Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services – Selection Advice

Finding suitable search engine optimization companies

SEO or search engine optimization companies come in all shapes and sizes, they all of course have the best SEO techniques and they will all be the best SEO company on the market offering many types of SEO services. You can also be pretty sure that for the most part they will charging a pretty price for those services.

So how on earth do you know if an SEO company is worth its salt and whether they will be able to deliver on the promises?

Now clearly there are many way of going about evaluating a company for suitability for purpose, but for once you have a distinct and relatively easy method of assessing which of your options is likely to be able to deliver on this particular promise.

The very first and most obvious test is to see where they come on the search engine results page for a decent keyword phrase that describes the service they offer. An example is to simply type in ‘search engine optimization companies’ in any of the top rated search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN or perhaps Bing.

But you can take that a little further, I would assume that you, like most people, would probably prefer to work with someone who is offering services in your area, not always the case and for SEO not strictly necessary but nice to be able to meet face to face fairly readily so you can assess more easily the type of company or person you are dealing with.

So a simple step you can take is to add your location onto the end of that enquiry in general or specific terms perhaps by describing your country and your nearest large city, for example ‘search engine optimization companies UK Gloucester’.

Now if I was a business in or near Gloucester and I was looking to optimize my search engine results page position to attract local business, I would be looking very closely at which companies were top of that list and I would feel reasonably comfortable that I have just found a company that has the potential to deliver on that specific requirement, assuming of course I get a satisfactory result from the enquiry.

It is fairly obvious that if the company can promote themselves into a first place position under similar circumstances to the ones you would like to explore, then they do at least know a working process for achieving a top place on a search engine results page for a relatively generic search term that people are likely to use.

Of course it doesn’t stop there and being able to promote their own business which they are intimate with and knowledgeable about is one thing, but what about promoting your business and understanding how to deliver the right sort of targeted traffic to your website so that you can service existing customers and hopefully gain a lot of new customers. Particularly as they will need to be able to do this effectively and at a reasonable cost.

But at least you are on your way to finding a suitable search engine optimization company and all that you need to do now is think about how you actually use this company once you enter into discussions and what questions need to be asked and answered to establish you are going to get out of the exercise what you want.

Topics that need to be discussed with SEO consultants

When you seek the services of any company and are looking to potentially use them as an expert adviser and or service, then there is always one thing you should keep in mind, you are the part of the committee that has expertise and knowledge about your business that no one else can contribute. That’s not saying you shouldn’t be open to new ideas, but it is saying you should recognise your own strengths, depth of knowledge and what you can bring to the party. In other words be very prepared to contribute to the process.

So from a practical viewpoint when it comes to search engine optimization that means expecting and requiring that the company you are about to do business with shows an acceptable level of interest in what you do and how you do it, what jargon is specific to your industry and what form enquiries are likely to take. This is all about identifying the first part of any search enquiry, the keywords that are likely to be typed into a search engine by a potential customer.

For your part, if you are serious about establishing a worthwhile and cost effective relationship with an SEO partner then you at least need a basic understanding of what SEO search engine optimization is and what a company that is dealing with SEO will need to do in order to get you a position at the top of a search engine results page. By that I mean the first page ideally and second page worst case, beyond that you may as well keep your wallet in your pocket and not bother.

These are some of the key elements of SEO you will need to be looking into and researching so that you can at least explore what questions will need to be asked in any SEO consultation: –

Keywords and Keyword Phrases – these are the enquiries that people looking for your services or products are likely to enter into a search engine enquiry. You need to be asking your potential partner exactly how the best terms are going to be established and which ones are going to be targeted in the optimization strategy, there is no point spending a small fortune on keywords that either delivers the wrong type of traffic or that fails to deliver on the promise they offered .

Linking Strategy – these are the sites that you are likely to provide outgoing links to in oder to enhance your website service and provide your visitors with additional (non-competing) information. You also need to know where you will get incoming links from so that your Internet presence and ranking can be improved, but possibly more importantly so that you gain sufficient amounts of the right kind of traffic.

Geo-targeting – understand where your Internet presence is going to be most prominent versus where your customers are and whether that is likely to bring you new customers or properly support your existing customers. There is no point having 6 million visitors a year from the States if you cannot provide a service to the States.

Website structure and content – SEO starts at the initial specification stages of your website, it includes what meta tags you will use that are generally invisible to the public and includes information like keyword listings, distribution and page descriptions. It should consider the site structure,layout and how the pages are going to be navigated. What the titles and page content are going to be and which keywords are targeted on a page by page basis. You may also want to consider the possibility of using graphics or dynamic data to target alternative types of search if that lends itself to your industry and the type of website you are developing.

Understanding these basic requirements, if not in the detail of how they work but that they at least need to be considered, will take you a reasonable way along the route to finding and employing a good SEO partner that can deliver the right sort of traffic to your website.

As a final consideration with respect to cost you will also need to know exactly what will be provided and what it is going to cost you both for the initial development i.e. where you will be placed in the search results for your money, and for ongoing support.

One thing that is fairly sure is that what has worked to begin with is likely to change over time and there will need to be ongoing support to maintain your position in the search engine rankings, so you need to decide if that remains a service that is outsourced or taken on internally.

For more information on SEO or website design generally visit Moulin Website Design.