When it comes to the major search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and MSN, you'll want to be at the top end on your chosen keywords or keyword phrases. Failure to hit the first page on campaign-critical terms can severely damage your Internet presence, your strategic objectives and your overall business health and wellbeing. To achieve high profile listings and to maintain them it's likely that you will team with a search engine optimisation (SEO) company or consultant. Together you can assess your existing strategy, define ongoing business objectives and devise and implement strategies to get you where you want to be.
Selecting the right search engine marketing company for your campaign will be a critical factor in your website achieving top search engine positions. Employing unqualified or ineffective SEO can risk damage to your site and reputation. A bad SEO company or SEO consultant may do irreparable harm to an online business, even contributing to the failure of a new or unstable operation. Strong SEO can see your business fly. Although, there is never a cast iron guarantee when seeking services from an SEO company, there are a number of important issues that you should consider when looking for an SEO partner to deliver significant measurable results over the mid to long term.
There will be questions that you need to ask and matters that you need to consider to insure that the company you select can meet (and hopefully exceed) your requirements and bring qualified visitors to your website. Ultimately, you will want those visitors who will come face to screen with your call to action, enabling you to fulfil your defined business objective be it to make a sale, take a vote, build awareness, encourage loyalty, inspire a download or any other quantifiable result.
In order that you are prepared for the process of selecting the best SEO partner, it's probably a good idea that you know a little about SEO and how it works. Who knows, you may even end up deciding that you can do the job yourself.
Sites are ranked according to how useful the search engines find the site's content - the relevance of a page against the search term. Search engines use a variety of parameters and each search engine has its own algorithm to rank different websites. Factors that influence ranking are numerous. However there are tied and trusted methodologies that in the hands of experienced SEO professionals like SEO Consult will yield website owners an important competitive edge. Ask not what search engines can do for you, but what you can do for search engines: amongst other things they like fabulous content, quality site organization, clean code, intelligent linking and simply categorized content.
SEO projects are based on four fundamentals:
- Business Objectives: Research and define the most useful keywords and phrases, mapping your business objectives in relation to the target audience. Appropriate search terms bring appropriate visitors likely to convert into leads, customers and ROI.
- Search Engine Preparation: Apply clean, current-standard compliant HTML code to develop sites that search engines can easily read and index. We encourage a high ratio of content to code and a fast-loading, accessible search engine friendly structure.
- Site Content and Structure: Search engines look for text content and respect structure. They are priority hungry. Results are more predictable if the site and content are structured.
- Link Popularity: Google, Yahoo! and the other major search engines like to see sites that have clean, incoming links from other relevant sites. It's all about authority. Sites with strong authority linking to your site pass on their authority. It's a kind of 'quality by association'. We develop a range of link sources including affiliates, online directories, press releases and blogs.
Professional and successful search optimisation is a multi-disciplined process. To some, it's an indefinable balance of science and art, technology and craft. SEO is often regarded as something of a 'black art', a marketing alchemy, with the processes listed above requiring an almost intuitive combination of copywriting, web design, web development, marketing, advertising and analysis. The blend and proportion of each skill is dependent upon the experience and expertise of the marketer. It's probably reasonable to advise avoiding an SEO company that over-eggs the black art side of things and turns all Harry Potter on you. People have made (and continue to make) fortunes using smoke and mirrors. Yes, SEO is an acquired skill that does require trial, error, ability, an element of fortune on occasions and a good amount of experience to return top dividends. But it certainly isn't the 'magical art' that some would have you believe it is.
To paraphrase - beware of geeks bearing gifts. If it sounds too good to be true that's because it probably is. When it comes to SEO there's often an inverse relation between the amount of success that a SEO company will guarantee and the amount of success that they can deliver. Companies that promise top positions are lying. Nobody can hand-on-heart guarantee top search engine positions. What reputable and professional companies like SEO Consult will do is equip your site to be as accessible to the web crawlers as possible, making it visible and relevant to search engines and their users. It's not about being all things to all people; a successful Internet presence is about being there for the audience that you want and who will engage with your business message.
A little research and a few recommendations should be able to lead to the door of a reputable, experienced and ethical SEO partner, skilled in delivering measurable and bottom line benefiting results. At SEO Consult we apply our skills, expertise and experience through an integrated suite of SEO services such as those listed by Google in their advise on finding a suitable SEO consultancy including:
- Review of your site content or structure
- Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
- Content development
- Management online business development campaigns
- Keyword research
- SEO training
- Expertise in specific markets and geographies
Don't pick the first company you come across. Be sure to meet them in person. Take and check references, do your homework and check previous and ongoing projects. Establish contact with a variety of people within the company. Request and search their keywords and see how well the SEO ranks for the keywords they have chosen to go with. How good the SEO is at SEO.
In SEO, as in life, you get what you pay for. Don't choose an SEO company just because they offered you the lowest price. Be sure the SEO consultancy is 'White Hat' and won't risk your organisations web presence with deceptive practices.
Visit www.seo-mama.com
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