Sastrugi Marketing - Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can just I do SEO myself?

A: Do It Yourself SEO is possible. SEO, SEM and PPC "how to" is widely available on the Internet, including on this site. However, learning is time consuming, and experience is needed to avoid rookie mistakes. Extensive experience with Internet Marketing enables Sastrugi to optimize sites quickly and effectively. However, involvement in the SEO process is important: SEO is often more effective if site owners actively creating content, keeping the website fresh.

Specific Example: My first time implementing an .htaccess redirect took about one hour: Several minutes of research find the right code and the correct file. Then, after I made the change, the site stopped functioning altogether. 60 minutes to successful restoration. Simple .htaccess redirects on my site require about 15 seconds today, including testing.

Q: What specific results can you promise?

A: Some SEO improvements will be visible quickly: Change the Title Tags and Description Meta Tag, and your listing in Search Engine Results Pages will reflect the specific change to your site the next time it's crawled by a Search Engine Bot. Improvements to your ranking relative to competitors are more variable. It's a competitive business! At the same time you are improving your site, competitors may be improving their sites, and search engines are refining their secret ranking algorithms. For many sites (those with poor on-page SEO initially and weak SEO by competitors), improvements may be fairly rapid. However, no honest SEO professional can tell you exactly what that improvement will be.

Q: Shouldn't my Web Developer have done SEO when the site was created?

A: Maybe. But, the bottom line is that most web developers do little or no SEO. They view their job as producing a site that looks nice, looks like what you wanted, and functions (all links work, forms send information, etc.) the way you wanted it to as their fundamental task. SEO tends to be neglected.

Many of a web developer's clients don't understand the importance of SEO, and don't ask for it. Rather than spend time on features the client didn't request, they focus on site appearance. When the client views the completed site, the client is happy. The client's friends and relatives look at the site, and are impressed. The client doesn't know that good SEO would have brought in more new customers - and they aren't upset at missing something they didn't know was possible.

Additionally, SEO is an uncertain and time consuming undertaking. If a client tells a competent web developer: "Use a darker shade of blue here," that's something that the developer should be able to achieve with 100% certainty. If a client tells a web developer: "I want to be in the top three for search term x," that may or may not happen. SEO is a competitive field, and, with respect to a particular search term, you may compete against other good SEO practitioners whose clients have natural advantages (domain age, domain name, etc.). If you are #27 for a search term with bad SEO, will good SEO make you #1? Or, will it just move you up to #14? Either result is possible. You'll almost always improve your standings in the Search Engine Results Page with good SEO, but the extent of that improvement is uncertain. The uncertainty of Search Engine Optimization drives web developers to focus on completely controllable items, like the appearance of the site.