In the recent past, we have written on the subject of selecting the best SEO expert and the best Web designer for your projects or websites. Revisiting the subject is warranted after reading a blog post over at Blazing Minds regarding SEO Packages for Small Business. It’s an important subject, and understanding it or the lack of understanding it can effect your long term business goals.

In our article Selecting a Web Design Firm and SEO Expert we highlighted these points:

• Avoiding the SEO Amateur – This continues to be a problem among startup businesses and those that do not do their research. We have rescued a few of these since the writing of our original article.
• Avoiding the Submission Scam – Be wearing of anyone who tells you that they will submit your site to 100′s or 1000′s of sites. First, that’s probably not going to do much for you. Second, submission of your site is a tactic and not a strategy in search engine optimization.
• Understanding how keywords are really used – It is a common understanding that being ranked #1 for a keyword is the goal of SEO. Well, it’s true, if you are using the right keywords. If you are ranked #1 for keywords that no one uses, then your keywords are junk. An expert SEO will help determine the best keywords to attract the visitors to your site that convert into leads or sales.

The Blazing Mind’s article points out these concepts in regard to buying an SEO package.

• Bulk Link Building – Root domain authority building should be one of the primary goals of any SEO package and not building low quality links.
• Results in Less Than 3 Months? – While real resultscan happen in less than 3 months, it often takes more time to develop solid ranking results that will stick around for the long term. Usually those 3 month promises is a good indicator that you are talking to a used car salesman. (No offence to used car salesmen.)
• Are you Being Offered a Complete Package? – Avoid the SEO package that doesn’t include keyword anaysis or competetor research. An SEO strategy that doesn’t include these will leave you wanting for more and few conversions from visitor to customer.

You can read the complete article about Selecting a Web Design Firm and SEO Expert here at the Abraxas website and you can read more about understanding SEO Packages for Small Business over at Blazing Minds.

Abraxas offers a highly effective strategic approach to search engine optimization and provides custom SEO packages to small businesses and startups. Please contact us for more information.

WRCB Channel 3 In Chattanooga, TN featured the expert analysis of our lead web/search strategist, Donnie Lee, in a story regarding the proposed new Web site for the City of Chattanooga. The interview was conducted on June 27, 2011 at the conference room of AV Simplified Solutions for the 6 o’clock news.

Update:
You can read the full article over at Channel 3′s website.

A recent web design project that we completed for Team Hillenburg, an independent consultant for Thirty-One Gifts, is beginning to make the rounds to the CSS award sites. Team Hillenburg’s new website has made an appearance as a featured site on CSS Based and CSS Basket. We expect a few more awards to be bestowed on this fine web site that was built using the latest version of WordPress, with some custom design and backend options to suite the needs of Team Hillenburg. The project time line for this project stretched over two months with the bulk of the design work being done in the first 30 days and the majority of the content being added in the last 30 days.

Visit Team Hillenburg to view the design and layout or to explore the Thirty-One concept.

We’re not often updating this blog with client projects, so we decided to give you a quick look at a couple of projects that we are having a lot of fun with. Not only are these projects enjoyable but challenging in their own unique way.

Dog Star Comics
First up, we have Dog Star Comics a digital comic book publisher coming online soon at the frontier of digital comics. Dog Star Comics is both an SEO and Web design project. This site is unique in that the site online now is in a pre-launch state to bring awareness and seed SEO efforts. Once, Dog Star Comics is ready to roll out for business, a new site that is more refined with a membership/subscription option will also roll out.

Focus Floors
Focus Floors is a well established retailer of carpet tiles for residential and commercial use, based in Chattanooga, TN. This project is an ecommerce project that features a robust shopping cart system, blog, and SEO. We have been fortunate enough to work with Focus Floors on SEO before developing customer centric ecommerce solution. This site is still in the design/development stage. In the mean time, their old and archaic site continues to serve their broad customer base. We expect a full roll out on this site in December 2010.

Dog Star Comics beta/pre-launch site to seed awareness and SEO.

Visit Site

Focus Floors early design build that hasn’t been released for public consumption.

Visit Site

Optimizing your web pages and images for Google’s image search is, in my opinion, underused. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. It’s good if you are looking to gain more traffic to your site from image search, because competition may be low. It’s a bad thing if you are doing the searching and looking for images based on particular keywords. At Abraxas, we always consider image search optimization when we design websites or optimize for search engines in general.

Continue reading SEO TIP: Optimizing for Google Image Search