Have you ever had a proposal, estimate or quote for search engine optimization work and wondered what goes into
pricing? What makes one site need more work than another? Why do some sites increase rankings faster than others? Why do some sites get more traffic from their top page ranking than yours?There are so many aspects of a web site that can decrease or boost your search engine rankings. Each web site is as unique as DNA and as such, will react differently to different marketing treatments.
What are these different factors that go into your web site’s ranking? Here is a list of
most important aspects:
1. The State of Your Site Prior to
Optimization - Your web site can have many different attributes that contribute to it’s ability to rank well or not so well. Your site’s PageRank for example, if your PR is a 0/10 or 1/10, it’s going to take a lot longer and a lot more work to get your site ranking well. If your site is poorly designed, contains frames or is written entirely in Flash, a lot of work will be required to redesign your site so that it is search engine friendly. If your site has very few incoming links, a fair amount of link development will have to be done in order for you to see
rankings and traffic you’re after. A web site that has been around for a while and developed it’s PageRank, has a search engine friendly design and obtains links on a frequent basis, will be able to reach top positions much faster than other sites, once an optimization campaign is under way.
2. The Keywords You Are Targeting - Some keywords are less competitive than others. If you search Google for a keyword or keyword phrase, you’ll see at
top of
results how many web pages are listed in those results. That is
amount of web sites that are competing with yours to reach top page placement for that keyword or keyword phrase. For example,
keyword phrase “web design” has approximately 303 million web pages listed in
results, whereas if you search for my name in quotations, “courtney heard”, you will see that there are only 508 web pages listed in
results. It is therefore, much easier to rank well for
keywords “courtney heard” than is is for web design. This is why you must choose keywords wisely. With tools such as wordtracker.com, you can find out approximately how many searches are performed for a given keyword or keyword phrase. The more competitive those keywords are,
higher
cost will be to optimize your web site and
longer
optimization will take.