How to pick an SEO Agency

What’s the best way for you to select the right search engine optimisation company? Ideally, you should investigate as much as possible. As with anything in life, there is risk involved.

A few things to consider:

  • Read Google SEO guidelines
  • Referrals from contacts who “vouch” for the seo – i.e. They���ve done a good job for ���them���
  • An appraisal of clients and appraisal of any client sites they’ve worked on.
  • How visible the seo himself/herself is in the search engines?
  • Personal. Once you meet your seo, do you think you can work with them?
  • Get a Couple Of quotes and try to base your decision on previous results an seo can show you and the best value for money as you see it.

How NOT to SELECT your SEO Company

  • If your SEO guarantees you anything, a red flag should be raised.
  • If a SEO says he works WITH Google, again beware – Google doesn’t work WITH any seo. They only publish good practice guidelines seos should stay within if you don’t want Google to penalise you.
  • Beware unsolicited email with little or no relevance to you or your business. You should be able to tell this easily. If the email is totally targeted at your business, with some useful / correct assumptions about your ranking, ask them to come and visit you. There’s no harm in it. If it is not, and looks like spam, just forget about it.
  • Do not enter into any type of agreement until the project aims and targets have been specified. A good seo will tell you whats realistic and what’s not for your budget and the resources he can deploy to meet your aims.

Why do most search engine optimisation companies charge on going fees?

Because of the work, research and analysis that is required over time in some sectors. YES – you can seo a site in one sitting, in an Ad-hoc project, which can deliver good results that stay the course over a large period of time. But this all depends on how competitive your sector is and what your aims as a business are. AND OF COURSE, part of ongoing seo is to consolidate good intial search engine rankings and FURTHER IMPROVE ON THEM. Most recent research alludes to the fact that searchers now dont go past the first FIVE results on the 1st page, making seo even harder in 2007, and all the more reason to aim for the top.

No matter how good your on-site seo is, it can be undeniably consolidated and improved by further promoting your site (i.e. ultimately getting links to your site from many different sources). I think you would find it hard to find a contradictory argument to this anywhere. There���s always room for improvement as in any walk of life.

But if paying for SEO every month, you want to see monthly traffic stats, keyword positions, increased sales etc – ie constant improvement. You can hold your seo to account. If you pay one off for seo, you’re unlikely to be able to expect even a constant visibility on Google never mind an improvement over time.

It is important you know Google changes all the time, with no warning. For instance, there is a lot of debate in the last week that Google is changing the way it handles “plurals” of words If correct, how does that impact on the ad-hoc project you comissioned six months ago?

This is proof that no amount of word play / on site seo is fool-proof or time-proof and cannot inadvertently trip a filter in Google today, tomorrow or next year.

Professional search engine optimisers have seen their sites completely vanish from Google for months because a new filter is applied or ���turned up��� (although this is conjecture ��� no one person knows how Google works ��� if they do, they are keeping quiet about it and making a fortune for themselves ��� not others.) For instance, one guy added 4 BILLION pages of spam to Google last year, using a simple domain trick, upsetting a lot of people, and forcing Google to actually change the way it handles sub-domains now.

In the end, you must decide, based on return on investment, what���s the right costing model for you. One off seo ��� or long term seo.

How A Search Engine Ranks A Website

The following factors are seo speculation on some of the considerations search engines may presently be using or which could be built into their algorithms. Ethical search engine optimisation agencies consider the following:

  • Age of site
  • Length of time the domain has been registered
  • Age of content
  • Frequency of content: regularity with which new content is added
  • Text size: number of words / ketyword density
  • Age of link and reputation of linking site
  • Standard on-site factors (some of which Tin mentions in an earlier post)
  • Negative scoring for on-site factors (for example, a dampening for websites with extensive keyword meta-tags indicative of having been Over Optimised [^SEO-ed])
  • Uniqueness of content
  • Related terms used in content (the terms that the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
  • Google Pagerank (Only used in Google’s algorithm)
  • External links, the anchor text in those external links and in the sites/pages containing those links
  • Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
  • Stem-related terms in the search engine’s database (for example, finance/financing)
  • Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
  • Negative scoring for some incoming backlinks (perhaps those coming from low value pages, reciprocated backlinks, etc.)
  • Rate of acquisition of backlinks: too many too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity
  • Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words “Sponsored Links” could be ignored
  • Use of “rel=nofollow” to suggest that the search engine should ignore the link
  • Depth of document in site
  • Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
  • Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
  • Metrics collected in data-sharing arrangements with third parties (like providers of statistical programs used to monitor site traffic)
  • Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
  • Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains… and negative scoring for such activity
  • Semantic connections of hosted documents
  • Rate of document addition or change
  • IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
  • Other affiliations of linking site with the linked site (do they share an IP? have a common postal address on the “contact us” page?)
  • Technical matters like use of 301 or 302 to redirect moved pages, showing a 404 server header rather than a 200 server header for pages that don’t exist, proper use of robots.txt
  • Hosting uptime
  • Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users (cloaking)
  • Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
  • Unsafe or illegal content
  • Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
  • Actual click-through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs
  • Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs

TOP SEO TIP

In the end, it can all come down to the content on your site. Is it valuable, up to date and unique? If it is you can enjoy good rankings probably ad-hoc or ongoing agreement. A unique site should be your ultimate goal, and your seo should be used to promote it, until it has achieved the position in serps you desire or need, or a level of lead generation you are content with.

Content is king as they say, links are Queen.

We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....