 How to choose an SEO company that’s right for your small business
The competition in the SEO/SEM/SMO arena is quickly becoming saturated with industry leaders, medium-sized optimization firms, boutiques, and start-ups. Everybody wants a piece of the action, be it the SEO service provider or the business owner looking for the SEO. Business owners who are looking to place their website in the hands of an SEO firm may find that their options are as confusing as the industry lingo. Here are some things to consider when choosing a firm that’s right for you.
How does the SEO/SEM firm operate?
SEO/SEM firms operate in varying ways using varying techniques to push your website. The most important things to look for are link building, original content generation, site compliance, and their ability to properly format your website’s title and meta tags.
Link building is one if the most important aspects of SEO. Part of a website’s validity and quality is measured by the number of links from other websites pointing back to yours. The major search engines use this number as part of a larger algorithm to rank your website against the other billions of websites out there. When shopping for SEO firms, make sure you ask them how they handle this. Link building can be done manually or automatically in-house, or outsourced. There is no perfect scenario for implementing this but make sure you ask your SEO for a record of where the link building is being done. Sites that link back to yours should contain content that’s relevant to your content. If you sell lampshades and you have 10 websites that link to you that sell ping pong tables then those 10 links aren’t worth much.
Original Content Generation or the old SEO adage ‘content is king’ still rings true. Having a blog or syndicated news section on your website is essential to good placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Ask your potential SEO firms how they facilitate this. Do they write press releases? If they do, how well? How much do they know about what you do? Good, original content is usually orchestrated by someone with solid experience in the subject matter. You can’t expect your firm to compose this material for you. The best option is to write it yourself and then allow your firm to submit the content to press release websites and social media networks. If your firm can help you create a sydicated blogging page on your website, and you keep it updated regularly, this can drastically improve your website’s incoming traffic.
Site compliance is really a simple matter. A group of people called the W3C (world wide web consortium) work together and with the public the create standards for website coding. In the mid to late 90’s HTML markup was like the wild west. Today, .php, .css, .xml, .html, etc. code is becoming more concise and specific. Do you remember frames? Some things worked and some things obviously didn’t. The major search engines take W3C compliance into consideration. How much? I’m not sure but it is definitely something to consider if you’re going to redesign your site. Sometimes a few simple tweaks will bring your site up to code.
If you’re interested in checking your sites W3C validity, you can go here to have your site’s markup checked for free.
Properly formatted title and meta tags are the big ones. These are simple to implement but for some reason, not everyone sees the light on this. Your title tag should contain 3 to 4 keywords of exactly what your website or services therein are about. There should be no stop words i.e. (and, the, or, I, in) these are a waste of space. If your site sells memory sticks for portable electronics, then your title might look something like, (memory cards, flash memory, memory sticks, flash drives, 123electronics.com). Your important meta tags include the ‘description’, ‘keyword’, ‘refresh’, and ‘robot’.
Description is exactly this, a paragraph of keywords that match your website’s content and hopefully the gist of your website. The ‘description tag isn’t as important as it used to be but some engines still use this. Make sure to place the most important keywords toward the beginning of your description.
Keyword tag lists words or phrases that are about your site. At one time this tag had more validity then it currently does. Many folks abused this tag by loading it up with hundreds and thousands of words, manipulating their rankings. The only engine that currently uses this tag is Inktomi. It’s always good to include this anyhow because things change and in this industry, more so than ever. Make sure your keyword paragraph is terse and there are no repetitions.
Refresh is a means of refreshing the content on the webpage after a specified number of seconds. This is useful when you have regularly updated content but most search engines don’t particularly like this tag since of its history of abuse and overall ability to clutter a search engine’s database.
Robot tag is simply some instructional data to help the search engine’s spiders crawl your site. A couple examples of this command can be INDEX, FOLLOW (follow all links from the index page) or NOINDEX (spiders will ignore this page)
So in summary, remember, when you’re shopping for an SEO firm ask, ‘how do you link build, how do you generate relevant and original content, is my site compliant and if not can you help, and are my title and meta tags up-to-par?
Having a small knowledge base like this can help you make a better decision when shopping for an SEO firm that meets your businesses needs.
|
