Internet Marketing & Website Consultants

Search Engine Optimization FAQs

Hopefully, we explained what SEO is and why you might need it here. We've provided a few answers to some frequently asked questions about SEO and will continue to update.

Q: How long does SEO take?

A: SEO is a long term marketing strategy. Results are not immediate. The general industry consensus has been that it will take approximately three months to see positive results in the search rankings. However, we have found this can vary dramatically, depending on several factors such as how new or established your site is or what kind of niche you have in the market. In a few cases, we have helped some clients achieve excellent results in a couple of weeks, but most usually take longer. You should see continued improvement from SEO for several months. An ongoing SEO campaign should provide excellent results and ROI over time.

Q: How long will it take my website to show up in the search engines?

A: It used to take most search engines a couple of weeks to index a new site. Updates weren't frequent. Today, search engines are crawling and indexing sites a lot faster and more often than they used to. Search engines are also changing their algorithms more often. Depending on the submission process and the search engine in question, a new site should show up in a matter of days to two or three weeks.For popular websites, new content is indexed daily if not hourly. What position your site shows up is another matter completely.

Q: Do FRAMES hurt my search engine rankings?

A: Yes. Your site needs to be redesigned. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and dynamic programming such as PHP and ASP have made frames pretty much obsolete.

Q: Can search engines read images?

A: No. Search engines read the code in your HTML. Sites that use a lot of images containing keywords, text, and navigation should consider using CSS or be sure to put the keywords and descriptions of the images in the ALT and TITLE tags.

Q: How about Flash?

A: Technically, Yes. Probably, No. In general, Flash is disregarded by search engines. There are ways to optimize the Flash portion of your website and make certain code readable; however, most designers don't know how to do this, and most Flash sites are poor when it comes to being optimized for search and usability. Sites designed exclusively in Flash are especially problematic as are Flash intro pages. Simply put, search engines like text. Research shows that most people do, too. A little Flash can be nice but can also go a long way.

Q: How about JavaScript?

A: No. JavaScript is disregarded by the search engines. It is best practice to keep the script in separate files to keep most of your page free of anything that can't be indexed by the search engines.

Q: How about server-side or dynamic web pages?

A: Yes. Search engines have no problem reading and indexing dynamic pages written in dynamic server-side programming languages (e.g. ASP, PHP). It may be favorable for several reasons to use "friendly html" file names for your web pages (e.g. 'search-engine-optimization.asp) instead of standard dynamic URLs (e.g. 'services.asp?cat=2?id=9'). It is best to limit the URL variables to three or less. But, dynamic URLs can be indexed and will probably have no effect on your rankings.

Q: Are META tags important?

A: Not really. Search engines don't really put much stock into META tags any more. Content, titles, domain age, and your inbound link profile can probably account for 99% of your search engine rank. We have seen some of our client's competition outrank them and have no META tags at all. Should you still do them. Yes. We believe it is good standard practice to do so. The Description tag is often used as the description under your link (which is the title) on a search engine listing. The Keywords tag can help at least provide a few phrases about what your page is about. Keep it short. Don't spend too much time agaonizing over your META tags. Just be sure to make them unique if you do them.






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