Search engine optimization – be it at the local, national or international levels – is a constant process for a number of reasons. Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms; exactly what moves you up [or down] in the rankings will be different, likely before you finish your morning cup of joe. New sites are published every day. New content is published every day. New linkages are published every day. The spiders that walk the web to ferret out content [to really mash up a metaphor] do so 24 hours a day. And your competitors are trying to do exactly the same thing you are -- get to that holiest of grails, the top listing for “reverse-threaded widget” on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

To top it all off, search engine optimization involves a large pastiche of factors. There’s content and how often it changes, headline tags, directory, page & image names, URL patterns [look at your location bar now -- notice the fun we’ve been having with mod_rewrite?], sitemaps, navigational structures, search engine submission, local directories, networking and discovery sites, blogging, content “basements”, dynamically driven META tags [those these are fading], resource & crosslinking, tag clouds, sunspot activity...

You probably don’t want to worry about all this. And that’s what we’re for.

It’s a hard, cold and potentially expensive fact: The best way to make sure people find you is with pay-per-click campaigns. Shortly put, pay-per-click campaigns are those paid advertisements you see as “sponsored links” on the side of Google or at the top of Yahoo and Bing. They can be targeted and dialed in specific to your needs, but for your best results it takes management – which we can and do provide.

Your content is arguably the largest part of the search engine optimization equation. Unique, keyword laced and targeted content is what the search engines crave when they crawl those billions of pages – so yours has to stand out, be concise and be meaningful. After we determine what architecture will suit your site best, the biggest step is to create and install targeted content. Then all the background operations can begin: alt tagging imagery, title tagging, directory and earch engine submission, link trees and more.

And if wordsmithing content doesn’t sound appealing to you, don’t worry. We can either review or create it for you.

Social networks [like Twitter and Facebook], professional networks [like LinkedIn and Plaxo] and discovery sites [like Digg and StumbleUpon] have their uses. And, unbelieveably, it’s not just tracking down people you haven’t talked to in 20 years and annoying them at work.

These sites reach an extremely large and diverse audience – and your message can reach them to help them find you. They also help to provide crosslinkage, which in turn helps drive your overall standings with the search engines. And there are advertising & play-per-click programs within some of them, as well.

Alas, it’s not as easy as just posting a Facebook page. Again, your content, presence and campaign have to be managed. And we can help you with that.

Yep. It’s not just the big three. We know of more than 50, other than Google, Yahoo and Bing – and we know that those engines are not only interlinked, but are actually dependent upon by the big boys to help set their rankings. As part of our search engine optimization services, we submit to all major engines.

The underlying architecture of your site has definite significance to your rankings. For example, if the URL to sell your new widget is made up of the complex hash of garbage that programmers use, you’re not as friendly as something like http://mydomain.com/new-widget-for-sale/. If search engine optimization is part of your business plan, it’s important that your site be built properly from the ground up. Liquid Anvil takes that into consideration from the get-go.

And URL patterns aren’t all of it. The amount of content on a page to the amount of code matters, for example – so if all your CSS and JavaScript is right in the page proper, rather than in discrete files that you load as you need, you get demerits. The search engines are a bit like college freshmen – they don’t want to read through all the gibberish, either. They just want the answer.

At the end of it all, your code has to be clean, precise, coherent and above all, minimal. The easier it is for the robot to read, the more likely it is the thing will actually get to your content and manage to digest it. And that’s the way we build them.

Another piece of the search engine optimization puzzle is load speed. The faster your pages load, the gooder Google likes it – and adds that as part of the algorithm, apparently. Discrete files loaded only when needed is one methodology for this; so is keeping extraneous imagery and video out of the mix. A balanced server on a fast pipe is always a plus [and, admittedly, fun for the developer]. And keeping your code to standards so the bots don’t stumble can’t be emphasized enough.

One reaction to this is to minimize your code by removing the white space – believe it or not, blank space costs time and memory as well. This process can leave teethmarks on your gluteal regions, however. Optimizing and minimizing your external JavaScript? No worries – unless you’re us and we have to change something in the code. But if you minimize the entire content structure... Well, ever hear a search robot choke? You’re back at “How Your Site is Built Matters”.

There are three dangers with search engine over-optimization: Cost and Lack of Conversion. First, rabid optimization can get costly, and get costly fast. By putting you in every paid directory and throwing banner ads up on every page that’ll take them, you will get exposure. You’ll also get broke. These sort of all-encompassing campaigns don’t come cheap. You can also get overly obsessed with search engine optimization. By sticking crosslinkages, completely pointless SEO basements [Ours has a point, honest – we’re running an experiment there. Honest! No. We mean it.], Google Ads and discovery buttons all over everything [a condition we call “NASCARing”] you end up with a garbled message; your signal-to-noise ratio is way too high. You’ve likely noticed this yourself, when you’ve clicked on a site after a search and had an immediate desire to click off because it looks like spam. You end up with a highly ranked, highly expensive site that doesn’t actually give you any conversion to leads. Over-optimization leads to under-sales. Your best bet – and the path we can’t recommend enough – is to make sure you’ve got good, solid content, a great & easy-to-use design and a modest, targeted campaign.