11.16.06
It’s finally time - I’m now selling Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services
Traditional SEO work involves tweaking a web site’s code so that Google ranks the site higher in the free organic ranking area of search results.
So far I have not been impressed with the companies that do this work full-time in our area. They all seem to be focused on getting rich via maintenance fees than actually innovating and providing real results for our customers. Since we built our store engine and it has some SEO already in it, we are really the best choice for ecommerce seo for our customers. For this reason, we are going to start to formally offer SEO services at Delaware.net. For our ecommerce customers, this is a no-brainer service.
We have ALWAYS done SEO work for our customers, we just never advertised it. Now that Google’s AdWords bidding engine is in wide use by customers, we are seeing a greater demand from customers to get help in managing their Google and Yahoo accounts as well as improve their site’s SEO and analytics work. For these reasons, we are going to offer ALL of these services in packages for our customers, effective immediately.
I am amazed at the number of companies that offer SEO and campaign management, that really are not qualified to offer the service. Even if they understand many of the tricks and theory, they either can’t handle the work, or they are implementing techniques that are horribly out of date. If you speak with an SEO company that thinks meta tags and a bunch of landing pages are still important - run for the hills. I just spoke to a fledgling SEO company last week that didn’t know how to FTP to a web server - sad. We can make a site come up higher in search engines whether we built it or not.
In the past, my mantra on this subject was that we did not want to offer the service because we could not guarantee results for customers. What I mean is, no one can REALLY guarantee that you will come up #1 in Google except for Google themselves. What is different now, however, is that the tools and the search engines themselves have advanced to the point where is now possible for us to greatly improve a customer’s ranking in Google and other engines. Almost to the point where it can be guaranteed. The demand from web site owners to come up high in google is an amazing thing to witness. I have customers that spend $100 per month to host their large e-store, but they spend $10,000 with Google PER MONTH (seriously). We can help these customers save a lot of that money, and also get them more sales from search engines.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at a large ecommerce site that we recently completed, only to find that the customer had stuffed the homepage of their site with keywords. The site looked terrible. And honestly, the way that they stuffed the keywords into the site was not going to have a significant impact on their Google rankings. I convinced the customer to stop by our office so that I could give them some tips on how to properly format their site to come up higher in Google. That meeting lasted just over an hour. After explaining the theory of what needed to be done, the client asked us to do all of the work for him. In about a week, we had gone through his LARGE web site and we made many changes to his site to make it more Google friendly. I am happy to report that he went from #5 to #1 in the rankings. He paid us for that work, and now we are doing the work on his other sites. His company is pretty sophisticated, and they are managing their own Google AdWords accounts.
There are a LOT of small businesses that don’t have the time to manage a Google account, much less go through the nitty gritty of SEO in their web site. For these clients, we can now manage all of these services automatically.
On the subject of SEO, in January 2007, we will launch the next generation of our commerce engine (currently called Store-Logic). This new version will have MOST OF OUR SEO METHODS BUILT-INTO THE SYSTEM. This means, that by simply USING our ecommerce engine, your site should come up high in Google. It will also automatically generate Google Sitemaps, Google Conversion tools, Google Analytics, SES URLs, and much more. The new engine has a new name, and it will be called “Commerce Engine”. The domain will be www.ce.net. There is a feature coming to this engine that is so amazing, I can’t put it in the blog. Watch our site for the press release, and when you see the press release you will be shocked. That is all I can say about it right now. 
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