Hello All!

I have been asked to help someone find an expert who offers SEO services. What does that really mean?

Can anyone list what those services might entail for me, please?

I know that SEO is an 'art' and and expertise unto itself. I see postings that folks offer this service but I can't determine what it is specifically that they do.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Janine

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Janine - Tess would have the best answer for you, but let me take a stab at it in the meantime.

The end result of SEO is to get the website ranked as high as possible in Google for given keywords; and then to convert website visitors to leads (converting leads to sales is more the purview of the business itself).

To get to this end result, you can use techniques on the client's web pages, and off them - i.e., on other sites.

Techniques include ways you write the code and meta-tags; optimized text and formatting; anchor texts; alt tags; frequency and quality of new content; social media participation of all kinds; competitive keyword analysis; analytics; bunches more. Basically anything you can think of to boost the search engine rating of the target site.

Higher rating=more traffic to your site=more potential to engage and convert to warm leads.

Whether or not a visitor becomes a warm lead depends on how well the site's marketing design works.

Much of SEO is trial and error, testing and re-testing, but there are recommended methods and many a site ready to tell you all about it if you just Google 'SEO tutorials.'

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Mary H. Ruth/Virtual Writing & Communications
http://www.writingVA.com

I think you'll find that people offering SEO as a service will vary widely in terms of what they actually do for their clients [obviously based on their understanding of and experience with SEO].

While I can't [won't ] give you a 'list' of what those 100+ elements might be on any given SEO project I can tell you that SEO as a service includes all of what Mary mentioned and then some.

Ideally, SEO starts at the coding level - at the build stage of a website. That doesn't always happen even now because there are plenty of website designers and programmers who don't have a thorough understanding of how the bones of a site should be structured for optimal content spidering. Relatively, there are plenty of SEO service providers who do not understand how to write code. The best of both worlds comes with a provider who not only understands both SEO and HTML but keeps current with Google's changing algorithms, user interaction with search results, and up to 100 other elements that can go into optimizing a site.

That's not to say that performing SEO on a site with ineffective code would be a total wash; just that it will take longer to see results if they can be achieved and those results will not necessarily hold long term without heavy off-site campaigns as well.

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Thanks. I've got a short, general list together, which is what I was looking for. It's enough information to give the inquirer as to the complexity of what SEO is.

I think when people ask for this service, they don't realize the expertise that is involved.

Wiki also has a pretty good explanation here as well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Thanks!


Janine

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Hi Jan,
I think I might have misunderstood your question - sorry!
I'm glad to know you found the info you were looking for; you're right, wikipedia does have a great overview of SEO

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