Search Engine Optimization and Site Rank Improvement.

Please take some time to read carefully before responding and avoid copying and pasting all the projects that you have worked on if they don’t have any relevance to this job.

The objective of this job is to improve the ranking of our website, ictafrica.info to the top 3 of the three leading search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – based on given key phrases. We are trying to create a very respectable site and we are not looking to accomplish our goals through spam, links from irrelevant websites or through other black hat techniques. We are looking for somebody who can develop a white hat SEO process using well documented guidelines in Google Webmaster Tools or any other reputable guidelines. Consequently, I don’t expect that the work will be successfully completed overnight so we can allow a maximum of four months to have the task completed – i.e, for the site to rank. We are open to discuss a longer completion time if that is necessary to achieve our goals. That said, we want to see consistent improvement in ranking over time as we work through the project. The project includes several tasks as follows:

1. Onsite Optimization
Review the site and make necessary changes to make the site more search engine friendly including but, not limited to:
• Inserting meta tags if they are deemed necessary
• Some site analysts and pseudo analysts say that our title is too short – recommend whether we should increase the site title and by how much
• Recommend how long the home page description should be and change it if necessary
• Make some minor adjustments to the site so that images we post with our news will have an automatic “alt” name assigned to it
• Make slight adjustments to the news posting code so that if no image is posted, there will be no blank image space on the news page
• Include robots.txt optimization
• Include W3C validation
• Create a site map for the three major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo

2. Website submissions –
The site has already been submitted to many sites, either directly or indirectly through press releases, for example. The successful seller will have to submit a list of directories where the site will be submitted for approval first. Additional tasks will include the following:
• Get the site RSS news feed to be included in Google and Yahoo News
• Submit our job and tenders feed to relevant sites – seek approval first before submitting
• Any other submissions that lead to one-way links that from reputable websites

3. Propose any other actions for optimising the site and implement them upon approval

I propose payments in milestones based on achieving the goals we have set out:
• Complete onsite SEO optimization – 5% of bid price
• Improve our ranking to within 100 in all three major search engines – 7.5% of bid price
• Improve our ranking to within 20 in all three major search engines – 12.5% of bid price
• Improve our ranking to within 10 in all three major search engines – 15% of bid price
• Improve our ranking to within 5 in all three major search engines – 25% of bid price
• Improve our ranking to within 3 in all three major search engines – 35% of bid price