What to Expect From Your SEO Professional?

 

As with any industry, there are plenty of frauds offering search engine optimization (SEO) services on the Web. No one expects you to become an expert in SEO just to weed out the illegitimate companies. Please, you have enough on your plate running your own business. However, you do have the responsibility as a business owner to familiarize yourself with what fundamental services a legitimate SEO professional will provide.

You see, the bottom line with Search Engine Optimization is that it is a long-term solution. Anyone who promises to get you immediate, organic, top-page results will simply either not deliver or will use “risky” techniques that could actually hurt your rankings in the long run.

 

Here are some warning signs that scream DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

• Guarantee immediate results.

• Guarantee first-page results.

• Are secretive about how they intend to optimize your website.

• Require a one-time up-front fee.

• Do not provide SEO-friendly content or optimize existing content.

• Are not willing to provide current examples of their work with references.

• Advertise via unsolicited email.

• Require you to link back to their site.

 

Now, let’s talk about things that you should expect from a legitimate SEO consultant or firm.

 

• The SEO professional should discuss, explaining in detail, the various marketing services that are available to you. For example, Pay-Per-Click campaign, search engine optimization, link-building campaigns and SEO copywriting.

• After discussing your website goals together, your SEO consultant should do keyword research to determine what keyword terms and/or phrases are currently being marketed by your competitors and searched for by target audience.

• Together you should finalize a list of keywords to optimize throughout your website.

• The SEO professional should stress to you that keywords will only be as effective as the relevancy of surrounding content. Therefore, writing content or optimizing existing content to include the selected keywords is fundamental for top results.

• The SEO professional should optimize your website title, meta and description tags for selected keywords throughout the website.

• The SEO professional should optimize your site for internal linking.

• The SEO professional should provide a general site analysis to ensure that source code behind your website is in compliance with accepted industry standards and is error free.  This will help make sure that search engine spiders do not have problems reading your page.

• The SEO professional should offer suggestions if any design, layout, and architectural improvements could improve search engine indexing, navigation and user experience.

• The SEO professional should manually submit your optimized website to search engines and major directories that require submission.

• The SEO professional should research industry-related sites and directories for submission.

• The SEO professional should explain the importance of link building and popularity on the Internet.

• Finally, the SEO professional should remind you that reaching your SEO goals will take time. Your consultant should offer to monitor and continuously tweak your website to achieve better results.

 

From the time that your newly-optimized site goes live, search engines will vary in the time it takes them to spider and catalogue your pages. If you are patient you will see rewarding results.

 

As famous Russian writer, Lev Tolstoy once said, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”…………Keep this in mind next time you talk to your SEO professional!

 

Written by Nicole Timofeyeva
July 11, 2008