What are keywords?
Search engines determine the relevancy of your page/site based on the keywords and keyword phrases that appear. Things considered are the keyword density, where the keywords appear, how they are used, where they are positioned, and their visual format(BOLD/Italics). Sites can be penalized for excessive keyword repetition. Aim for a fair and reasonable keyword arrangement. It's never worth optimizing a page for a keyword that is never actually typed into a search engine query box. Keyword phrases are generally better than single keywords. E.g.. "health insurance" is far better than "insurance" if you happen to offer health insurance products. Keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the web page that is to be optimized.

Does your search engine marketing fee include the fees which some search engine and directories require for inclusion?
Our fees do not cover the fees required for those directories that require fees for commercial sites such as Yahoo! ($299) or the express inclusion programs of Inktomi, Lycos and Altavista. These are fees required by the search engines / directories themselves.We do of course however help formulate directory titles and descriptions and can advise you which inclusion programs are worthwhile and which are not.

How much do the meta tags count for a high ranking nowadays?
Generally not a lot. About the only tags that carries some weight at all is the meta description and title tags. It is not well known that Google for example, completely ignores the Meta Keyword tag.

Do you need access to our web server in order to optimize our web site?
Strictly speaking no, if you send per email your web site zipped up we can optimize the site, then send you the optimized pages zipped up back to you. Far better is it, if we do have FTP access or any other method to log onto your server. This means we can test online and it speeds up the whole process.

How many extra visitors am I likely to get having used your service?
It is near impossible to calculate out what an optimization will bring as far as extra visitors are concerned. There are simply too many factors involved to consider. How many internet users are actually searching for your service / product? How many competing web sites are there? The search terms themselves, the popularity of the site (incoming links) whether you have good marketing sales copy etc. etc. what WILL happen is that your visits from search engines will increase dramatically. This means many more visitors who are actually searching for your products and services.

What about those companies that offer to submit my web site to 100,000 search engines. Do you offer this as well?
We do not, and for good reason! There are less than 20 PROPER search engines that bring 95% of ALL search engine traffic. The rest of the 99,980 search engines these "SEO companies" submit to are either a very small engines that bring zero traffic to your web site, or more likely, they are what are known as FFA's (Free For Alls) which are essentially link lists. You end up on the list for about an hour and then you are pushed off the pages by the next load of submissions. Not only that, but your email address is then used to spam you to death. We know this, as our reseach team has done numerous tests. They are also dangerous nowadays due to Google's policy about penalizing link farms and the "bad neighborhood" penalties that are known to exist. Be very wary of the "we submit to 10,000 + search engines" scams! It is normally done with automatic submission using software which can be bought for less than hundred dollars, and that is even offered by various sites for free. Automatic submissions are frowned upon by just about all search engines, and SEO specialists.

What is Cloaking?
"Cloaking" is a technical method of analyzing search engine IP numbers and/or http user agents and accordingly delivering content dependant upon it. Every search engine has a range of IP addresses which they use to spider web sites. Cloaking detects whether a visitor is "human" or a search engine robot. If the visitor is a search engine robot then a special optimized page is delivered to the robot for indexation. If it is a human visitor then a normal web page is delivered. It is also known that if detected by many search engines, especially Google, it can lead to your site being banned or penalized. There are legitimate uses for cloaking (Geographical delivery) but it is not something search engines officially approve of. We at Banana-SEO do not risk our clients site with this technology. Some competitors do but that is their choice.

How important are incoming links to my ranking?
Extremely important! Over the last 2 years now, since Google started the link popularity weighting going with their Google PageRank, incoming links have become increasingly important. It is now at the stage that regardless of on-page optimization, if a web site has no or very few incoming links, it is nigh on impossible to get a high ranking. With Google it is not however just the number of incoming links, it is the quality and the number of out-bound links on the linked from page. A very good start to getting good link popularity and/or Google PageRank is to get links from DMOZ and Yahoo!. Also be sure to have your keywords in the link text (anchor text). Never disregard the smaller directories, especially those that are of your theme.