At Echo-Factory, we build websites.  But what many business owners don’t understand is that often, launching a website is just the beginning of a process.  Let’s start with an example.

Say you’re a business that sells nose hair trimmers.  You’re ready to start selling them online, so you build a website, launch it, and wait for the customers to start rolling in.  The problem is, they don’t.  So you head over to Google and type in “Nose Hair Trimmers,” only to find that your site doesn’t come up anywhere in the search results.  Quelle horreur. 

This is where Search Engine Optimization, SEO, comes in.  At its most basic level, SEO is the process of convincing Google that your site is worth returning in searches related to your site. 

On-Page SEO

At Echo-Factory, we separate our SEO services into two areas, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.  On-page SEO refers to things that we can do on your site.  Things like making sure you have keywords worked in to your pages that will be relevant to what people are searching for, formatting and arranging things in ways that make it easy for Google to understand and index those keywords.  We think of this as the foundation of SEO.  Like in construction, evereything else we’re going to build depends on this foundation being solid, so we want to make sure we get it right.

Off-Page SEO

Once we’ve completed our initial on-page SEO optimization, we move on to off-page SEO. Beyond on-page optimization, the way that Google tells how valuable your site is, is by looking at what other sites link to yours. 

So, if you put your nose hair trimmer site online, and zero other sites link to it, Google thinks, “Well, nobody’s linking to this new site, so it’s probably not very valuable.” 

But the solution isn’t just as simple as getting a bunch of links.  The quality and type of the links you get matters as well.  Google assigns a ranking to every single page on the internet.  They call it a pagerank. The higher your pagerank, the more valuable Google thinks you are.  Sites like Wikipedia have a very high pagerank.  Sites that Google thinks are spammy or useless have a very low pagerank.  If you want to improve your chances of coming up in searches for your target terms, you need links from sites that Google thinks are valuable, sites with a higher page rank.

Of course, this just scratches the surface.  There are plenty of other variables that affect what sites come up for any given search. But the underlying principle remains the same.  If you can get a respected site to link to you, it will help your search rankings.

What It Looks Like

When we take on an SEO project, we start with on-page content, building the foundation for what we’re doing next.  When that’s done, we move on to off-page SEO.  Practically, this means creating reasons for other sites to link to our clients, and convincing them to do just that. 

In practice, SEO is hard work.  It takes time to create good content, and to approach other webmasters and bloggers, develop relationships with them and convince them to link to our client’s site.  But when it’s done properly, it pays off.

The Payoff

The reason we often encourage our clients to invest in SEO is that it often pays off in big ways.  The obvious alternative to SEO is paid online advertising.  While paid online advertising can be effective, long term, good SEO campaigns can give a far higher return on investment. 

With paid online advertising, you generally pay per visit to your website.  Say the keywords you’re targeting cost $1.50 per click.  That means that bringing 5,000 visitors to your site will cost $7,500, and once you’ve spent that money, the ads stop running and the visitors stop coming.

If you invested that same $7,500 in SEO, you might not get 5,000 visitors immediately, but you’ll likely get far more than 5,000 visitors in the long run.  And unlike paid advertising, the benefits of SEO can keep bringing visitors to your site long after the campaign has ended.

Pitfalls

The world of SEO is filled with less than honest providers. The truth is that good SEO takes hard work, and if anyone promises you great SEO results for incredibly low prices, watch out. 

We’ve worked with a few clients who have fallen prey to SEO schemes.  These schemes will promise things like “1000 links for $50” - and while they technically deliver these links by throwing up thousands of junk links on a network of spam sites, they do more harm than good. 

In the cases where we’ve taken on sites that have fallen prey to these schemes, we’ve had to spend several months simply undoing the damage that’s already been done. 

Learn More

If you’re ready to learn more about SEO, Wikipedia is a great place to start.  If you’re interested in trying it on your own, our favorite tools are Google Analytics and Mint for tracking your site’s traffic, SEOMoz for some of the best SEO analysis and tracking tools on the internet, and Scribe for monitoring the SEO potential of any article or blog post. 

And of course, if you’re interested in Echo-Factory taking on your site’s SEO, let us know.  We’d love to hear from you. 

Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to do some pro-bono work for the Claremont Educational Foundation, designing their 2010 fundraising brochure.

The foundation supports the Claremont Unified School district, providing funding for technology, music & arts programs and general funding to Claremont’s public schools.  We were honored to be able to work with them.

A few days ago we heard from the foundation.  Their efforts have been overwhelmingly successful.  They raised more than $350,000 this year that went directly to Claremont schools.  The funding purchased new technology, restored 16 class sections in grades 7-12 and helped preserve smaller class sizes.  And perhaps most remarkably, in a time or rampant cuts in education, no Claremont School District teachers were laid off this year. 

So, to the board members and sponsors of the Claremont Educational Foundation, congratulations!  Thanks for letting us be a small part of your success. 

We’ve never thought of ourselves as a Madison Avenue style ad agency - but we are apparently getting close to Boardwalk.  A while back, Mike took some photos for a MagLite law enforcement campaign, and just a couple weeks ago one of the photos was used on the gameboard of the soon to be released Monopoly:  Law Enforcement Edition. 

I can’t say we ever expected to see our original photo peering down into the corner of a Monopoly board. 

Should you want to friend Monopoly: Law Enforcement Edition you can do so on its Facebook page, or pre-order your copy today for November delivery. 

We’re happy to announce that Echo-Factory has become the agency of record for Allied Anesthesia, an Orange County group of 42 highly respected anesthesiologists.  We pitched the medical group in July, and were selected through a competitive agency review.  The pitch was against other Southern California advertising agencies and Echo-Factory was chosen to be Allied’s new agency of record.

We’ve already started on several projects for Allied, including an initial rebranding.  You can expect to see some of that here in the future.  In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more, check out our press release on our newest client. 

Echo-Factory is happy to call NALMCO, interNational Association of Lighting Management Companies, our newest client. We got to know NALMCO through our involvement with PEERS and our relationships with [P2] and other lighting industry clients. In June, NALMCO put out a RFP for a PR campaign and some advertising materials.  We put together our pitch, and when the dust settled, we were their new agency. 

Our work started out with a rebranding project.  NALMCO has a reputation for offering the most respected certifications in the lighting industry, so we created a logo that compliments that reputation.

NALMCO launched its new logo in July, and we’re currently in the middle of a three part PR campaign, so keep your eyes peeled for more from our new lighting buddies.

The association’s president, Jim Frank, was nice enough to give Echo a shout out in its monthly magazine, LM&M: 

“One of NALMCO’s initiatives is to increase awareness of our association in the energy market.  [...] For this reason, we are in the early stages of image branding and media campaigns.  We contracted with Echo-Factory of Rancho Cucamonga, California, to consult with NALMCO on matters of image and media.  [...]  Some might ask, ‘What was wrong with the old NALMCO logo?’ Or, ‘Why do we need to hire an outside consultant to handle NALMCO media campaigns?’ The answer is that we need to elevate and maintain a stronger and more visible presence in today’s market.  And today’s market needs NALMCO.”

Thanks Jim, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.