What We Do

Any search engine optimization company that will tell you they have a way to boost your placement without changing your website's text is after your money and not looking out for your best interests. To gain higher rankings takes a careful analysis of your website, along with knowledge of the current search engine algorithms and changes need to be made to your current website. If your website was OK then you wouldn't be talking to us! We have studied algorithms and rankings for years and even when the algorithms change we can figure out the changes , take corrective actions accordingly, and make our best efforts to return you to your previous results position.

We are totally focused on excellent customer service and fulfilling our commitment to you to make your site the best it can be, not just for search engines but for customers and visitors. We do not spend our time ranking our own site to say :"look how good we are" so that we can put a huge price tag on our services. Instead we spend our time working on our customers sites and letting them say how good we are.

Initial Proposal

We will conduct an initial assessment of your site, highlighting the major SEO trouble spots found on your site that can cause search engines to misunderstand your site, or worse not even be able to read your site. We will provide a high level view of the changes we would propose making to your site. This is deliberately high level as the full analysis is part of our services and takes a long time when done correctly.

All of our proposals are sent out with references that you can contact directly, and real life testimonials from satisfied customers. What our customers say about us is very important to us and is why we share this with your right up front.

Full Analysis

Once we are engaged by your company to carry out optimization, we will provide the following major activities.

Critique your Site

Optimization can drive visitors to your site but if your site is difficult to navigate, distracting, or irritating then visitors will click back and go to the next site in the search results. We will provide advice on how to improve your site's usability including:

• Unnecessary Java applets.
• Removing blinking text and other effects that went out of style many years ago.
• Suggestions on improving confusing navigation.
• Suggestions to improve visitor to sales conversion rates.

Research Search Terms

We will work with you to decide the best search terms and phrases to use for your target audience. We have tools available that can tell how often a phrase is searched for and also what the competition for the phrase is. Some search engine placement companies say they will get you five 'Top 10' positions, but if these five phrases are never searched upon no one will see your site. You need to balance the chance of being searched for against how many sites you have in competition.

Create an Enticing Title

The title of the page is displayed to the user as part of the search results. If your title isn't appealing then the searcher may click elsewhere. If your title is incorrect or misleading, the searcher will click into your site, realize they made a mistake and click back to the search engine.

Write an Effective Description

This is the text displayed by some search engines when your site is part of their result list. Just like your title it needs to be one or two lines describing your site and why the searcher should visit you.

Design and Define your Keywords Tag

This meta tag is ignored by most engines as its been abused in the past, still you will not be penalized for putting one in and some of the engines still use it for relevancy.

Modify your Pages to be Readable

The need for optimization has become acute in the past few years. Web sites are being created with Java, Flash and images all of which search engines spiders can not understand and ignore. If the content of your web site is ignored by the spiders then they can't index your site and no one can find your site by searching for it in Google, Yahoo, etc. If no one can find your site then your hard work and money spent creating the site is in vain.

By subtly modifying your site you can improve your position in the search engine, improve your position and number of visitors to your site will increase. Additionally, by targeting specific search phrases and using descriptive text the visitors you receive are highly targeted and more likely to convert into sales.

Validate the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)

Constantly changing font sizes, colors and other anomalies can create an impression of a fly-by-night website. In addition, the constant use of <FONT> and other style tags can massively increase the size of your file, slowing the page download and frustrating users on dial up modems.

Validate the HTML Used

If any of your pages contain broken or malformed HTML if can confuse some browsers, and more importantly some search engine spiders. We will validate the HTML on all pages of your website to check for accurately used, properly nested HTML conforming to HTML 4.0 transitional standard. This will ensure the spiders can read your site without getting confused by poorly formed HTML and potentially not indexing or badly indexing your site's content.

Supply a Current Ranking Report

You need to know your current ranking for any search term before you optimize your site, without this knowledge you won't know whether you've made any improvements. We will supply comprehensive reports detailing your site's ranking on all the major search engines for all of your search terms, this includes your previous position and current position so you can measure progress.

Search Engine Submission

We will guide you through the perilous waters of search engine submission. We don't claim to submit you to hundreds and thousands of search engines because frankly, most of them are a waste of time. Google and Yahoo and a few other engines perform the majority (well over 90%) of all searches made on the web today. If you see a site boasting of how many 1,000s of engines your site will be submitted to ask yourself 'What is the audience like for any one of these engines', if you think it is good then submit your site manually, if not avoid these sites.

• Free Submission
  We will submit your site to the major free just once. We don't recommend multiply submitting to the engines as a) they prefer to find sites on their own, and b) with many incoming links the spiders will find and index you anyway. The reason we submit once is to give the spiders a jump start finding you.
• Paid Inclusion Submission
  Depending on the package bought, we will submit your site to the major paid inclusion search engines for as long as you stay a client.
• Directory Submission
  DMOZ is the open directory that is used by Google and some other search engines as their directory. We currently do not recommend submitting to the Yahoo directory as they do not use their own directory to provide results - however this will change sometime in early 2004 and when it does we will modify our advice and recommend submitting if its relevant. There is a cost for this, currently $299 per year for most websites. Where appropriate we will also recommend inclusion in Business.com which costs $99 per year. We also recommend inclusion in other smaller directories which will increase your chance of extra traffic and give you a good link to your site. We will also include you in any free directories which are relevant to your industry.

Solicit Inbound Links

We will review with your your current inbound links. Depending on the package bought we will contact related web sites to arrange for reciprocal links to your site in return for you linking to their site. We also arrange inbound directory links - more information.

Monthly Maintenance

Rome wasn't built in a day, nor is your web site presence. Search engines change their algorithms over time, if you don't consistently monitor your web sites position within the engines you could be losing ground to your competitors without even knowing it. Worse! you could be using HTML code on your web site that although perfectly valid today, but in one months time could cause your site to be banned by the search engines. See spamming for more details.

We do not always get it right but we will make it right once we identify a problem and the monthly reports allow us to stay on top of your search engine position and identify issues early and take corrective action.

No SEO company can guarantee to keep you at the top as search engines can and do change the way they return searches overnight and Google has just done that in Nov 2003.  What a good SEO company will do is be very honest with you about how the process works. They will enter into a partnership to help you develop and grow your internet business not offer a quick fix which will get you ranked today and you are gone tomorrow. Our monthly maintenance takes care of reoptimizing your site when a change is made.

See our article for more information on search engine optimization monthly maintenance.

What You Do

We can not do this alone. Search engine optimization needs the commitment of the client too. We will commit to you to work diligently and with best efforts to get you ranked in the major search engines. We will provide you with step by step details within our contract on what our service consists of for the optimization of your site.

We want you to commit to us in the spirit of a partnership to make this happen. What we will need from you:

• You will carry out Elixir's recommendations on constructing new pages or making the necessary changes to existing pages as defined in our optimization report. Elixir can recommend professional copy writing services if needed.
• Return of optimization report with comments and agreement in a timely manner to ensure we can schedule the work quickly and start the process of getting your site ranked.
• Cooperation from client in testing changes as requested by us.
• Inform us in a timely manner if any changes have been made to the website pages.
• FTP access will be provided by client in a timely manner to enable us to initiate the links campaign (if applicable).
• All Pay per click and advertising charges recommended by Elixir will be paid for directly by the client.
• Client has to indicate that they fully understand that Elixir does not participate in "quick Fix" optimization services and commit to the longer term process that we offer.
• Client has to indicate that they understand search engines can and do change the way they rank a site. What will get your ranked today may be out of date tomorrow. Elixir's commitment to you will ensure that when this happens we will take the corrective action necessary to get you ranked again at no extra charge during the term of our contract or if you sign up for monthly maintenance.

We are highly focused on targeted traffic and conversions. We will need your full cooperation to make changes to your site if the traffic comes but the business doesn't.