It's very important to do your homework before hiring an SEO company or consultant. There are essentially three types of company you will come across when researching for an SEO partner.
The Rip-off Merchants: In all walks of life there are always plenty of people out there happy to take your money in exchange for empty promises and a few regrets. SEO is no exception. Guaranteed search engine rankings, massive ROIs, the moon on a stick: they'll promise whatever they feel you want to hear to get you to part with your cash. There are companies who cold-call prospective clients, informing them that their site is on a list of sites to be banned for link farming or spamming and that unless the prospect uses their SEO services, Google will drop them. These companies basically know just enough SEO terms and expressions to convince lay people to think that they know what they are talking about. When it comes to ripping people off, they're expert. When it comes to SEO? Just forget them.
Sites offering 'Website Advertising Services', 'Search Engine Submissions', 'Free Search Engine Submissions', 'Website Traffic' are invariably a waste of time and, more importantly for your business, money. Submission services are also pointless. Search engines will discover your site by crawling links from other sites that point to yours. You don't need to submit. This is a service you will most likely be offered from inexperienced SEOs. Talking of inexperienced SEOs leads to the next type of prospective SEO partner - the 'Don't know what they're doing' brigade.
Probably inexperienced or stuck in some sort of Internet time warp, they'll apply the most inappropriate and ineffective SEO techniques. Employing unqualified or misguided SEO can risk damage to your site and reputation. A bad SEO company or SEO consultant - as well as wasting your time and money - may also do irreparable harm to an online business, even contributing to the failure of a new or unstable operation.
The final type of partner is the one you'll hope to work with - the consummate professional - an experienced and expert SEO company or consultant applying the state-of-the-art SEO techniques that will delver your business objective. A company like SEO Consult for example.
Identifying the sharks is relatively easy. Differentiating between the 'Don't know what they're doing' brigade and the real professionals is more difficult, especially for someone with limited SEO experience themselves.
Of course you will take word of mouth referrals seriously, run searches on a company, ask for references, check their Internet presence and show the due diligence necessary when researching a prospective partner to your business. In addition, and perhaps the best thing to do, is to educate yourself in some of the dos and don'ts of SEO so that you can judge the quality of the advice you are being given.
Here are some of the classic negatives & no's when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO). If you're presented with any of these 7 deadly sins, start asking why they have to be resorted to. If you don't receive satisfactory answers then simply walk away - you'll have exposed a company who won't really be able to offer you the quality of SEO you need.
1. Keyword stuffing - Yes, target keywords, keyword phrases and closely-related terms should appear in the page title, description meta tag, and page copy. Stuffing and shoehorning keywords into copy is so passé. Not only that but it can seriously damage your Internet presence; at best burying your site and at worst leading to it being delisted. Matt Cutts of Google says on his blog, "As always, webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action on keyword stuffing".
2. Meta Tags - More old school SEO, meta tags do nothing to improve your rankings other than possibly marginally on Yahoo!. The one that really counts is the description tag. It may not help with your ranking, but it may be used as the description of your site in the Google results. Avoid companies obsessing over meta tags and their use as a selling point.
3. The anchor text at the bottom of the page SEO technique - used to encourage spiders and deep links. Overdo it and it's excessive over-linking.
4. The high inbound link to one page looks like link farming to the search engines. A professional SEO company will apply techniques such as link bait, articles, press releases, and online public relations to generate quality inbound links not only to your home page but to deep links to pages in the site. Link quality is much more important than link quantity, so look for companies that focus on building good links for you.
5. Hidden Keywords - If you use hidden text such as white on white text or hidden with a div tag you run the risk of being penalised. It's cheap and it's shabby. Avoid this and all other tricks.
6. Don't over elaborate your pages with h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, bold or italic SEO techniques. There are advantages to properly organising your on-page formatting, but when it turns into a technique that is trying to outsmart the system it starts to be counter productive.
7. If submit your site to 5000 directories and 3,500 search engines you can forget about appearing in the top 10. The crawler-based search engines will find your site more quickly as soon as you get a link from another web site already being crawled. Search engine submission died a few years ago. IF SEO companies start talking big numbers and automation when it comes to site submission, show them the door.
None of these techniques reflect favourably on an SEO company. You can't help but ask yourself why a company would have to resort to trying to fix the system when there are numerous techniques that, if applied professionally, can achieve enormously effective results.
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