SEO Latest News - What to Look For From an SEO Company

By: RH SanMiguel for SEO-in-Motion, September 2008

SEO Service Provider that Works for You!

The recent years have seen an overwhelming growth in the SEO industry and it’s seemingly unstoppable. There are now innumerable SEO service providers all across the Internet and if you’re interested in having your website search engine optimized, what are the factors you should be considering to get the most out of your SEO investment? It could be quite a feat. There are several important issues to be addressed beforehand if only to minimize the risks involved and maximize the full potential of your SEO efforts. When you have made up your mind to launch an SEO campaign, the decision of choosing the right partner is definitely the next big step.

Given a million choices, which would you choose? Let’s face it, there are as many competent SEO companies in the world as there dubious ones, even more, all claiming the same thing—that of driving a high volume of traffic and better sales. The choice you have to make at this point is anything but trifle, it is of great importance, if not the most important. A set of guidelines about what to look for and the questions you ought to be asking the prospective SEO partners would prove helpful to your quest.

Here is a list of probing tactics to determine which among the candidates are truly deserving of your funds.

Would you display materials to search engines which online visitors could not see? “Cloaking” is a fairly common SEO strategy which involves a technology that allows your website to determine whether a site visitor is in fact a search engine spider. It supplies designated material, apart from those that human visitors see on the site, to these spiders with the intention of fooling them into giving a site higher ranking. This particular tactic is a direct violation of the Terms of Service (TOS) of all major search engines. If found guilty, your site would be removed from search engines’ list. While it is indeed effective in getting a high rank for your site, it’s a risk your site could live without.

Would you fabricate certain pages which would not be included in the navigation of our site? “Doorway Pages” or special pages as they are sometimes called are crafted pages hidden in your server specifically created to lure search engine crawlers. These pages give out exactly what spiders are looking out for resulting to the best possible ranking for your site. But, just like cloaking, it is a practice which violates the TOS and therefore a risk not worth taking.

Would you use an automated link-building method and target reciprocal links? While link popularity undoubtedly plays a vital role in the race to higher rankings, effective link- building could be done in a much safer way than going automatic. The things is, with automated link- building there is no way to be sure of the integrity nor the quality of the sites you will be linking to, and in the event that a site you are linked to gets penalized, your sites runs the risk of being penalized too. A legitimate SEO service provider would choose quality over quantity and invest both time and effort in forging good inbound links that would benefit your site as opposed to risking it.

Would you make modifications to the present content of my site? If the answer is anything but yes, you may call in the next candidate. It’s inevitable. Your site will have to undergo a certain amount of change to achieve what you desire. Becoming SEO - friendly means recreating meta tags to get the attention of search engine spiders, rewriting page copies to attract both humans and robots alike. See these so called spiders are mostly interested in what is in your website that matches with what people are typing into search engines.

Would you be injecting key phrases into the existing pages of my site rather than creating better content? The “shoehorn approach” is typically the process of inserting keywords or phrases into the existing pages of your site as opposed to creating new ones which would host better content. While this could improve your ranking, it’s not as effective in converting visitors to actual buyers.

Resulting to shady SEO techniques to target the search engines attention may offer help in terms of better rankings but the risks are often greater than the benefits it offers. As a conclusion, when the issues raised above have been properly addressed, you should be able to classify the good from the bad and select the one which gave you the most satisfying answers. Take the time to go through the details carefully, examine the proposed solutions, and make an informed decision.