How To Choose A Good SEO Company
As with buying a car, selecting a new sofa or just choosing your next meal, there is a lot of competition in just about every service or market sector. The field of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is no different. Companies vie for your attention, promising you top position in the latest search engine flavour of the month for the simply unbeatable price of XXX.XX. So how do you start the process of selecting a genuine, experience based SEO company to take your online presence and business to the heights you desire? Well, here are a few tops tips on what to look out for and avoid in any SEO service being offered. Meta Over Indulgence They repeatedly harp on about targeting the meta keywords. You get the impression that your pages will soon be keyword stuffed to breaking point. Whilst meta tags can still have a relevance to some search engines and certainly won't harm your online presence, they are nowhere near the pinnacle of methods to use to ensure good placings in the search engine results that they were once. Link Building Packages They approach link building as an either Plan A, Plan B or Plan C approach. No allowance is given for the nature of the business, niche or site.
Structuring individual link building blueprints is a facet of good SEO that cannot be over stressed. Just as everyone is different, so should just about every link building programme! Building Multiple Sites Beware of any SEO advice that suggests you can increase your web presence by simply building or buying more sites. Multiplying the number of sites that you have online only ever manages to increase the number of link building exercises you have to go through. Unless your site has been penalised for some infraction, always look to increase a sites presence by adding new content, making it more unique for the visitor or adding an interactive element such as a poll. Blackhat Tactics They offer to “keyword stuff” your pages so that you rank higher for popular keywords. They tell you how they can 'hide text' on the pages or create links back through blog farms or captured .edu links.
Avoid any SEO company that offers any form of grey hat tactics, let alone black hat. Trying to trick or fool the search engines into ranking you highly through dubious means may work briefly to begin with but they will always end up with your site being flagged and de-listed. Once your site is de-listed from the main search engines it is VERY hard to get is included again. Any inherent trust value your site has built up over the years would be lost completely! Insane Promises One of the most popular promises that poor SEO organisations make is that ”they can get you the number 1 position in Google, Yahoo or any other major search engine, guaranteed.” Even Matt Cutts, a Google employee of good standing doesn't know the full algorithm by which they rank sites. If he doesn't – what chance is there for your local SEO company to know such insider information AND be able to apply it successfully to gain that position? Answer = None! Do you remember the golden rule “If it sounds too good to be true it probably is”? Sadly, this rule also rings true in the field of SEO!
Pete Arkwright
This article has been sponsored by The Little Things in Life, Online supplier of Wedding Jewellery and wedding hair accessories
Related Articles
Top Quality Website ContentTop quality website content is an array of words that 1. Please searc
Date Written: Thu, Jan 26th 2012
Unique Content and Links
Many of our clients ask questions based on content and links, generally based
Spamming Social Networks
Tactics applied by spammers could eventually lead to the demise of the major
Are You Maximising Your Position?
Be under no illusion, being highly ranked in Google is an enviable position f
Poor Conversion Ratios
Often ecommerce sites suffer from poor conversion ratios, there are many reas
Date Written: Sat, Jun 18th 2011