We first need to determine if your site has bad SEO, or zero SEO. We evaluate the negatives and positives in order to determine if we can help your business achieve organic web traffic. We look at the age of the domain name, design factors, HTML source code, incoming links, link structure, meta tags and titles, directory listings, on-page content and competition.

Competitive Research

We take a look at your competitors online, to see what they are doing correctly and incorrectly. Our research gives us insight into how much competition your site will be up against, and some target rich key phrases we want to rank your site for.

Targeted Keyword Research

Just because you get a top placement on a particular keyword doesn't mean that you will be flooded with web traffic. We do in-depth keyword research to find the highest traffic key phrases for your industry and area.

Meta Tags and Title Optimizations

Each web page has a title (located in the top browser) that is the title of the search result when your site appears on the search engines. Each page should reflect unique titles with terms and geo-targeted locations. Titles should be constructed to brand your business name as well. Meta tags are hidden keyword tags within the source code of each web page that need to be written and optimized for the terms you wish to target. Each page within your site should have different meta tags.

HTML Validation

Most websites are written in a computer language known as HTML. This is the language that is picked up by the search engines. Just like any other language, the HTML language has rules. Inproper HTML can be negative to your SEO. Our Orange County SEO specialists ensure each page on your website is validated with an HTML validator.

Keyword Density and Placement

Titles, meta tags, links and written on-page content of each page require proportion and positioning to ensure the search engines understand and value your site according to the keywords for your campaign. Placing keywords in certain spots on a page, in the titles and meta tags have an affect on how your site will rank. In addition, the density of keywords compared to the density of non-keywords plays a part.

Link Density and Placement

Just as with keyword density and placement, link density and placement plays a role in SEO. We ensure your outgoing and incoming links to each page are correctly constructed and placed to help the search engines understand how to rank your site.

Photo/Video Optimization

Images and videos cannot be read by the search engines unless they are optimized. Without optimizing your photos they will not appear in the image search listings on the major search engines. Optimizing photos consists of giving each photo a an 'alt' tag with keywords. The 'alt' tage is picked up by the search engines and allows the search engines to rank your photos in image search.

Internal/External Linkings

Internal linking consists of designing linking strategies within your own site. Links need to convey keywords that show the search engines what the page is about it is linking to. These links can be created within your own site, from page to page, and also outside of your website, linking into your pages. External linking is when links link out to another website. This gives 'power' to the other site, and diminishes power from your own site. We can put 'nofollow' tags on external links to retain the power of the links.

Directory Submissions

Online directories are not search engines. Directories are sites with business listings, much like your local classified ads. There are many free and paid directories, some are good for your site, and many are actually harmful because they are low value directories. For each client, we place a free directory listing in http://DMOZ.com - Google's directory. DMOZ is a human edited directory that may take up to 12 months or more to be listed. The significance is in the long term results. Once DMOZ lists your website, it gives your website authority, which means you achieve better rankings and more traffic. Google also pings your listings to dozens of other directories for free, expanding your web presence.

Local Business Search Inclusion

Google, MSN and Yahoo! each have a local business search program. We will list your website and business information with these programs. The benefits of having local search is that your website will appear in Google Map listings and certain search strings. Have you ever searched for a local pizza place online and a map popped up with listings beside of it? Well, those are local search results. You want to be seen.

Geo-Targeted Landing Pages

If you have a business that has customers outside of one particular city, we want to make sure people can find you. Depending on the scope of your SEO campaign, Clark SEO will construct 'portal' pages that help capture market share from County terms, city terms, community terms, and zip code searches. For example, lets say you own a catering business in Irvine. You may want to rank for Orange County and Irvine based keywords, but you know that you get business from Costa Mesa and Newport Beach as well. We will make sure you are being found when consumers search for catering in those surrounding areas, as well as the zip codes you do business in and community names.

Search Engine Submissions

Once the initial SEO work is completed, we will submit your optimized website to Google, MSN, Yahoo! and over 100 minor search engines for inclusion. Search engines take time to update the changes. Within 2-6 weeks the search engines will index your website and your listings will appear on keyword searches.

Ranking Reports/Monitoring

Our customized SEO technology and tools allows us to run reports on your keyword positioning on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Each month we will send you a ranking report that displays where your site is ranking. This helps us monitor activity, and make adjustments to keep your rankings high and watch for negative changes. Keyword rankings fluctuate from other online competitors and search engine updates. If a set of keyword rankings drops, we will be able to catch it quickly, and adjust the SEO in order to get those rankings back.

Google Analytics/Site Statistics

Each client will be implemented into Google analytics to monitor site performance. With analytics, we can understand how people are finding your site, how long they are staying on your site, and what regions the visitors are coming from. This helps us understand your consumers better, and allows you to coordinate changes with us.