Search Engine Optimization

If you are a serious business website owner, chances are you are constantly on the lookout for ethical means to promote your website to your target market. Chances are also good that you probably read somewhere or heard from someone that your most practical promotion solution is to trust your business to a search engine optimization company. The processes of promoting your site and increase your online visibility is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you are familiar with the term but do not have the expertise to properly implement SEO for your website, then you might want to consider hiring a Search Engine Optimization Company to do that work for you.

What is a Search Engine Optimization company? It is an organization whose objective is to provide the necessary tools and expertise to optimize your website towards the goal of securing for you a first or second page ranking in the search engine’s list of keyword-responsive sites. A Search Engine Optimization company’s role is that of an influencer, i.e., the strategies it employs for your website are geared towards influencing the search engine’s “spiderbot” to give it a high relevance rating which, in turn, influences its ranking. A Search Engine Optimization company’s indirect role is also to influence the surfer to visit your website but is not responsible for what happens to the visit.

There are many Search Engine Optimization companies that have hung their virtual shingle in cyberspace, with many more sprouting up each and every day. With so many choices available, it is important that you are guided in selecting the right Search Engine Optimization company that best suits your requirements and budget. Here are a few tips in selecting that Search Engine Optimization company:

• Always Go for Reputation and Experience

This is pretty much a common sense tip. When you are headed for the unknown, it always makes sense to go with a guide who knows what you don’t. A Search Engine Optimization company that has years of experience as an organization and has people working for it with years of individual experience is normally a good choice. Experience, however, is just one half of this selection criterion, the other half being REPUTATION. A Search Engine Optimization company may have the experience, but if it has a track record of unethical or even illegal SEO activity, then the experience counts for nothing.

• Avoid SEO companies that Spam

A Search Engine Optimization company that sends spam email to promote itself is not a good Search Engine Optimization company and will get your site banned costing you more that it will ever benefit from.

• A company that hides everything, has something to hide

Beware of the Search Engine Optimization company that has a “black box” solution for everything that ails your website, i.e., you don’t need to know how it works; you just pay. In all likelihood, what this type of Search Engine Optimization company is hiding from you is, at best, unethical, or at worst, illegal. It is very important for you to understand what is going to be done with your website (in lay man’s terms) because, at the end of the day, it IS your website and you will have to live with whatever the Search Engine Optimization company does to it.

• Go Window Shopping

Like with every important purchase decision you make, you must check out more than one Search Engine Optimization company before you make a decision. Ask for a list of the websites they claim to have worked on, and do your own research. Also, ask each Search Engine Optimization company you are considering about what they think of the other candidates in your list. Be wary if they launch into a negative marketing pitch about their competition. A really good Search Engine Optimization company will rarely badmouth a competitor. Even if the competitor is really bad, the worst that a good Search Engine Optimization company will do is objectively point out their strengths and weaknesses.

• Go with the Clear Deal

A good Search Engine Optimization company will always be very clear any work proposal it makes. It clearly spells out the terms of reference, timelines, commercial aspects, guarantees, penalties, any other items that it and you may find relevant towards meeting your expectations. That way, you know what you are getting into and what (and what not) to expect.

These are but a few tips on how to select the expert that will take care of optimizing your website for you. Approach a Search Engine Optimization company like you would any other company that you are considering to handle some work for you, and you are covered.

Before going into what a Search Engine Optimization firm does, let us first define what “search engine optimization” or SEO is. In “brick-and-mortar” terms, SEO may be compared to placing an advertisement in a medium that caters largely to a particular market segment, e.g., medical journals, fashion magazines, adult cable channels, etc. so that there is a high probability that whatever products or services you offer is what that particular viewing, reading, or listening market segment needs. The “agent” for this type of advertising is the advertising or marketing firm which, when related to cyberspace is the Search Engine Optimization firm.

SEO is the set of activities and strategies implemented (either by yourself or through a Search Engine Optimization firm) that influences a search engine’s “spiderbot” to give your website a high relevance rating which translates into a high ranking in the list of keyword relevant websites. Since it is a targeted approach, the success rate of an SEO strategy (measured in terms of average business per visitor also known as conversion rate) that a Search Engine Optimization firm implements should be higher than, say, online advertising (which may attract more visitors but will include a big share of “just looking” hits, thus resulting to a lower average business per visitor). This ultimately results to lower cost per sale since the resources required to service the visits (which will go down in terms of quantity but increase in terms of quality) goes down.

What does a Search Engine Optimization firm do in order to achieve its objective of ethically optimizing your website? One Search Engine Optimization firm may apply a different set of SEO strategies versus another Search Engine Optimization firm, but they both focus on one aspect: the search engine keyword or keywords. Essentially, the keyword is the major rating criterion of a relevance rating; i.e., how often it appears in the website or content. Although more sophisticated discernment algorithms are being implemented by the search engine’s “spiderbot” to weed out unethical practices (e.g., embedding keywords in articles or content that do not have any logical connection), the keyword density still the key.

Some of the strategies that a Search Engine Optimization firm employs are as follows:

• Keyword Rich Domain Names

This is the most “no brainer” strategy that a Search Engine Optimization firm could employ, yet is one of the most difficult to implement. The proposition of this strategy is that the best way to get a high ranking for a keyword relevant site is to embed the keyword into the domain name. For example, www.recipes.com will obviously get top ranking when the keyword “recipes” is used in the search box (as a side note, if you are looking for recipes, you might even just skip the search engine altogether and instinctively enter www.recipes.com). The problem with this strategy, of course, is that these domain names are probably owned by someone else already, in which case, the Search Engine Optimization firm could embed the keyword in a longer domain name like, e.g., www.mothers-recipes.com or www.home-cooked-meal-recipes.com, which, when combined with other SEO strategies could potentially even outrank www.recipes.com.

• Content Optimization

In this strategy, the Search Engine Optimization firm ensures that the content is ethically filled with all the relevant keywords to which the website is responsive to. This is accomplished by framing the advertising copy around the keyword and making it appear as many times as relevancy allows, including the keywords in the text articles, etc. The Search Engine Optimization firm has several ways of determining the possible relevance rank of your website based on the level of content optimization.

• Meta-Tag Optimization

All websites use HTML in several parts of the website’s program. In the body of the HTML program are areas that the programmer uses, among other things, for remarks (e.g., to remind him what the code is all about). The content of these areas (called meta-tags) do not have an impact on how the website looks but is “crawled through” by the search engine’s “spiderbot” all the same. Because these meta-tags play a factor in the website’s relevance, a Search Engine Optimization firm will normally embed as many keywords as ethically allowed to into them.

In selecting the Search Engine Optimization firm that you will use to optimize your website, be sure to put a heavy premium on its experience and reputation. Also, avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that engages in unethical (and illegal) practices just to increase the number of visitors to your sites. Avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that is vague about how it is going to optimize your website. If it has nothing to hide, then it should be transparent as to what it is supposed to do. If you heard about a Search Engine Optimization firm through spam mail, do not even consider it. If the Search Engine Optimization firm charges you a low price without any clear specifics as to what it will do, walk away. Finally, make sure to canvass your requirements before selecting the Search Engine Optimization firm you will use.