Top-Rated Portland SEO Company

Whether you're searching for a Portland SEO Company, a local Portland SEO Consultant, or a National SEO Company outside of Oregon that offers SEO Services: Search Engine Optimization is the effort through an array of web marketing techniques to boost a website's ranking in the search engine results. Google still commands the majority of the search engine market, so their standards usually set the bar for all search engines no matter what country, city,  or state you are searching from.

With that said some ethical SEO companies have you're best interest in mind while other Search Engine Optimization Services are like SEO factories that run you're project through the pipeline where you will be lucky to receive personalized human to human solid interaction about your project. Which in the end is really your business, or "baby" that you have put all of your energy, time and finances into. We understand the personalized touch counts, we understand how to apply SEO to your business to make it help increase leads.

The goal of any SEO effort is to move towards the top of the organic listings or unpaid search results. Showing up as the first result is considered the ultimate goal. While appearing on the first page is still highly sought after, it would be a secondary target if you have an aggressive SEO campaign planned while shooting to be the #1 result for your targeted search term.

In SEO there are two major areas of concern, but techniques for one will usually also work for the other, depending on exactly what you want to accomplish.

The primary area of SEO is organic search engine optimization, which are the listings on a search engine page under the paid (PPC) listings.

In the second area, is Local SEO where you may have a local business which does no business at all on the internet, and basically uses Google and other search engines to primarily communicate with their local customers. When a person in Portland searches 'Best Restaurant, Portland Oregon' they don't care to see restaurants across the country - they want the restaurants that are in their area right at the top of the page. And if you are a business owner you will want your business to be right up there at the top so that potential customers can find you faster right?

Google has become very good at this; there are many other companies that specialize in promoting local businesses like Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo! Local, and Bing!

Enhancing local search results is an extremely important subset of local SEO that can have amazing long term payoffs for businesses that operate on a local basis such as retail stores, law firms, real estate agents, restaurants, dentists and doctors.

There is a third area which is actually just a combination of the first two. Music stores have combined brick and mortar locations with internet sales very effectively (Like Guitar Center, but there are many examples). An entity that does this will want to be among the top results in both local and general internet searches.

As stated previously, many of these tools are the same and can be tailored by SEO consultants to meet the individual needs of the over-all strategy. Further down this page I break these down, but keep this in mind - Google has changed the way their search engine algorithms work, and bulk indiscriminate links from any source are no longer a factor in their search engine ranking algorithms. In 2023 it's all about content, quality signals and inbound links, I imagine any good Portland SEO Expert will tell you the same. Brilliant, unique, and compelling content that makes people want to bookmark your page and possibly share it with others on social media sites.

Link Building for SEO

Even after the change in search standards, some bulk link activity can have very positive effects, especially when you use images instead of anchor text links. Link building still has its place in the bag of tricks that are available in advanced web marketing strategies. This can include such things as social bookmarking (on places like Digg and Delicious), getting listed on directories, which are basically independent online yellow pages.

Submission to Relevant Websites for Search Engine Optimization

This applies for all three types of business. Our in house SEO consultants use PRO tools from around the web to scan, and confirm that you're website is listed on every relevant search engine that matters here in this decade. Each search engine has a submission process where our staff registers your website with the Search Engine if you're company is not already listed there. If you're website is already listed we will verify your login information to CONFIRM that each listing is claimed with updated login credentials that you can actually use yourself.

This link building tactic is also one of the major steps for businesses that deal only on a local level. Making sure that your company is listed in every local business directory is one of the first things that our SEO Consultants work on for you! MozLocal (formerly GetListed) is perfect for this and they offer a fantastic tool that includes Google, Yelp, Yahoo, Local, Bing, SuperPages and several others. This also establishes additional links that are generally of a higher value than those above - but there are not as many. The goal here is not links, it's being cited on a quality directory, but links are an additional bonus.

Web Page Optimization

There is also the basic work of making sure that your website has what search engine bots are looking for. Largely this is also what humans are looking for but if you're content is written with how bots think as well, your content could hinder your website's performance in organic search results. This is priority one and one of the first areas that our SEO efforts focus on. It involves the way your website is put together, the proper use of keywords and keyword combinations and the way the site is assembled on a behind the scenes level. This involves making it easy for the search engine bots to find their way around your website. If they cannot do this they will not be able to properly categorize your website.

This involves making sure that there are sitemaps in the proper spots and that the bots have full access to your webpage. There are some instances where you will want to keep search engine bots away from specific pages, and there are now tools to make sure that they don't comb areas that you don't want factoring in the search results.

Customized Content Strategy

This involves some serious planning with talented writers for website content creation, resource pages, blog posts and occasional press release marketing. It also involves something that is less tangible but extremely important. Your website has to confer information in an effective way for humans that's easy to read, but it must also must appeal to customers on a broad range. In other words, the written word is as important as the videos and pictures that are on your website.

Under the new rules, content is the number one rating factor. There is an old marketing adage for this that is as old as the internet "Content is King." Your website and the way it is written will be very important if you want to see success on the web in 2023 and most likely beyond. Strategies such as blogging and guest blogging or writing an article for an online newspaper or magazine also demand very well written articles that entertain and educate people. This type of effort is not promotional at all - your blog and especially guest blogs or articles you submit should be about news in your industry, your analysis of it, how to tutorials or should address some sort of problem or barrier that people have.

Social Media SEO

Social Media SEO is on fire and soon could be a major indicator for Google about your brand's legitimacy. After all, now that it's almost 2023 what legitimate business doesn't have a Facebook page? Starting a blog, a Facebook page and in some cases a Twitter account on top of your website will give you a comprehensive network that can create a lot of activity. These social media networks are also extremely important to local businesses - for instance, a twitter coupon good for half off that a restaurant sends out 2 or 3 Fridays a month. All of these entities also provide links back and forth to each other, and the higher your social media and websites are rated the higher value those links will.

Hiring a Portland SEO Company

Regardless of what SEO company you decide to work with SEO will be more challenging but more rewarding under the new content based algorithms but SEO for websites is as alive as it ever was. Fortunately, if you have the time search engine optimization is still something that can be done on your own, or if you don't have the time you can always hire a local Portland SEO company like Webfu, or click here to contact me (Greg Beddor) to help assist you with your SEO project.