Recommended Reading/Tutorials

BnB

Hi All

We have a few developers in-house and we currently manage a few different websites/online applications.

There is an awful lot of information out there on SEO and it is very difficult (when you don't know what you are looking for) to separate the good info from the bluffers.

Does anyone have any recommended reading or tutorials that would be suitable for people who would be technically strong coders but would have little to no experience in SEO ?

Thanks in advance.

adamrooney

To be honest there is so much crap online about SEO and 1st page rankings etc that most of it is just not true or out of date. The search engines, and with particular reference to Google, are making so many algorithm changes per month (Penguin, Panda and now Hummingbird) that it is becoming increasingly difficult to rank sites or keep up with all the changes.

Or very importantly keep your clients sites up to date. Just a few changes in the algorithm can have a devastating effect on a sites performance (first hand experience!). Reading blogs and journals online will help you understand the lingo and terminology which will help you, and even places like theshortcutts.com (Matt Cutts) will help you understand better the processes involved in SEO, SEM.

But my advice is if you already have clients and they are looking for marketing work, outsource it to a company who know what they are doing leaving the developers in your business to do what they are good at doing - developing. Online marketing (SEO, SEM) & Web building/Development are two very different things.

BnB

Thanks for that adam. Just to explain why I would prefer to do it in-house. You mentioned our "clients" a few times. - We are not a software/web development company. We are a B2B services company in a niche area. The sites and applications that we manage are all our own for our own business. One is a shop, one is just a straight company website and then we have two main Applications which clients would pay to access. (But these applications would have a marketing front end to them too)

Typically, if you want maybe 2 websites to be managed externally for SEO, what do you think you would pay for it (On a monthly basis). We would provide copy and technical skills ourselves. We would just need someone to tall us what to do for the month

adamrooney

In relation to what you would pay If you wanted to outsource 2 websites for SEO there is no set price in my experience. Although some company's do have a Chinese menu of prices, the way search engines rank sites now it is not realistic. A few years ago Yes, but certainly not anymore. The days of building a website, adding some content and pointing some Links at it and it would rank in the SERP are long gone.

Each project/business is different and thus different audit, research, analysis and requirements are needed. Competition is also extremely important. ie. what is your competitors web/online presence like - both on-page and off-page factors. What are THEY investing in marketing per month? What is their content marketing strategy? Research is key, it really is. Get the research wrong and chances are your site will never rank or generate any kind of ROI.

If your going to do it in-house you will also need to invest in some software tools - both for research purposes and productivity. As a developer I am sure you understand the importance of having the right tools. If your not working with the right data well then chances of failure are obviously higher.

M.T.D

Some people will always try to win by cheating, so Google has to change things to give the least biased search results to its users.

I am going to be simplistic here so no abuse please.

Things for SEO
Assuming your sites are not blacklisted for anything else

Main ones:
Reasonably well written relevant content
Page structure: proper use of tags meta, h alt etc.
Site structure: a menu system that the search bots can follow (a site map can help as well)
Google is also taking increasingly into account where else your site and business are mentioned. Google+ places,Facebook etc. i.e. your overall online presence.

The voodoo is knowing what the content should be and how to phrase it. Fairly obviously it has to be about your products or services, but written in the terms/words/phrases your potential site visitor and future customer uses when they search.
Very simple example, if you call all your spanners wrenches but your customers only call them spanners your pages will not rank as well as they could.
How you promote existing and new content will depend on both the content and the target audience.

Price depends very much on what needs doing on the site and online presence and also on who the competition are and what they are doing.
If you do not yet have a professionally market assessment done, covering your sites, your competitions, and potential traffic , get one. It will save you a lot of unnecessary expense and time later.