Competent search engine optimization requires that an SEO expert become fairly intimate with the subject matter of your business and the demographics of your target audience. Your SEO specialist will need to work closely with your IT and marketing departments in order to maintain a consistent and effective online marketing campaign. In addition to your log files, your SEO specialist will need access to your copywriter, your webmaster and all individuals that work on your website. SEO is an in depth, ongoing procedure and it is crucial that we are able to work well with all the members of your development team.

There are several areas that require attention (and possibly modifications) to achieve proper search engine placement. Some areas that may be affected are: copy / text, coding, as well as the physical appearance of your site. Proper search engine optimization requires that you find a professional that not only possesses ethical, up-to-date SEO techniques, but who is able to work well with the members of your website team. They will need to explain what changes need to be performed to your website and why. It is very important that you stress to your team the importance of effectively accomplishing the necessary changes requested by your SEO specialist.

Warning: The proper selection of an ethical SEO firm is imperative if you want to maintain a listing in the search engines. Select the wrong SEO firm and your website will be banned from the search engines forever.

There are a number of SEO firms that operate using unethical or ‘black hat’ techniques. While these techniques can gain you temporary ranking increases, in the long run your site will be banned. Common search engine spamming techniques include: link farms, cloaked pages, redirects, hidden text, nonsensical strings of keywords and links from sham sites. If your SEO firm uses any of these techniques fire them immediately, and employ an ethical SEO firm at once!

Be wary of any SEO firm that ‘guarantees’ results. If your potential SEO firm acts as if they can get you top listings in a short period of time……..RUN!!

There is no magic SEO wand that will rocket you to the top of the search engines. Depending on how competitive your industry is, achieving top rankings can take months to years.

In the end when a site utilizes spamming techniques, it is the client who is ultimately responsible for the content on their site, not the SEO provider. Once you are banned, it is very difficult to get listed again.

Questions to ask potential SEO firms:
1.) What SEO methods do you utilize?
2.) Do you use any black hat techniques?
3.) Do you submit my web site to search engines?*
4.) What is the most important aspect of SEO?*
5.) What search engines do you focus on?*

Questions 3-5 are trick questions*

*3) Submitting to search engines is an unnecessary and outdated concept. As long as your site is already listed in the engines or you have a listed website linking to your site you will automatically be indexed.

*4) If they say meta-tags, run! There are a number of areas that require attention and all must be properly incorporated to achieve top rankings. Meta-tags were the case years ago but meta-tags have lost importance in all the engines and weigh no bearing upon your ranking in Goggle whatsoever.

*5) Google, Yahoo and Bing are really the only engines necessary to focus on. They receive almost 100% of the searches performed and feed a number of the smaller engines. If they tell you any different they are blowing smoke.

What we need from you:
There is some essential information that we need to be provided before any SEO work can begin. This includes target audience information, keyword phrase ideas, competition sites, recent statistics and reports, and all information regarding the overall goals of the campaign. It also helps to be provided with an overview of any SEO work that may have previously been done to the site.

During the keyword research phase, you will need to review the keyword lists and remove irrelevant phrases, then order the relevant ones in terms of importance to your business. It is critical to have you involved in this phase, because as much as we know the SEO side of things, you will always know your business better than we could. In the beginning of the project we'll need more client involvement than later on in the game.

Contact us for a free quote on optimizing your web site!