What to Consider When Looking for SEO Specialist
Writen by Patrick Spencer
Did you know that search engine and directory searches account for 80% of Internet traffic? A study conducted by Booz-Allen, a leading strategic management and consulting firm, revealed that less than 10% of websites are found using search engines or directory searches. How confident are you that your site is being found in the major search engines and directories?
An increasing number of businesses are incorporating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into their marketing strategy to ensure that the site, into which they invested a significant amount of money, receives high ranking in search engines and is prominently visible to potential customers.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your site’s ranking in search engines by incorporating key components. These critical elements must be readable by the search engine in order for the site to be included in their database, and must be relevant to your website in order to achieve a high ranking. When planning for SEO, it is critical to find an ethical SEO specialist who does not use blacklisted techniques that could result in your site being banned from major search engines.
Here are several points that you should consider when selecting a SEO provider:
Experience & Knowledge:
Optimizing a website is an on-going process and not a one-time solution. Accordingly, a reputable SEO provider will have an on-going strategy, establish matrixes to measure success, and have a commitment to your website. It is important to look for an SEO provider that is experienced in optimizing sites across various industries and is up-to-date with SEO strategies and industry changes.
Your SEO company of choice should not work for your competition, so be sure to ask about their other clients and get references.
Accomplished SEO specialists have an in-depth knowledge of how search engine spiders index HTML, and will spend a great deal of time on keyword research. The keyword research should be shared with you for your review, and the provider should work with you to incorporate the keywords into the page context and not just add the words in the metatags section. In addition, the specialist should hold frequent update meetings with you to review your site’s current ranking and provide recommendations to increase your site’s ranking.
Strategies:
Reputable providers will educate you on the difference between search engines (ex. Google) and directories (ex. Yahoo). If an SEO provider describes Yahoo as a search engine, keep looking for someone else. In addition, the SEO provider should have two separate promotion strategies for each: one for the search engines and one for the directories.
Until relatively recently, title tags and metatags with relevant keywords gave decent rankings. However, after years of tag misuse, search engines now attach more importance to: