How To Choose A Search Engine Optimization Company

By Wyatt Galt, 22 Jan 21:54

You may have spent countless hours trying to get a good search engine ranking. Maybe you have been successful and maybe you haven't.

In either case you may have considered outsourcing this part of your website promotion to a professional search engine optimization company.

Here we will provide you a few tips on how to choose a good company.

1) Find a Company by Searching the Search Engines
What better way to find a company that practices what they preach? Look in all the major search engines to see which companies come up on top most of the time. You can do a search on keywords such as "search engine optimization" or "search engine placement." If a company can get itself up in the top, then chances are they can get you on top as well. Narrow down your search to a few different companies and follow the rest of the steps below until you find one that you like. You will find our search engine optimization partner listed very highly in all the major search engines.

2) Guarantees
Find out what kind of a guarantee they provide. No one can guarantee that 100% of your keywords will get a top 10 ranking in all the major search engines. However, most companies will give a minimum guarantee and a refund if the guarantee is not met.

Some companies, provide a pay-per-performance type placement, where you may pay an initial set-up fee and nothing more until you see results in the top 10 or top 20. Note that most companies will only guarantee results after minimum of 2-3 months, because search engines do not index sites immediately.

3) Reputation
Find out how long the company has been around and who are some of their clients. Ask them if they can provide you with a client list that you may contact. You may also ask to see some recent ranking reports for their existing clients.

4) Technique
Ask them what technique they use for optimization. Almost everybody uses some sort of doorway page technique for placement. Some may use cloaking software and some may use other redirection techniques, where the visitor does not actually see the optimized page.

Some do not use any redirection and the visitor may end up on an ugly entry page constructed only from a few sentences of text. Cloaking software may be a little bit risky because the search engines may detect them, and also it requires a high level of maintenance to keep up with the IP number changes. If the optimization company does not update their IP addresses on a regular basis, then you may lose all your rankings.

Also, ask the optimization company if they use any software for optimization or if they use manual techniques. Companies using such software normally do not have true knowledge of how search engines work and they rely on software that anyone can buy to do the work. A true search engine placement expert will not need any type of software to get you a high ranking.

Do not use cloaking software. Use proprietary Frames and Java based redirection techniques.

5) Directory Submission
Since directory submissions are reviewed by actual humans, other techniques must be used for optimization. Make sure that the optimization company knows what they are doing. Make sure that they will submit you to Yahoo, LookSmart, Open Directory (Dmoz.org).

6) Keyword Consultation
Most optimization companies will help you decide keywords for your site or can recommend better or similar keywords to use. There are tools that can determine what the most searched keywords are. A good optimization company will have such tools and will help you decide keywords for your site.

7) Who will own and host the pages?
Make sure that you have full ownership of the optimized pages. Some optimization companies will register new domain names under their own names, host it on their own servers and redirect all traffic to you. The problem is that the day you decide to cancel service you will lose all traffic to your site.

If new domain names are being registered for optimization, some companies may offer to host the optimized pages for you and redirect traffic to you. However, make sure that the domain names get registered under your own name. Note that it may not be necessary to get a brand new domain name. Some companies will optimize your existing domain name. If so, make sure to ask what changes will be made to your site in advance.

8) Ranking Reports and other Extras
Make sure that the company offers you monthly ranking reports. Ranking reports could be a very time consuming process, unless you have your own software. Most search engine companies will offer this in the deal. Also, ask what other extras or options can be provided.

Link popularity is a very important ranking factor these days. Make sure that the company you choose offers a plan for improving your link popularity.

9) Fees
Some companies may charge a one-time flat fee and some may have monthly maintenance fees, or some others may have various options to choose from. For those that charge monthly fees, make sure they are on either a flat monthly fee or pay-per-performance model. Stay away from sites charging on a per-pay-click basis.

Some companies will offer to redirect search engine traffic to you and charging you only for the keywords you have chosen upfront. They will install a tracking software that can track what keywords your site is being found with and they will charge you a certain fee, such as 50 cents a click to your site. In the long run, you will end up paying a lot more using per-pay-click placement vs. a flat monthly fee method.

There are only a handful of good optimization companies out there that do not charge an arm and a leg to do the work and offer everything above.

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Tags: seo search engine optimization