Every client purchasing Search Engine Optimization services should know these laws, so should every SEO provider. To date there is lack of a consorted effort to standardize the service offerings of this industry. This post is to draw the line in the sand and say this is what we stand for!
To be informed on HOW your SEO services that you are paying for work and what you can expect makes YOU a better purchaser. By defining and archiving the Law’s of SEO, will help educate consumers and bring a positive, ethical and trustworthiness back into our industry that is long overdue.
If you are a customer/client who is receiving SEO services then pay attention to this post as it will help keep your marketing firm accountable for the money you are paying them.
Remember, service without results is not marketing that is on target and in today’s economy it is important to have your marketing efforts working hard for you which is our motto!
The Laws of SEO
Law 1. All improvement’s and recommendations to a site are done with the absolute intention of adding value to a clients site.
Law 2. Taking into consideration the varying degrees of SEO. Black hat SEO, Grey hat SEO and White hat SEO. These terms come from the rapidly shifting algorithms over time where techniques used in the early years of SEO are now considered more “spam” like to these engines. Only the use of up to date techniques should be used on a clients site unless there are specific reasons to venture into these other techniques AND your client has full understanding of what they are getting into.
Law 3. Keyword research shall be done with a combination of keyword tools as most keyword research tools are inaccurate. There must be a way to quantify the difficulty of a keyword based on information provided to us by the search engines and there should be set expectations and strategy plans based on this initial keyword research. This is the most crucial point of an SEO campaign and most typically overlooked.
Law 4. Regardless of budgets, all website owners should be allowed the opportunity to work with an SEO firm and get measureable results.
Law 5. On page optimization should always contain these elements unless a specific reason for their exclusion exists. See the elements of on page optimization below:
- Href’s are optmized with Title Tags
- Meta Title optimized with up to 9-11 words depending on lenght and size of each word.
- Meta Description should not exceed 250 charactors, should include the keywords in your title but also include more supporting keywords.
- Meta Keywords should contain 4-6 keyword phrases that are found within your title and description. This will help insure a properly themed meta section.
- There should be no less then 1 htag per page. The use of h1, h2 and h3 where possible including keywords found within your meta data would be preferable here and shall be executed by your seo team.
- Alt tags shall be optimized according to your pages keyword theme.
- Valueless source code like java script and nonscript lanaguages should be called within external documents or shall be placed near the end of the bottom of the source page.
- The use of table tags is considered web 1.0 code design. It is recommended that all clients upgrade to web 2.0 coding which is xhtml and css based.
- Siloing is the process of filing and archiving like items within your site and then buiding a link bridge back to the catagories main page and drill down links as you get deeper into a given catagory.This process should be done for clients long tail keywords to rank utilizing internal deep pages.
- All internal outgoing links shall be nofollowed except for 2-3 which can be used to pass page rank and link juice which will also boost your internal pages up within the SERP’s.
- All external outgoing links shall be nofollowed except for 2-3 which can be used to pass page rank and link juice which will also boost your internal pages up within the SERP’s.
- Sitemap shall be created in 3 channels. 1 xml, 1 html and 1 txt version and then submitted into yahoo, msn and Google. You shall also verify your sitemaps within Google webmaster central.
- You shall build a robots.txt file that calls your xml sitemap, blocks bad bots, includes god bots and is also a syndication version.
- Your content shall always be seeded with keywords that surround your pages theme. The best way to build content that will truly empower a clients site is to build it with interesting and educational information - adding value to the web.
- Your site should be make into an xml feed as to syndicate your content throughout the web.
Law 6. Linkbuilding is one of the most important aspects of SEO and should be recognized as a driving force behind ranking a keyword. By far, a diversified inbound link reciepe will look more natural to the search engines and should consist of inbound links with varying page rank, link relevancy and varying degrees of overall inbound link quality. Below is a list of link building techniques to stay away from.
- MFA sites - Made for Adsense sites are typically spammy sites plastered with ads from top to bottom. Typical marketing techniques deployed on these sites are less trustworthy and are not a network you would want to be associated with.
- FFA sites - Free For All sites are pages where your link is one of 50-100 links in a long list. You can identify these typically by the lack of relevancy on a page and how many links are listed on one single page.
Links you do want are as follows:
- Editorial and contextual links within a body of content
- Article links
- Directory links
- Social web 2.0 links
- Blog reviews
- Comment links
- One Way links
- 4 way links
- Press release links
- Syndication links
- Video site links
- Social network links
- Parasitic hosted links
- forum links
Law 7. The Google dance is recognized as the process of robots crawling links, discovering, indexing and rating inbound links to then take back to google in order to stand in line to be processed. This process is widely accepted as the google dance and is an ongoing process making initial results take up to 3-6 month to see accurate sustainable ranking adjustments.
Law 8. A well executive and setup web analytics system is needed for all clients. In order to track progression, benchmark campaigns and visibly see what is happening to a clients site is an absolute necessisity and shall always be integrated and constantly evaluated over the course of a campaign. After all you cannot know where to go unless you know where you currently are.
Law 9. The use of Competitor profiling on a large scale is not always necessary however the use of competitor profiling when evaluating current serps shall always be taken into consideration taking very special notice of the following areas:
- How many inbound liks a competitors page has
- The value and mix of these links
- The SEO structure of your competitors pages in regards to SEO. I.e. nofollow, meta data, source code ect.
- Current trafic projects
- Age of site/page
- Site root evaluation
- Page Rank
There are more but these are the absolute minimum that should be checked.
Law 10. All SEO firms shall provide cutting edge marketing to all of their clients. Our industry is a rapidly growing one where algorithm shifts happen frequently and the importance of staying up with the industry is crucial to providing the best results to your clients.
These are the current 10 commandments / Laws of SEO that shall be followed and expected of all SEO firms. At ArcherSEM.com we stand behind these laws and in return know that our process is second to known. Our team of leading SEO engineers have devised proprietary methodology in order to stay true to these laws and encourage others to take up the 10 commandments of SEO.
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