32 SEO Questions and Answers

There are many people and companies out there that guarantee first page ranking or even first place ranking through their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. The term “SEO” is thrown around a lot both online and offline but many don’t know what ethical, white hat SEO is or how important to the success of their business and how to use it to increase their return on investment (ROI). Acting as a primer for those new to SEO and how crucial it is to their company or individual endeavors, I have provided a list of 32 SEO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and Answers for everything you’ve wanted to know about SEO to start the conversation and provide insight into the world of natural and organic SEO.

1. What does SEO stand for? This acronym itself stands for Search Engine Optimization.
2. What is SEO? The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers to increase ROI or meet goals. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engine spiders to index the content on a website or social media networking community.
3. Is SEO spam, junk, dead etc.? Some believe that SEO is dead but with the expansion of social media networking communities, ethical and “white hat” SEO is more alive than every and is highly necessary when performing social media optimization (SMO).
4. Why aren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? Any SEO company that promises you the #1 spot on search engines is trying to sell you something. There are no guarantees as far as search engines are concerned but if you haven’t done SEO yet, have no real website content, and have a site that contains mostly Flash, AJAX and Javascript, you will have a difficult time showing up in any search engines. SEO is a long term strategy – not a keyword density game.
5. Why am I on #1 all the time but when my wife searches for me she doesn’t find me? Search engines like to cache (or keep) your personal preferences and personalized search queries to make searching more convenient for you. If you search and click on your website often, search engines such as Google will bring that website to the top of the stack. Clear your history/cache and turn off personalized search options to see the real ranking.
6. When will we see results? Some websites are indexed in a few hours and some take a few months. This time span depends on the search engine’s processes, your content and age of website as well as your level of competition.
7. Can we rank for Apple? Ranking for a highly competitive keyword such as this will decrease your possibility of getting ranked properly. Remember that you are in direct competition with the likes of Steve Jobs.
8. Can we rank for everything (huge list of keywords)? Sure you can but this is not the most effect way of being ranked. Customers who want an Apple computer but come to your website that sells mattresses is not only going to leave but will most likely not return even when they are ready to purchase a mattress. It is all about the long tail approach and relevancy. You have one chance to make a first impression with your customers.
9. How much does SEO cost? This really depends the goals of that you or your company have in place. Every good SEO company will work with you to assess your goals and give you a project cost and timeline agreement based on an hourly rate as SEO is an ongoing process. Some SEO companies have created packages with a set of deliverables to help the decision making process.
10. Why is SEO so expensive? This depends on your classification of “expensive”. High quality ethical and natural SEO costs more because you are paying for the return on that investment. SEO is a science and an art that will bring in more money to your company than it takes. An ethical SEO company will focus on your ROI.
11. How long does it take to get indexed by Google? Each search engines indexes different sites at different times. It could take minutes or weeks depending on your site. Without SEO, it may never be indexed.
12. How to submit my new site to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.? The search engines provide a few submission portals but these days your website it submitted through content and XML Sitemaps.
13. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? There is absolutely no need to submit to that may websites. The top 3 search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) usually feed all the smaller websites their findings. Submit to the big 3 search engines and the smaller ones will find them.
14. Do I need an XML Sitemap? There is some room for debate but it is highly recommended to have a XML Sitemap for your site to provide further information to search engines.
15. Do I need meta tags for SEO? Yes, although some meta tags are no longer being used for search engine placement and indexing, the information is usually display and will increase the chances of someone clicking a link to your website. Other meta tag information gives data to the search engines to help decide if your site is safe and when they should return to index again.
16. Do I need a high PageRank for SEO? PageRank is important to some but it is all about the content on your site and your target audience. There are thousands of websites that have great PageRank with absolutely no return on investment (ROI) and vise-versa.
17. What is linkbait? It is highly linkable masterfully crafted pieces of content people not only like but also recommend to others by linking.
18. Can’t my niece who is a graphic designer do the SEO? Again, SEO is an art and a science. There are a number of people that are well versed in many areas of website design and development but those who are successful in SEO have an extreme passion for SEO specifically. Just as web designers are no coders, graphic designers are not SEO experts.
19. Can’t my nephew who is a web developer do the SEO? Many professional schools don’t train web developers about SEO and its place in web programming. A good web developer can only provide about one third of the skills needed for successful SEO.
20. Can my son-in-law who is a Perl, Java and C programmer do my SEO? Programmers often underestimate the difficulty of SEO and attempt to attain rankings by creating scripts that automatically enhance websites. This is a very risky business as it often crosses the thin line of what’s allowed by the search engine guidelines.
21. Why should I outsource my SEO? SEO is a full time process. Unless you have at least one experienced full time SEO in-house it is strongly advised to seek assistance from a SEO company or consultant.
22. Can’t I just use WordPress plus plugins for SEO? You can to get started but it’s not enough. Nowadays most modern content management systems (CMS) and blog software have built-in technical SEO capabilities. To outrank others who use mostly SEO friendly software, you need a professional.
23. Does Google hate SEO? No, Google provides information and website tools to help webmasters fine-tune their SEO efforts. In fact the Google employees and SEO practitioners speak at the same conferences and work together as business partners.
24. Does SEO mean optimization for search engines spiders not humans? SEO is not used to please just search engines robots but humans as well. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimization for end-users and customers.
25. Is buying links, hidden text, IP delivery etc. black hat SEO? Most definitely! Some techniques can be used ethically as well but there these specific tactics are black hat SEO tactics.
26. Is black hat SEO legal? The question to ask should rather be whether black hat SEO is recommended. No it is not. Most of it is probably still legal, depending on the technique. It pays only for the few who do it on large scale but most that do find their websites and IP addresses blacklisted from search engines quickly.
27. Does site size matter? Yes, site size does matter. Search engines will only crawl a portion of the data on a site if it is overrun with programming codes, large graphics and other technological instances that would slow down as website load time.
28. Do domain extensions (top level domains like .com, co.uk) matter? Yes they do. Especially when it comes to country-based domains like .fr, .de or .es – for local results in respective countries you should use preferably a country domain to get a small advantage.
29. Do nofollow links count? Yes, search engines don’t discount nofollow links completely but it decreases the credibility of the link and therefore it’s link “juice”.
30. Do you offer PageRank optimization, search engine submission, meta tag optimization? These things are secondary or negligible. In the world of SEO, content and linking reign supreme.
31. Is blog commenting for SEO spam? Like in many other cases, it depends on how it is used. Your name should be relevant and comment value needs to be added.
32. I have a question or answer that is not on this FAQ what can I do? There is a comment section! Add your questions and/or answers there. They might get added to the actual FAQ. If you would like to keep your question private or would like to hire me as your SEO consultant, feel free to contact me for free SEO quote.

This article was inspired by a post over at SEOptimise – check out the original post over there, its a great read!

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