Search Engine Optimization—Organic SEO Services

I do not bill myself as a search engine goddess. However, I am capable of achieving excellent ranking for certain types of sites without cheating and without paying for links. I will only attempt search engine optimization on sites for which I believe I can achieve success and only with the full cooperation of the site owner to make any necessary modifications. To learn more about what organic SEO entails and why it is preferable to those companies that promise instant results, I recommend reading Organic SEO — What Does it Really Mean? by Scott Buresh.

The following are the minimum requirements for me to attempt search engine optimization:

  • I will only attempt to adjust rankings on Google. Other search engines naturally follow, but many allow for sneaky ranking adjustments.
  • There must be 5 million or fewer, preferably fewer than 1 million, results pulled up for the desired keyword sets. If there are more, I will still work on your site, but cannot promise you'll suddenly show up on the first page of Google!
  • The keywords must be highly relevant to your business.
  • Your site must not utilize Flash or images as your sole content.
  • You must have a content-rich site or be willing to create one. This may involve time on your part in maintaining a blog or writing weekly or monthly articles or newsletters.
  • You must agree to make any recommended changes or, if you choose not to make them, payment is still due.
  • Optimizing your site may involve re-coding the entire thing. If this is a recommended course of action you may of course decline, but it may result in either lower rankings than could otherwise be achieved or no results at all.

Sites I can help

I can primarily help small businesses that target customers in their local geographic areas. This is especially true for specialty stores or boutiques. If you sell computers on a national basis or adult services, I probably can't help unless your service is very specific and unique—there are just too many sites in competition.

Guarantees

There are very few honest guarantees in the search engine optimization industry. I try to be different. I will guarantee definite improvement with all search engine optimization that I do. I also offer a premium guarantee program in which I will guarantee placement within or above a specific range. Please ask about this guarantee for more details.

Cost

There is no cost for me to tell you if I can help you—just send me a note or give me a call and I'll take a look at your site. If I believe that I can improve your Google ranking I'll let you know and then we can proceed.

Cost for recommendations: $50. For this amount I will spend a minimum of 1 hour researching your site and those of your direct competitors and will develop a list of between 7 and 15 recommendations, which you can implement yourself, give to your webmaster, or contract with me to complete.

Cost for implementing recommendations: My hourly rate for SEO is $40. An estimate for the total cost of implementation will be included with your recommendation. If your site must be re-code d the quote will be a firm flat rate, no surprises. Search engine optimization for a small geographically-specific or niche product site typically runs between $200 and $500. when I am finished I will provide you with explicit directions for how to maintain the ranking yourself with minimal effort—there is no monthly contract!

Examples

Following are a few sites for which I have successfully provided search engine optimization. Click the keywords to view the search results for them.

  • Site: RelentlessDragon.com / RelentlessGames.com
    Keywords: Magic the Gathering NH, Dungeons & Dragons NH, Dungeons & Dragons Nashua, Pokemon NH, Settlers of Catan NH
    Ranking Info: RelentlessDragon.com is the main site, RelentlessGames.com is a related but semi-retired site related to RelentlessDragon.com—it was inactive for 3 years prior to October 2008. Within 10 days of RelentlessDragon.com going online on October 1, 2008, the site was ranking first in Google for "Magic the Gathering NH". I take particular pride in this accomplishment! The site also ranks highly on the other listed keywords. It should be noted that these are targeted local results and your results for these keywords may vary based on your geographic location.
  • Site: Stokes Genealogy
    Keywords: Stokes Genealogy
    Ranking: This is my own non-profit website. At the time I am writing this, the site ranks on the first and/or second page of Google for the chosen keywords and a couple pages rank first for their specific keywords. This is phenomenal because I registered it six weeks ago with no intent of publicizing it at all for another six months! I never informed Google that it existed and, initially (until the cat was already out of the bag), was careful not to post the URL anywhere. But somehow Google got wind of it anyway and as I was doing research one day I saw it—right there at the top of the second page. A few days later it was at the bottom of the first page. Then, a week after that, I was researching a specific individual and a page I had created only two days earlier showed up as the first result!

    This is a mixed blessing—on the one hand I'm thrilled with the results I got just by creating well-crafted pages and doing no SEM at all but on the other hand, I'm less than pleased that the site is out there and getting hits when it's really not done yet! ;)

    Ultimately, my goal for this site is to further improve the positioning; I anticipate that I will see an increase once the site has had time to earn a PageRank—so far it has no PageRank at all.
  • Site: JunzBoutique.net (Owner retired and closed shop in July 2010)
    Keywords: Cambio Jeans, A'Nue Ligne, Joseph Ribkoff, Christopher Blue Jeans, John Medeiros
    Ranking: I provided search engine optimization and monitoring for this site for seven years until the owner retired. During that time I maintained the site at a consistent #2 position for "Cambio Jeans," below only the manufacturer of the jeans. For two years the site ranked #1 for "Joseph Ribkoff," even above that clothing line designer's website. Ranking for the other key phrases mentioned varied between #2 and #6. I believe that had the site included an online store, I would have achieved consistent top listings for all desired keywords but I was destined never to find out whether that was the case!
  • Site: SlackSite.com
    Keywords: Passive FTP
    Ranking: This site is interesting—the accepted "wisdom" is that Google and other search engines love change—that frequent updates will result in higher page rank. However, the relevant page on this site has been ranked #1 in Google for several years with no changes at all. This demonstrates, more than anything, the power of clean code and relevant content.
  • Site: TourismWithKidsInNH.com
    Keywords: tourism nh kids
    Ranking: This site spiked to the first page shortly after going online and despite not being actively maintained—or even really finished—it maintains a first page ranking for the keywords for which it was designed. This is another example of the power of clean code and relevant content. No modifications have been made to the site in over a year, though, and it has thus dropped to the second page.
  • Site: ErikaStokes.com — This site
    Keywords: Erika Stokes
    Ranking Info: OK, so it may seem silly to list this site as an example, especially with my own name as the keywords (I actually, at the time of this writing, haven't even attempted to get this site ranked in any way). However, I list it for two reasons: 1) 10 years ago a search for my name pulled up ONLY me—dozens of instances of my name on various websites of friends and colleagues but six or seven years ago that changed—suddenly the web exploded and there were all these other "Erika (and Erica) Stokes" people out there—I believe there are about 25 people who share my name with one or the other spelling. And at that time I no longer ranked at the top of the search engines for my name. 2) Simply because I haven't made any effort to publicize this site yet simply putting the effort into creating a few well-written pages popped me back up to the top. In fact, only three sites on the entire web, at the time I am writing this, even link to me and they are listed above. That shows not only the power of relevant domain names and clean design, but the power of page rank! Because the above sites have the "respect" of the Google search engine, sites they link to are considered relevant and therefore accorded more importance—or at least that's the rumor, the actual algorithm Google uses is not officially known.