A few months ago, I started doing some search engine optimization (SEO) on the company website.

SEO is a process whereby you make your website more “find-able” and readable by the search engines. This in turn is (theoretically) going to lead to a better ranking on the search engine, when people search for a specific phrase or set of keywords.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the whole SEO process was going to take far more time than I expected.

Like the good little geek I am, I started the whole thing of with research. Knowing what I wanted to accomplish is different from knowing wwhere to start. That’s where I realized the time required to accomplish all this. I found one site in particular with a good scoring system for the different SEO efforts I could make. A good place to start.

But as I was going through the checklist, I realized that between actual billable work, and the other aspects of managing and operating a company, I just wasn’t going to have the time to do all that was required. Not by a long shot. Especially with the website currently sitting at 23 pages. Optimizing all that was going to take far too long.

I decided to enlist some professional help in doing the SEO. I checked a couple references and was pleased with what I’d heard about one particular company, so gave them a call. I’ve been doing a little bit of work with them for about 2 weeks now. They do the heavy lifting, and I do things like responding to emails and clicking on links. Tough eh?

The challenge of course is that the keywords I’m optimizing for are very popular. There are a lot of companies that do tech support, so standing out can be tricky. However I’m going to do a few articles here on the process, sharing some of the things I learn as I go along. And I’ll also use this to keep score of how the SEO is working.

As of this morning, the 3 key phrases I’m guaging by are “Vancouver tech support”, “Vancouver IT support” and “Vancouver computer support“. The first one has CPG Systems on page 3, and the other 2 don’t register inside the first 5 pages (which in my mind means that you might as well not be there at all). So I’ll keep you posted as to how it all progresses.