Search is a growing industry, and it seems that every day there is a new search engine optimization company in the game. On the other hand, the skills of many of these search engine optimization companies are questionable — staying on top of the knowledge curve can be daunting, and getting up to speed more daunting still. Moreover, there are a huge variety of tactics, “safe” and “unsafe” practices (in terms of the risk of penalization), and other imperative business considerations that you should think about before deciding on any particular search engine optimization company. The following is the first of a three-part series that provides a list of questions to help you to determine if the company you are considering is deserving of your trust. In this installment, we’ll center on the tactics that search engine optimization companies might use that could put your website at risk of penalization or removal from the major search engines. Ask your potential search engine optimization company the following: “Do you show search engines anything that a visitor does not see?” There is a common tactic that certain search engine optimization companies use called “cloaking.” In simple terms, these companies use knowledge that enables your website to recognize when a visitor to your site is a spider and to then feed that spider specialized content designed to rank highly in search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of every major search engine. Sites that are caught cloaking are routinely removed from engines. Therefore, depending on your tolerance for risk, you may want to find a search engine optimization company that does not employ this tactic. “Do you make pages, either on my server or somewhere else, that are not built in to the navigation of my site?” One more common technique that some search engine optimization companies employ is the creation of “doorway pages.” Since the term “doorway page” now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies have their own names for such pages: “gateway pages,” “bridge pages,” “targeted entry pages,” “specialized content pages,” and so on. Whatever they are called, such pages are rarely effective and also put websites at risk of penalization, as this is another tactic that violates the TOS of every major engine. If your potential search engine optimization company does not give you a definitive “no” to the above question, you may want to look somewhere else. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: How To Pick Out An SEO Company, SEO Best Assessment On Google Top No-No’s, Get an SEO Firm Or DIY

We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization) can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer is always a qualified “yes”– you can attain professional SEO results using existing talent. On the other hand, for every company we have known that has met with great in-house SEO success, we know of numerous more that have seen their in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits. If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are some critical questions that you should address before you proceed. Do I have the proper resources at my disposal to achieve professional SEO results? Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO expert will require to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal – especially at the project’s outset when target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes are first being established. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and service areas are added. Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn hurriedly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business. Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative is likely doomed to fail. • Do I know which departments of my company should be involved, and will they work with an insider? As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to classify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website. Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO specialist to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot. • Will someone be held accountable for the results?This may seem like a small thought, but it can have a tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If you have added this responsibility to some poor soul’s job explanation with the direction that he or she should “do the best you can,” you’ll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: SEO Certification Considerations, Selecting An SEO – Musing On An Endeavor To Trademark SEO, 10 Reasons Why You Should Pay for Search Engine Optimization

When researching SEO companies, it is tempting to choose any company willing to offer guaranteed SEO services. It is human nature – people love a guarantee. This holds especially true for purchases where the buyer is purchasing something outside of his or her area of comfort. When companies first consider pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) as a potential marketing channel, particularly when there is an ongoing cost involved, they get a sense of comfort from purchasing “guaranteed SEO.” Unfortunately, with many SEO companies, this confidence in the guarantee is ill-placed. A lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a “leprechaun repellent” guarantee. In other words, it’s a guarantee that is easily attainable – if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain? The truth is that SEO companies do not control the major search engines, and any firm that claims to have a “special relationship” that gives it sway over the natural search engine results is simply counting on your ignorance. Fortunately, this does not mean that guaranteed SEO is impossible, especially when the guarantee has to do with aggregate results and the methods used to achieve them. What follows is a partial list of some of the more popular types of guaranteed SEO out there – some of them roughly as useful as leprechaun repellent, and some of them actually meaningful. Questionable Guarantees The “Leprechaun Repellent” Keyphrases Guarantee Many SEO companies boast that they will achieve a certain number of top rankings in the organic results of major search engines. This type of guaranteed SEO can be tempting, especially to those who are investigating SEO companies for the first time. After all, high rankings are what it’s all about, right? Isn’t that the goal? The answer is an emphatic “No.” Quality SEO companies will point out that the real goal is to bring high quality traffic to your site. It’s quite simple to guarantee top positions if you choose non-competitive or obscure phrases – for example, “leprechaun repellent.” Want proof? Enter “leprechaun repellent into your favorite search engine. You will almost certainly find this article dominating the results (caveat – if you are reading this article immediately after its release, the search engines may not have indexed it yet. Wait a week and try again.). If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: Search Engine Optimization – Selecting The Ideal Provider To Perk Up Your Website, Don’t Sabotage Your Search Engine Optimization Company, Selecting An SEO – Musing On An Endeavor To Trademark SEO

Search Engine Optimization Philosophy This is debatably the most critical factor when deciding which company to work with to improve your online business or brand identity. Employing a search engine marketing or placement company that only utilizes moral search engine optimization techniques or “white hat” methods will ensure that you minimize the potential risk of being dropped, removed, penalized, deleted, or banished from the search engines. Nobody enjoys waking up glassy eyed to the unfortunate reality of being “Google sacked” for breaking or bending the search engines’ implicit rules or explicit terms of service. Search Engine Optimization Methodology / Specific Expertise Can your expert SEO Company only optimize static websites constructed in basic HTML? An upstanding SEO company will have experience working with websites in all the common programming languages and technologies, PHP, ASP, ASPX, HTML, Cold Fusion, Flash etc. Does your SEO Company have experience optimizing both static and dynamic websites? Can your SEO Company optimize using various e-commerce packages and interfaces such as Monster Commerce, Yahoo Stores, OS Commerce, Storefront.net, Volusion? Depth Of Optimization / Piecemeal Services The most basic search engine optimization companies around don’t actually perform search engine optimization at all- they are merely submission services which either manually or automatically submit your site to various search engines or directories. Submission companies are characteristically very reasonably priced since no actual coding, linking, or content development takes place on your actual website. Typical pricing runs around .95 to 9 per month for these submission type services. A mid level optimization company gets their hands more firmly on the marketing handle by editing code, analyzing keywords, building links, and adjusting / writing fresh content for your site. They also may do a pinch of off-site optimization, such as press releases, article submissions, and blog writing. Classically, firms of this middle level range charge between 9 and 0 per month. The highest level search engine placement firm performs the duties described for mid level optimization companies, but also is responsible for conversion tracking and analysis. The stress on off-site optimization is also much greater and time consuming. This means that high level optimization firms are fundamentally responsible for discovering what is working and what is not working throughout the entire customer experience – from initial search through conversion. More man hours per month also means a higher fee that search engine firms must charge to cover their costs. The common pricing range for these firms’ are 0.00 all the way up to ,000 per month, but on average, you’ll be looking at fees above the ,000 a month range. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: How TO Be A Perfect SEO Customer, SEO And RSS Feeds, Professional SEO Copywriting Services – What They Are, And What They Aren’t

Most people who are internet savvy almost certainly would assume it is much easier to do search engine optimization themselves without the need to hire any professional search engine optimization assistance. In some cases this may work, but in most cases this is an absolute injustice for your web business. Marketing is a significant and viable aspect of any business and without the proper marketing attention a business can easily fail. The following are 10 reasons why you should hire a professional search engine optimization consultant or SEO company. Search Engine Optimization Takes Time, Effort, & Dedication It takes an extreme amount of time, effort, and dedication to successfully complete a search engine optimization campaign. Search engine optimization consultants and companies usually have dedicated time to work on your search engine optimization project, thus giving you a controlled and managed search engine optimization campaign. Large companies as well as many small companies can provide your search engine optimization campaign the SEO effort and architecture it needs. Attempting to dedicate your own time can sometimes be overwhelming and without strict self-discipline you can easily get sidetracked. In addition, progress for your search engine optimization campaign can take time to see any results, this fact can lessen your motivation to complete your own do-it-yourself search engine optimization campaign. SEO Tools, SEO Strategy, & SEO Experience Goes a Long Way The available SEO tools are ever-changing, but most skilled SEO’s have a suite of SEO tools which they keep up with and use to execute reports and other processes, such as keyword research, keyword density reports, keyword competition reports, traffic reports, etc. Like any vocation you need the necessary tools and essentials to get the job done, the experienced use of SEO tools will aid in any SEO campaign. Professional SEO consultants and companies create SEO strategies and roadmaps to successfully market client websites, this strategic roadmap outlines in detail the planned effort to market clients’ websites. SEO strategy is necessary for any SEO campaign. Having an experienced SEO professional on your side is always ideal. Experienced SEO’s stay up to date with the latest SEO trends and news. By having an experienced SEO your website can impressively gain ranking within a short time and much more successfully, providing greater Return on Investment (ROI). Search Engine Optimization Is Not Easy Search engine optimization is not simple, it’s not just starting a website and throwing around hundreds or thousands of links. Those days of search engine optimization are gone. It is now more about strategy, method, and architecture. Search engine optimization is a form of engineering these days. True search engine optimization engineers stay up to date with search engine algorithm and search marketing. Knowing the trends is important, but that doesn’t unavoidably mean following trends, true search engine optimization engineers use experience, skill, historical methods, and best practices to successfully market websites. Researching trends and not just following trends is very significant, a good search engine optimization engineer uses good judgment, to know what methods work and what is borderline unethical or useless methods. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: Get an SEO Firm Or DIY, Criteria You Should Look For In Professional SEO Firms, An SEO Campaign – Quick And Dirty

Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking. However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives. 1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices: – Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages. – Use of cloaking – Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google Web pages loaded with irrelevant words – Keyword stuffing – Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content 2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not. Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines. In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases. 3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags According to Internet Marketing Articles, One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag. Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though. 4. Optimize Website Content All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization. To prevent your site from being regarded as “over optimization”, you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words. 5. Ensure Clean Coding To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase. In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well. Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort. 6. Link Building In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.. Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a “positive vote” to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking. However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit. There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building. 7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: Selecting an SEO Company – Reasons Why SEO Case Studies are Significant, Selecting an SEO Company – Reasons Why SEO Case Studies are Significant, How to Select The Ideal SEO Service