Jetz Limousine, offering limo service in Springfield, Missouri (MO), have a Flash website. As many of you may know, Flash sites are generally not search engine friendly. When the guys at Jetz came to us, their website was no where to be found for any of the important keywords in Google.

We are proud to report that they are now on the first page of Google for “limos Springfield Mo,” “limousines Springfield Mo,” “limousine service Springfield Mo,” and all of the other keywords that people are actually searching when trying to find limo services in Google.

We’ve had similar success with other clients and we’re optimistic about the future. But we realize that none of this comes easy and we don’t have any top secret techniques. It takes hard work and an eye for detail. Much of our results have come from creating websites that are built with SEO in mind.

So, even if you decide against using our SEO services, you will have a leg up from the start just by using Digital Stax to build your website right. Do it right. Stay on task. Results will follow.

There are two major components of SEO:  onsite SEO and offsite SEO.

Onsite SEO involves optimizing the content, coding, and other aspects of your website to make it search engine friendly.  Some activities in this category might include adding keywords to the text of your website, reorganizing the content of your website, and optimizing your HTML code. All of these activities allow your website to better “communicate” to search engines what your site is about and the quality of your content. This is sometimes an overlooked aspect of SEO, but is a critical step when conducting your campaign.

Offsite SEO is the part of search engine optimization that most people are referring to when they use the term.  There is a lot of controversy and differing opinions and ideas about Offsite SEO, but everyone can agree on one thing: Links are important. Very important. More specifically, when conducting an SEO campaign you want to acquire links on quality websites and ideally on websites with content similar to your own.

The keywords used when creating these links are especially important. To demonstrate this,  go over to Google and type “click here” and then look at the first result.

Are you surprised by the result? The website isn’t clickhere.com, there’s no mention of “click here” in the title, description, or anywhere on the web page. So, why is this?

There are links all over the web that look just like this: click here to download Adobe Reader. There are likely millions of these links that have the words “click here” and are pointing to Adobe’s website. Of course, there’s little value in ranking high for those keywords, but it definitely demonstrates the importance of keywords in your links.

So back to our example of a barber in Springfield, Missouri, he would probably want to create links that look like this:  barber springfield, mo or something similar. And he would want to choose wisely where these links should be placed and how many.

There’s much more to SEO than what I’ve covered in this post. And regardless of the activities undertaken, it’s important to remember that all of this takes time. In fact, somtimes it takes a great deal of time and effort before you will rank well in search engines such as Google. But, in the end, your persistance will pay off.

In David Viney’s book, Get to the Top on Google, he reveals that Google tracks what is called “timed-out_queries_total”. Although it is not known for sure why they track this variable, the logical conclusion is that this is factored into how Google ranks the importance of websites. When a site performs poorly in this area, it is perceived to be a low quality site without much importance. Having a poor hosting provider could very well have a negative impact on your Google ranking. And it also doesn’t encourage users to frequent your site if the pages load slowly or they constantly receive server error messages.

The best advice is to choose a hosting provider that has been around the block for a while. New hosting companies turn up every day and many bite the bullet every day too. Many of these providers over-sell their technical capabilities and thus under-perform when you need them most.

Check out Internet forums, such as Web Hosting Talk, and find out which hosting companies to avoid and which have a proven track record. Ask fellow webmasters what hosting providers they use to help you make your decision. Make this decision carefully because it could be one of the more important SEO moves that you make.