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There has been a flurry of entrants into the Search Engine Optimisation market in the past year or so. Judging by the horrendous rates some are charging, money rather than service seems to be the main motivation. Judging by the horror stories from clients who have arrived on my doorstep after being ripped off by sharp operators, in some instances there is evidence of a serious deficiency in both ethics and skills in some cases.

I have a new client who spent almost $30,000 last year, with no work having been done on the actual site, no evidence of link increases, and according to traffic statistics, site visitors have gone DOWN by 60% – so read the following sections carefully.

So, how do you choose an SEO firm to entrust your business to? I believe that there are some simple checks to put in place before committing yourself to any SEO proposal, no matter how attractive it might seem.

How To Shorten Your SEO Short List
The following sections list a few ways you can find some potentially good SEO firms, and also eliminate some dodgy ones and thus reduce your chances of being disappointed.

How Well Does Their Own Site Rank?
Do a search for search engine optimisation, seo rates and/or seo firm on the country-specific version of each of the big 3 major search engines – e.g. Google.co.nz, Yahoo.co.nz or XtraMSN.co.nz. Alternatively, go to the main Google.com etc site, and search for nz seo, seo rates, or new zealand search engine optimisation (or your own country-specific version of those). The market SEO has become very competitive out there, but you should expect the SEO business you are contemplating doing business with to be on Page One on each search engine! If not, drop them from the list of possibles, because how much help could they possibly be to you? A list of 3-5 potential firms should quickly emerge from this process.

Request For Proposal
From your initial research, you should have a list of contenders you are considering entrusting your business to. Contact each, and request a site review. This will invariably result in a detailed analysis of your site, and a proposal which sets out what remedial action is required and an indicative costing to achieve this. Having now received a series of these, apply the following criteria against each one.

Guaranteed Inclusion in Google/Yahoo/MSN
If an SEO firm offers a guarantee of inclusion into any major search engine, or assures you that they have a special relationship with a search engine, immediately drop them from the list of possibles. Frankly, search engines simply do not enter into such relationships. That would be as likely as a close friendship between a poacher and a gamekeeper!

What Are They Proposing?
There are two key ingredients to web site optimisation, and if both are not assessed and addressed, drop the SEO firm’s proposal from the list of possibilities!

The first is on-site optimisation of individual pages to improve organic or natural search engine rankings. This involves keyword research with associated analysis of the business products and services. This is the most important aspect because it delivers ongoing traffic which is essentially free after the initial work is carried out.

The second key element is link analysis and recommended remedial action. Basically, the more links to your site from trusted sites carrying high page rank, the better. Insufficient links means your site is not worth indexing. Proposals to increase your 1-way back-links from web directories and other trusted sites are good. However, should there be any suggestions for participation in link propagation schemes, or place main emphasis on reciprocal link strategies etc, drop the SEO firm from your list because they are not up to date with current best practice.

Google Adwords & Yahoo Search Marketing
Some SEO firms boast that they are certified Adwords practitioners etc. That’s all well and good, but what they mean is that with YOUR money, they are real confident of getting you top placing in the keyword bidding warfare! There can be some short term benefits in that, but guarantees along those lines are not overly helpful to your business. If a proposal places primary emphasis on Pay-Per-Click, slip it down to the bottom of the pile!

References
Can your SEO firm provide you with some reference sites they’ve worked on successfully, case studies, and/or some clients you can contact for comment? Bear in mind that there are likely to be some commercial sensitivities that apply constraints.

Is There Value in 1 Year Contracts?
Frankly, no! The hallmark of a professional, ethical operator will be a fixed price contract to carry out the initial remedial action on the site. As a reassurance, they will usually let you know that ongoing support is available if required, because the rules of the SEO game do keep changing. The best SEO practitioners do not attempt to lock you into 1 year contract because they know the initial work will often take 8-12 weeks to deliver full benefits, and the project cost will usually include a built-in monitoring component over that initial period. It is, in my view, a little unethical to double-dip on the project costs!

Not only that, but what if you are not happy with the results of the SEO firm or their level of service? A 1 year contract might just guarantee you receive a full 12 months of unsatisfactory services! My advice – do not lock yourself into a long-term contract until you have grown comfortable with the SEO team you are dealing with

Fixed Price Contracts
Insist on one! A professional SEO firm will set out exactly what is wrong with your site, and explain the precise remedial action in a coherent and logical fashion. The actual work will be specified and a total cost provided. It is customary to require payment in advance. This is usually 100% for smaller jobs, which I would define as less than $1500. For larger projects, expect to pay a 50% deposit with balance on completion and/or when Top 30 rankings on agreed keyword terms show a demonstrable improvement.

How Much Should It Cost?
Well, each proposal should come down to a judgement by each SEO firm on how many hours of work are going to be involved in the project. However, some seem more inclined to make an assessment of your ability to pay in big chunks! There can be obvious, huge discrepancies – its common to see variations of 1000% e.g. you will see that some firms initial cost proposal can be 10 times that of competing operator! From your point of view, you want to know how many pages are gong to be amended, what will be done by way of increasing incoming links, are articles being published, and if so, how many? Reduce it to a known quantity, compare apples with apples! When you are systematic about it, the choices become more obvious, and a decision becomes easier!

You Need to Know What Will Be Done
An SEO professional will involve you at each step of the process, providing you with a preview of all site changes before implementation. You will be able to measure progress of the work on a page by page basis, and see the results in your site traffic statistics as well as SE ranking reports. As in all aspects of life, failing to plan is planning to fail! If there is no plan, no road map, don’t expect a happy ending or any rights of redress.

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
There are other danger signs to be aware of. If your SEO proposal suggests cloaking, redirections, doorway pages, hallway pages, invisible text, multiple domain names for duplicated content etc, immediately drop the company from the list of possibles!

There are many Black Hat SEO operators who prefer to attempt to subvert the Search Engine guidelines, essentially looking for rapid, short-term ranking gains by ANY means, instead of taking a responsible, professional approach. If your site is caught up in any scheme like this, banishment from search engine indexes is assured! Essentially, good White Hat SEO involves thoughtful restructuring of site content, within the SE guidelines and parameters, and taking no risks of any kind.

Who Are You Dealing With?
Does their site have some personal profile information? Are you dealing with a seasoned IT industry professional, a kid fresh out of high school, someone moonlighting from their primary job, or maybe somebody who has English as a second (or third) language? SEO is very much about words, semantics, languages skills and this, plus broad SEO project experience over several years, should be a key indicator to consider!

Partnerships
Your web site is an integral part of your business. The people you work with should have an intuitive understanding of your business, products and services, and should by now have demonstrated that they have given your particular circumstances some personal attention. Some, on the other hand, may have merely used automated site assessment tools. From the initial proposal, and exchange of emails with questions and answers to clarify any issues that have arisen, do you feel a sense of rapport with anyone? The best people to work with are those you are comfortable with.

I hope that this has proven a useful and thought-provoking summary of how to weed out the space cadets, cowboys and make-a-quick-buck operators. I really hope you do find yourself a competent, professional SEO practitioner, because they are out there toiling away, doing a great job for great people like you!

Good luck!

Even if you are armed with all the knowledge of SEO, you might and probably still need the services of a good SEO company. Having a good knowledge about SEO is hardly enough sometimes. Even if you are doing your best to try to get a good ranking for your site, you may still end up wondering why your site is just not doing well. For starters, you should be aware that your site will need to be optimized in all aspects. Not only that, your site needs to be maintained in a regular basis. SEO is an ongoing process that involves a lot of time and effort. To make things easier, you will be better off hiring the services of a good SEO company to do the work for your site.

There are many SEO companies today, and there are just as many reliable companies as unreliable ones. Thus, it is very important that you choose the right SEO company. Here are a few points that you should keep in mind when selecting SEO services:

Site Analysis Report

Does the SEO company provide you with a website analysis report? A reliable SEO company will be able to provide you with a comprehensive analysis of your site in terms of ranking and design to give you an idea of how much work needs to be done. They should be able to inform you of any elements in functionality, content and design that may hamper in the reading and indexing of your pages.

Providing Qualified Traffic

Do they understand the difference of plain traffic and qualified traffic? You will hire the services of an SEO company mainly because you need to attract traffic into your site. However, what you want is qualified traffic that gets customers who may be genuinely interested in availing of your products and services. You do not want unqualified traffic that comes to your site because of irrelevant keywords. Unqualified traffic only increase your bounce rate (surfers that land on your page and leave) and not your sales

Tools in Determining Keywords

What tools does the SEO company use to search for keywords? You also need to know what methodology the SEO company uses for keyword analysis. You may also want to do your own research on usual basic tools and those provided by Google AdWords, for example.

Back Link Collection

From where will the SEO company get back links from? Back links are just as, if not more, important in SEO then onsite optimization. What you would like is to get back links from good sites and sites that are closely related to your niche. Ask your SEO company what their methods are for collecting back links.

Cost Structure

A reliable SEO company will only give you a quotation as soon as they find out just how much work needs to be involved. Charging you high prices may not always necessarily ensure you high quality of services. Make sure that the price being quoted is proportional and consistent with the services that you can expect your SEO company to provide.

The Timeline

Does your SEO company offer you a timeline? It is only through hard work and proper planning that results can be achieved right on time. Some companies offer SEO packages that claim to put you in the first page search result in just a matter of 10 days. Realistically though, no SEO company can possibly guarantee you the number 1 ranking in Google in as short as 10 days. This is one of the basic guidelines actually published by Google. Make sure you do not give in to false promises. Conversely, avoid SEO services that will give you time limit. A good SEO company knows that optimization is an ongoing process and they will need to provide you with regular maintenance jobs, customer service and proper updating. An SEO campaign will take 3-6 months before seing the top results you expect.

SEO Strategy

What SEO strategy will your SEO company use to raise your ranking? You should look out for companies which will use spam advertising strategies to get you on top in no time. If the plan involves some form of unethical practice such as spamming or deceiving search engines, immediately walk away. A good SEO company will make sure that you will not be subjected to spam or deceptive services. Remember that if it is based on deceitful tactics, your site may simply be pulled out of Google’s indexing and will lead you to trouble. Knowing your SEO company and doing your own research are very important in choosing the right firm.

In that particular SEO industry there are several SEO experts may come in various profiles with different working principles. They may do entire work by themselves and take care for each site uniquely. Because they believe each website require different phenomenal work done to receive successful SERP.

On the other hand of the coin, you will find giant SEO services providers. Those firms employ several medium levels of SEO peoples to maintain numerous numbers of SEO campaigns. Thus it is quite assumable that they don’t have much time to separate the different technical requirements for several websites individually.

They are following just the simply working format or you can say working templates for all sites to get ranked and they practically doing this in a daily manner. In this way their sharpness level decreases simultaneously. Thus it is imaginable that they have a solid inclination to rotate into SEO factories.

Before you choose your service provider, you should check above tip for several SEO companies. You must check their recommendations for your site what they are going to deliver also check their glorious performances. Feel free to ask more questions regarding your chances about your success. Try to avoid technical terms and suggest them to talk to you in layman’s terms.

Unluckily, SEO analysis is neither so easy nor so simply to do as it sounds. Search engine algorithms are getting more complex constantly as the internet world advanced. Thus you need an efficient SEO expert who will understand your business aim first and do the work accordingly. You don’t need any famous SEO firm who has no time to done any research work for your own site and will do the same work as they done for others.

SEO is an ongoing process not a single time matter. You require constant care and the research work also done side by side with other SEO work to keep your keywords on the highest position in all search engines otherwise they will rapidly fall down and disappear form top position which may effect your business growth.

Advantages of getting ethical SEO analysis

Hiring a growing ethical SEO expert or company for your small business is the finest thought to do if your wish to pull ahead yourself or your keywords amongst from your competitors. What accurately the benefits of receiving the services from a growing ethical SEO firm? Here are a few advantages of appointing an expert SEO analyst.

• Specialized SEO experts have the depth knowledge on the methods to improve the search engine ranking of your keywords in all search engines, and able to do it speedily. It helps your website to create a superior sum of web traffic at your site.

• Increment of the volume of authentic web traffic creation is also means an increment in sales of your business product and services. In ethical SEO you does not required PR on your web pages, it is automatically generated. You mostly concentrate at your keyword ranking which will put superb effect on getting superb web traffic.

• SEO specialists will give you superior informative advice on effectual online web promotion and off-page marketing methodologies. You may advice them for searching the finest ways to lift your keywords at all search engines top positions within very wee time period.

Forget the cost estimation

SEO is the best way for those small business owners who have financial limitations for promoting their business into internet, because they don’t afford to spend lots of money for banners or ads. Thus people searching for those SEO firms who asking a least cost for search engine marketing.

But don’t stipulate yourself only at pricing; you should calculate their efficiency because a reputed SEO firm provides you SEO services at low expenditure, do not automatically mean that they will be efficient enough for your site.

Choose those SEO experts who have much time for done several type of research work for your site. Search engine algorithms are developing day by day and the SEO companies needs to know the latest tools, hasty methods and newest searching types which might help to increase keyword ranking at all search engines.

In this particular SEO industry, there are several SEO experts can come in different sections with different principles. They can not all work by themselves and ensure each site unique. Because they believe that each site require different phenomenal work to obtain successful SERP.

On the other side of the coin, you will find giant SEO service providers. These companies employ more middle levels of SEO peoples to maintain numerous number of SEO campaigns. Thus, it is assumable that they do not have much time to separate the different technical requirements for multiple sites individually.

They are only the following working day format or simply say you can work templates for all sites to maintain and ranks practically do so in a way daily. In this way their sharpness level drops at the same time. So it is conceivable that they have a strong tendency to rotate into SEO factories.

Before you for your service provider, you have more than one tip for SEO companies. They must make their recommendations for your site, what they want to deliver their glorious performances. Do not hesitate to ask further questions about your chances for success. Try to avoid technical terms and suggest them to speak in layman’s terms.

Unfortunately, SEO analysis is neither simple nor as easy to pretend, as it sounds. Search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly complex, ever since the Internet world is well advanced. So you need an effective SEO expert, will understand your company should first do the work accordingly. You do not need a famous SEO firm has no time to do any research for your own website and is the same work as they do for others.

SEO is an ongoing process not a single issue. They need constant care and the research work done side by side with other SEO work, so that your keywords in the highest position in all search engines, otherwise they will quickly fall down and disappear form the cutting edge, the effect of your company’s growth.

SEO benefits received ethical analysis.

The attitude of a growing ethical SEO expert or a company for your small business is thought to be the finest, if you like, do you prefer yourself or your keywords in terms of your competitors. What are the advantages of obtaining the services of a growing ethical SEO company? Here are some advantages to the appointment of an expert SEO analyst.

• Specialized SEO experts have the detailed knowledge on methods to improve search engine ranking of your keywords in all search engines and able to do it quickly. It helps your site to create a superior amount of Web traffic to your site.

• Increase the volume of authentic Web traffic is the creation also means an increase in sales of your company’s product and service portfolio. In ethical SEO you do not need PR on your web pages, it is automatically generated. They focus mostly on your keyword ranking is the excellent effect on the always excellent Web traffic.

• SEO specialists will give you superior advice on factual information online Web promotion and off-site marketing methods. You can use them advice for finding the best ways to lift your keywords in all search engines top positions in very small period of time.

Forget the cost estimates

SEO is the best option for those small entrepreneurs, financial constraints to promote their business on the Internet because they can not afford to spend a lot of money for banners or advertisements. To search for the people those companies, SEO ask for a least cost for search engine marketing.

But not only you can determine in price, you should calculate their efficiency, because a well-known SEO SEO company offers services to low spending, does not automatically mean that they are efficient enough for your site.

Select the SEO experts have plenty of time for more than one type of research done work for your site. Search algorithms evolve from day to day and the SEO company needs to know the latest tools, methods and anticipated new ways of searching could help to increase the keyword ranking in all search engines.