There is a lot of conflicting information out there when it comes to advice about choosing which SEO Company is right for you. After all, if you are like me, your Internet business is your livelihood; you cant afford to trust its success to just anyone! Additionally, as you may have already learned, time is not on your side. Every day that you struggle with optimizing your website is another day without sufficient income and another day that your competitors have a chance to get the jump on you.
To eliminate some of the confusion, below I have listed the top ten things that you should look for when choosing a SEO company. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to find an effective, efficient and affordable Search Engine Optimization Company!
1. Size. A good SEO company should include different price points for all business sizes. It should be able to effectively optimize websites with pages from 1 to 1000.
2. Page Rank. The company should specifically address ways of improving your websites Page Rank and Search Engine Positioning. Ideally, this will include a detailed site analysis.
3. Keyword Optimization. Your sites keyword optimization is an integral part of onpage optimization. The SEO Company that you are considering should be able to analyze and optimize your keywords, and suggest alternative ones, if necessary.
4. Linking Strategy. Any SEO company worth its salt will understand the importance placed on both one-way and reciprocal linking by the Search Engines. Therefore, they should offer and be able to perform an advanced analysis of your websites linking structure and offer to improve it.
5. Customer Care. You should have expert advice available to you within reasonable parameters. Do you want or like to wait for answers to your questions I didnt think so! A companys philosophy on customer service is your indication as to how reliable they are as a company!
6. Time is of the Essence. If you cant save time using an SEO company, what is the point They should be able to do their job professionally, without asking for continual guidance from you. You should be free to work on other, more pressing projects, such as developing another income stream!
7. Savings/Pricing. The company should be competitively priced. Always compare the value of their SEO services with price that you will be paying. The prices should be reasonable; this means not too cheap, but not too expensive either.
8. Communication. The company should ask for all of your contact information and offer all of theirs. You should be able to get regular updates as to your sites progress, at any time that you ask for it.
9. Value. Compare the price of the SEO service to that of traditional advertising (for example, PPC or classifieds). How does their price compare with other methods of advertising Do they offer better results faster, with much less cost
10. Reporting. A serious SEO company should provide detailed reports to you so you can see your websites performance. Do you like guesswork I know I sure dont! It is much better to see results in print rather than accepting a verbal one. This way, you can be assured that the Search Engine Optimization Company is really doing what it said it would.
Choosing the right SEO Company is critical to the success of your online business. Use the guidelines above and you will be starting on the right path to making your business profitable.
Joe Borges makes it easy to get your website optimized and listed in all the major search engines. Learn how to automate your SEO Process for online business success by visiting our Search Engine Optimization Service website.Joe Borges is an experienced professional SEO Consultant, helping internet businesses increase their web presence, website traffic and Search Engine Ranking. He is also an Internet Marketer and Software Consultant with experience in website development and implementation. Get tools and strategies that you can use right now to make your online business thrive by visiting:
This article starts at a time when if I offered any smart webmaster the choice of #1 spot in Alta Vista for just a single day or #1 spot in Google for the rest of the year hed take the Alta Vista, thank you very much. Yes, a long time in internet years.
Who killed Link Building
Google did. They created it. And then they killed it. Dead. In the beginning there was no Google. There were directories and other search engines that operated in a vastly different way to the current Google behemoth. When Google came along they established themselves largely on one unique selling point: Their way of establishing relevance for any given search phrase. For the first time ever a search engine used a citation based model where every link was considered a vote for the page it was linking to. They called it Page Rank and it was the mainstay of their algorithm. Simplistically put: pages with more incoming links ranked better. Of course, nobody could predict how large a market share of Search Google would control. For a small and insignificant search engine it didnt make sense for webmasters to spend time and money chasing links in an attempt to improve their ranking.
But, as Google got bigger and bigger, it became more and more worthwhile to hunt for links. And to exchange links, beg for links, pimp for links or plain steal them (drive-by blog spamming). A whole industry build up around links. From the simple web-rings you now had link exchange programs, automated links exchange programs, link clubs, links in forum signatures, buying and selling of links, buying and selling of sites for PR (links), link cooperatives and a whole new lexicon from link tarts to guest-book spamming to no-follow tags.
The value at a rock concert is the sound. But when millions of other people are making their own unrelated sound and amplifying it with sophisticated tools then you cant hear the music anymore. And the link noise was disrupting Googles way of determining relevance. If they stuck with their links-determine-importance algorithms they were easy prey, their results could be manipulated by people with the most money/best technology, searchers would lose respect in Google to churn out relevant results. So, Google had to evolve and they had to drop links as the main and sole arbitrator of value. It wasnt in their interest to tell you or me about the change... so they didnt.
Why does content replace link building
If they were not using citations as the sole determinant of rankings they had to find something else. And it had to relate to what the users wanted. If users were searching for content on how to improve their ranking in search engines they didnt want a page of links, they wanted an article like this one giving them information or a perspective on the subject of their current interest. Google figured this out a while ago and started making subtle changes to their algorithms to reward content.
Webmasters werent far behind. They cottoned on that sites with a lot of content seemed to be well rewarded and that started the rush for content. They figured, in fact, that the content didnt even need to make sense. In a fashion similar to the earlier rush - innovation and money made a lot of difference. Whether Google predicted it or not they were under attack again. Programs that auto-generated thousands of pages of useless text started going mainstream. Tens (hundreds) of thousands of webmasters were feeding in seed keywords for the autogenerators to pump out the trash. Then there were the scrapers: Take a small bit of text for each site but if you do that enough times you have a lot of content. And the translators: Take someones 100,000 word English site, translate it to German via one of the free webtranslator services - which largely mangle the syntax and content to an unintelligible mush - and translate it back to English again (double-mangling, if you will) and youve got a non-copyrighted volume of content using your chosen keywords (together with semantic relatives).
If content doesnt work, what does
So, to the bitter truth and something you dont want to hear: Churning out content is not blackhat or whitehat anymore, its old hat. To succeed in the SEO game you need to be one step ahead of the search engine, one step ahead of what all the other SEOs are doing. Writing articles WAS the new link building. Things have moved on and you can read about Long Term SEO here: . Yes, thats the purpose of this article: It isnt content for contents sake and its not even reproduced on our website to bulk out the content there. Its to emphasise Quality Content. The new trick in town is understanding how Google makes the Quality judgement... and manipulating it.
Happy search engine results for all your sites.
Mark writes for , a website catering to the more experienced webmaster. It also deals with the buying and selling of websites and .