The Top Six Most Important Factors When Choosing an SEO Firm for Search Engine Optimization Services

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Running an on-line business is tough enough without having to worry about gaining website traffic and search engine rankings in order to maximize sales.

The harsh truth is that your website is worthless if no one visits and with more people visiting the more likely you are to get increased conversions such as sales, growing your email list or clicks on adverts and so forth.

With that in mind many choose to hire help in the form of a search engine optimization firm or better put an SEO.

As with the good, the bad and the ugly choosing the right SEO firm itself is fraught with many difficulties given the plethora of technical jargon, out dated practices and the many con artists and snake oil salesman promising overnight success with their secret system unlocking backdoors to instant success.

I am sure you have heard it all before and some may have found out the hard way that it does nothing to help you and even worse can cause serious damage to your website rankings.

Hence my top critical items for you to consider when deciding on which SEO firm to choose:

• If the service provider states that they will submit your website to hundreds of search engines and directories. Then do one thing – run! To be blunt this is a scam. There is only a hand full of search engines which matter and for directories well there are not many these days which are reputable and most simply raise a loud announcement that your website is potentially seeking to manipulate search engine rankings and do very little to nothing in raising your on-line profile.
• Does the service provider state that they will provide hundreds to thousands of backlinks through blog comments and forum discussions? Then again run away! These outdated methods do nothing and further can even damage your website as with the Google Penguin update which detects low quality backlinks, over optimized anchor text and keyword stuffing and when done excessively it will lead to your website receiving a penalty. Especially if backlinks are from bad neighborhoods which have been identified as spam or as link exchange schemes which are in fact against terms and conditions of Google.
• Does the SEO provide unique content as part of the SEO campaign such as written articles, audio and video? These days it’s about quality content targeted for your keyword which really gets your website to rank high and be deserving of the top position. By means of proliferating valuable, useful content on many on-line resources with links pointing back to your site is an extremely important factor when increasing your website traffic and rankings. After all you need to raise your on-line profile if you want to get noticed. If they don’t provide content then as with the above points – run away!
• What about social media support and integration? Social media is an important search engine ranking factor and simply cannot be ignored. It indicates to search engines and people viewing your website that your business is endorsed by many and is taken seriously by the masses with accumulation of Facebook likes, Twitter followers and Google plus votes which are clear evidence of interaction with your audience such as supporting needs and shows that your business really cares about its customers. Hence make sure that your SEO strategy also includes social media.
• Does the SEO provide a manual audit and assessment to evaluate your current website and to identify fixes which will do much to improve how search engines crawl your website and display data? There are many factors related to on-site optimization from performance, navigation, URL conventions, content, technical and so forth and by identifying and fixing issues your website can benefit greatly in very little time and hence saving much time and effort as well as improving user experience. Therefore prior to implementing an SEO campaign make sure you have an SEO audit conducted which will ensure that you have the most solid foundation which will leverage all the benefits in efforts to increase rankings and traffic through correct SEO practices.
• Another great tip is to check to see if the SEO provides a secure on-line area whereby you can access project plans, reports and status. This is a solid indication that the potential firm pride themselves in customer support and keeping you updated with analytical reports and progress.

In sum when choosing and SEO, don’t be afraid to keep asking questions and if the answers seem too complicated and vague then chances are that they aren’t what they seem and should be avoided.

The best SEO will emphasize that they only engage in white-hat ethical practices and have a combined approach to ensure development and proliferation of unique content is based on your keywords as well as the option for social media integration.

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Source by Sid Aslam