Search Engine Promotion or Optimization (SEO)**

Getting you to the top of the search engine list* and keeping you there is our specialty at M3Company.  Many of our competitors are excellent graphics designers or computer program specialists that can put together a very fine website.  But making money on the internet is not like the movie "Field of Dreams".  Just because you build it they will NOT NECESSARILY come AND BUY. To have someone want to buy from you or do business with you they have to find you on the Internet. Considering that there are more than 6 billion web pages it is easy for your business to get lost. SEO at M3Company brings your website to the top of the search engines for the terms people use to find businesses like yours.

To be found by the largest volume of potential customers on the net you must be listed on the top 7 or 8 search engines and directories for the SEARCH TERMS people use to find your type of business. For example the top two Internet search engines are Google and Yahoo -- They process about 70-80% of all searches made on all search engines .

M3 can have your site appear in the first 1-3 pages of all the top search engines and for most clients, a number one page listing. And we do it all legally (according to search engine approved methods)

We have been keeping up with all the methods to get on top of search engines and directories since 1995.  A lifetime in internet years when you consider search engines change their main Ranking Rule Set about every 3 months and minor adjustments monthly.

Again, you want to be at the top of a search engine for your businesses' key search terms, because many studies have proven that over 85% of the Internet surfing public use search engines to find information about their next purchase. And 95% of all business-to-business entities use Internet search engines to research their next purchase. 

Compare that with the fact that more people are coming on-line all the time and you can see that the internet search engine has become, in many areas, more popular than the yellow pages for finding products and services. This even true locally, as more computer users come on line at home in small towns and cities. well. In fact, many serious business "think tanks" and large business schools are predicting that within 2-3 years the Yellow Pages will be so little used it will be a very cheap place to advertise. That means you must act soon to get your website positioned so you can compete locally as well and internationally. All search engine ranking rules give some precedence to "time in their database." So, all things being equal, you will have an easier time competing with the guy across the street or across the ocean,  if you act now.

The current connectivity rate in the US is over 74% and some areas are higher than 86%. (Northern Virginia is one of those)

Connectivity is defined as a computer at home or work connected to the internet and used for making purchases, researching future purchases or communicating with other businesses, co-workers, or loved ones.

Having your site listed in a search engine is not enough.  In order to develop large volumes of traffic, you must be listed within the first three web list pages for the term or phase being searched. This is because studies have shown that 98% of the people searching will not go past the first 3 pages of the search engine results of web site listings for the term searched.

The SEARCH ENGINE Business Paradigm

Almost all search engines make most of their money two ways: selling ads to advertisers on their web site or selling space on the returned search listing pages to folks who want to be listed for a particular term in an area called "Sponsored Listings". This latter method is called "Pay per Click Advertising" and will be addressed in another section where we offer consulting services.

Both ways require that search engines get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day or hour. These visitors are you and I. What do we want from a search engine that will keep us coming back? Three things: fast loading. fast listing results and relevant results from our search term request. The first  and second were not in the mix until 1999 when Google.com appeared as another new search engine. Within months they had grabbed up a 40% share of the completed searches world wide. Why? Not just because they were fast loading (1-2 seconds compared to Yahoo's 25 seconds at the time) BUT because their searches were more quickly returned, more relevant and had larger quantities of websites in their database. 

Obviously, if you are in this business you want to protect your search engine from being impacted from anything which would detract from those three key customer concerns. Google has done this very well and other search engines have followed suit. Therefore, if your website is not really the top website in terms of relevance for the search term your potential clients are searching for, it is difficult to get to the top page. It is only possible if  you have a knowledge of how to write and structure your website so that a computer driven robotic program will assess and rank your site among the top 10 listings.

This will be even more true in the coming months and years because more businesses are coming on to the Internet and The Search Engine Business just got more competitive: Google just became a public company.

Since their entry into the Search Engine world, Google has gradually taken over as the largest search engine and the recently completed IPO has made billionaires of the top folks that made Google a top performing company. They will now be even more conscious of business owners who would like to cheat to get to the top positions for heavily searched terms.

This last fact is good for M3Company. It will put out of business a lot of fly by-night SEO companies who prey on desperate businesses who want to get a top position on the search engines quickly and easily. Any company that advertises that they can get you a number one position for your search term is ether a scam or uses a method that will eventually get your business banned from the search engine database all together. In the past, Google and others have been slow to ban companies using this practice. With an influx of capital I suspect some will go to policing the illegal activity.

M3Company only uses Search Engine approved methods of optimization. Fortunately, most "illegal" SEO has been in a volume low enough for most terms to allow legitimate businesses to get on the top page using legal SEO in spite of these bad apples.

Glossary of SEO or Search Engine Optimization Terms

* Search Engine - a web site on the Internet where one can enter a term or phrase, press return key and be provided with a list of web sites that relate to that tern or phrase. Search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek, Dogpile, MSN Search, AOL NetFind, etc. all contain billions of web pages. In Google the average search time to retrieve thousands of pages is a few seconds for just about any conceivable search term entered.

**SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of making sure your web site is as good or better than all other web sites which contain information about a particular search term. The determination of "better" is which ones rank in the first 2 pages returned by a search engine after a person enters a search term. It should only return web pages where there is significant information regarding that term.

That term within your website is called a "key word". When your website has conformed to all the rules of that search engine and has more information relevant to that key word than all the other websites which are in the same business, it will appear at or near the top of the listings for a search for that key word or term.

SEO Process and Costs

So what is the SEO process of getting to the top. It is an iterative process, i.e., we make a change, check the results and then make another smaller change to see if you can move up one more step. It usually take 3 -4 changes and resubmissions to achieve a top position. The first step is always to word the web site with appropriate keywords in just the right amount so a computer can apply a search engine rule set for ranking against other websites using the same search terms. The next is to get as many links back to your site from as many other websites as possible. Getting links to your website  is not difficult it just takes time to ask webmasters for a link and following up when, invariably they don't do it as soon as they said they would.

As the process can be complex in very competitive business arenas we avoid giving a specific cost or time frames to complete the SEO until we have evaluated each specific business case. In general terms it can take as long as 12 months or as short as 1 or 2 months to achieve a top ranking on all the top search engines. We have achieved top rankings for as little as $600 per term and as high as $1800 per term or phrase. Of course we also evaluate whether or not we believe our price is warranted and inform you of that up front.

As a disclaimer here, we offer some caveats:  A few of our more successful SEO projects resulted in low net income for the client. This was due to the clients' insistence on continuing what we considered poor Internet Business Practices. We can "bring them to your door but you have to sell them." In another low income project we got the folks to come to the front door in droves but, due to the client's insistence of leaving a slow loading page there, no one stayed to see what a great business and website they had landed on. Another client insisted on "helping us do SEO" by buying hudreds of instant links. This is a clear violation of Google rules. He was banned from the Google search engine which negated all the effort placed on Google specific optimization.

We may make a number of suggestions for website improvements on existing webs in which we are commissioned to do SEO but you the client are the final judge of whether or not you can live with those changes. Again, we bring this to your attention up front before we do your project. We now require that you use M3Company website hosting on all our SEO projects. This is because much of our work is proprietary and ours is a very competitivebusinesses. We also have access to some proprietary software which assists and speeds up the SEO process. Finally, it allows us to block some well meaning attempts by owners or friends of owners who will inadvertently criple M3Company optimization work.

It is important to note that a website built by us from the ground up has a good chance of doing very well in the Internet Search Engine Optimization arena. And certainly would be on the low end of the SEO project cost scale should you choose to do it.

At this point I must point out that while it is possible to get to the top of the search engines for a particular term, it is not always easy to stay there without some small monthly, quarterly and/or annual tweaks. These are needed to leap over folks who hired other SEO professionals and temporarily received a higher ranking.  Again longevity in the top position helps keep the top position.

At M3Company we take one company in a competing business field as we feel it is a conflict of interest to have the ability to move one client above another. In the Internet search engine marketing world there is not much difference between the top 3 websites on a search results page.

Who is a good candidate for SEO work?

Any business in which the gaining of a new customer or client, will result in more income than the dollar cost of doing SEO and maintaining a top Search Engine position.

It is not like "Selling High and Buying Low." It is a straigh forward calculation M3Company does and informs you of your probabilities of achieving the above business improvement based on your net return on an individual sale and back end income from gaining a new customer.

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