A Little History...

I’ve been helping companies develop web sites since, well, the beginning of the Internet. Once the domain of larger companies and large budgets, Web sites have now become accessible and affordable to almost anyone running a business.

Larger businesses still have the advantage with larger budgets and SEO initiatives designed to keep their listings at the top of search engine results. So how do you compete with those spending $10,000.00, $20,000.00 or even $30,000.00 on SEO projects? As with most things in life, you can do about 80% of the work for about 20% of the effort. It’s not rocket science, but it is computer science, and you have to understand some of the language, concepts and something about how search engines work if you want your page to show up on Google and other search engines.

Many of my clients, in an attempt to get better search engine and page rankings, have asked me to look at their sites, make recommendations and in many cases, implement the changes. Initially, this was interesting, even exciting, until I realized that most Web sites consistently have the same problems – their Web pages have not been optimized! In fact, so far, our results are showing that two in seven (that’s nearly 29%) Web site home pages do not have a description or keywords! Without a description or keywords, search engines are going to have a difficult time indexing your content. But more importantly, another two out of seven sites are using their keywords so ineffectively, they might as well not have any. And although the topic of keywords and their relevance to search engine rankings is hotly debated right now, there is a relationship between your keywords and your content you cannot ignore. After all, web page optimization is all about making sure Web surfers can find the great content that’s on your site.

Frustrated with the lack of tools available to my clients, I set out to build some tools that they could use to analyze what was going on under the hood. Most tools designed for Web masters and developers, return all sorts of valuable information – to them -- but what if I needed to know what the keywords on the home page were? What if I updated some content on my page and wanted to determine how my content related to my keywords? Managing a Web site is a lot like owning a car. Most of the time, you can do next to nothing and it’ll get you there and back. But under the hood, there’s work to be done to optimize the engine for better mileage and lower costs. Most of us are not mechanics, and we put off going to the shop until there’s a problem.

I created this solution so that I could not only better serve my clients, but it provided them with a tool that they could continue to use long after the developers had left the office. This is particularly important with content management systems, where it is easy for Web site owners to update their own content.

SEO for the Rest of Us!

Search Optimizer 2.0 is priced at $47.00 because it’s less than you would spend buying a book on optimization. But a book would just provide generic, theoretical information about any site – and nothing about your site. More importantly, you can register on the site and have your custom report printed faster than it would likely take you to drive to the bookstore!

Search Optimizer 2.0 gives you detailed insights into fifteen key aspects of each page on your web site. And, you can re-run this report as often as you like. In fact, it’s designed to do just that. For example, you run the report, see that you are not using any modified text. You edit your web page so that it now includes Bold, Underline or Italics, and then re-run the report. It will now reflect those changes in the report the next time you run it. And, not only can you do this for your home page, you can do it for every page, allowing you to optimize every page on your site.