors: 1) keywords 2) original, relevant content (CMS or content management systems) and 3) quality inbound links.   These factors require an ongoing maintenance and updating process to ensure that your information is current and fresh to maintain your company’s top rank position on the search engines.

What is my site ranking dependent on?

Site ranking tends to be "cumulative" and is dependent on the following factors:

1. The specific keyword phrases (search terms) that have been targeted
2. The overall competitiveness of your industry - how many players are there
3. Whether you are targeting a local, regional, national, or international market
4. How well Web site ranking is monitored and the site tweaked over time for SEO improvement
5. The progress of your inbound linking campaign
6. Number of competitor sites achieving new ranking themselves.

How often will my site be optimized?

SearchXCEL's content analyzing and meta generating engine will scan your target pages and generate relevant meta tags, based on the content, once per month. This is followed by a complete submission to the top search engines.

Why is natural search important?

Engine searchers who understand the difference between paid and natural results are more likely to hold the natural search engine results in a higher regard, much like a person reading a magazine would probably be more positively influenced by an article about a particular company than by a paid advertisement from the company.

When will I see results?

You will see some tangible results within four to six weeks, but typically it takes 3 to 6 months to see significant search engine traffic occur after optimization. This time frame is often reduced if a site already exists within the search engines, combined with the implementation of our SEO services.
As the search engines change their ranking methods or if competitors mount their own optimization campaign, your search rank may change. Companies often retain SEO firms on a monthly basis for monitoring and maintenance. If much of your sales or sales leads come from the web, then continual maintenance is strongly recommended.

Achieving a favorable ranking in the major search engines is a gradual process. We must consider several factors when determining the timetable for achieving a favorable rank.

What keywords or key phrases will be targeted?

How competitive are those keywords and key phrases?

These factors, along with others, determine the size and scope of a search engine optimization campaign.

Is SEO costly?

Search Engine Optimization SEO is a highly-specialized process requiring much research, forethought, skill and can be extremely time-consuming to implement correctly. However, compared to online (pay per click) and print advertising, SEO is very economical. The cost of having your website SEO optimized is by far the best advertising dollars spent and the return on your investment (ROI) can be very rewarding.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. In the context of search engine optimization, when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

What is the most used search engine?

Google is by far the most used search engine. It provides search results not only on it's home page, but powers other search engines' results as well. Google claims to have indexed over 3 billion pages, but in reality, that number is probably too small. More than 300 million searches a day filter through Google's fingertips.

What are spiders, robots, and crawlers?

Spiders, robots or crawlers are software programs that follows or crawls web links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding them for indexing. They are programmed to follow web links from one web page to another and from one website to another. The more search engine spiders find links to your site, the more they will visit for indexing. For example, Google relies on its’ spiders to create a huge index of site and page listings.

What are Meta Description Tags?

Meta description tags have three primary uses:

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text "advertisement" to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they're a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.

What are Meta Keywords?

Though meta keywords tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page.
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with the rest of what you've written on your site.

What is link popularity?

Link popularity is the total number of web sites that link to your site. Link Popularity refers to the number of hyperlinks pointing to a web page. The higher a web page's link popularity rating the better, as most major search engines consider link popularity as an important factor in determining a web page's relevancy in its search rankings. Generally speaking, the more quality links you have to your site from other sites, the better your ranking.

What are Link Farms?

A link farm consists of websites set up with the sole purpose of increasing a site’s search ranking and page rank. They are typically made up of long lists of links to totally unrelated sites with little or no content. Some link farms are created as networks of sites that contain numerous links to one another.
Search engines such as Google consider link farming as a form of spam and have procedures in place to blacklist and ban such sites completely from being indexed and displayed in SERP’s (search engine result pages). Furthermore, sites that participate in link farming and get banned will also lose their PageRank.

Can you guarantee a number #1 position in the search engines?

Nobody can guarantee a number #1 position in search engines or specific ranking for your site for a given keyword phrase. There are simply too many factors beyond anyone's control - the search engines changing their ranking algorithms, efforts made by competitors, and new sites being added to the Web.
Be careful of SEO guarantee scams. There are a number of ways in which some supposed "SEO companies" can scam unsuspecting business owners and web designers. These companies give true search engine optimization professionals a bad name. So, even if you do not choose us as your website solutions company, we urge you to keep an eye open and stay clear of companies that guarantee #1 positioning on search engines such as Google.

How do I achieve top 10 search results?

To achieve top 10 search results your site should follow these general rules.

• Search engine friendly web design is a must
• Flash web sites can't be read by search engines
• Java script navigation should be avoided or used as secondary navigation.
• Conduct extensive keyword research and include it in your content
• Build back links aka inbound quality links to your site to help build Page Rank (PR) and improve search results
• Relevance, strive to make your site the most relevant to its keywords in the search engine index
• Black hat, never employ deceitful methods to fool search engines or visitors.

Ethical SEO" White hat SEO Vs Black hat SEO?

What is Ethical SEO? (Aka: "White Hat SEO") Ethical search engine optimization is to follow guidelines and accepted standards to search engine optimization of a web site. Which means don't use any tricks or cheats that are sometime employed by "Black hat" practitioners. The end result of Ethical or "White Hat SEO" is often stronger positioning that is much longer lasting, and can withstand frequent changes made to algorithms.

Black Hat Optimization on the other hand, uses optimization strategies that can sometimes result in faster results, but most often are not long lived. Some Black Hat strategies can result in being penalized, or even permanently banned by some major search engines and directories.

White Hat Optimization is the only way to go, don't take the risk of having your site banned.

Do I Need Keyword Research

Keyword research has a huge affect on web traffic, without knowing what the public search for and what search phrases they use, how can you expect to gain web traffic?

We research all your most important keywords for each page you want indexed, and highly listed in the major search engines. From there we now know what keyword phrases are most searched for, and which are not being used.

For example if you are selling "American Automobiles" Our keyword research might show that the phrase "American Automobiles”, is never searched for. But: "Automobiles made in America" is searched 200 times a day .Obviously we then want to use the keyword phrase "Automobiles made in America" Our keyword research experts can help identify the best keywords to target for your business.

Ready to get started? Get a FREE SEO ANALYSIS today!
Let our team of SEO professionals review and analyze your website at no charge, and we'll create a detailed proposal with advice on how to enhance your search engine presence and overall web exposure.
Call us at 877-400-0252 or contact us for a free SEO consultation and quote.