What to look for when hiring an SEO Consultant or SEO Company
SEO as the profession is open to abuse and misinformation, the following will hopefully give you a basic understanding of SEO and enlighten you about what to look for when hiring an SEO consultant or company.
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Openness and education are incredibly important,
especially when it comes to SEO, as the profession is open to abuse and
misinformation. In order to better inform my site visitors I have prepared this
article which will hopefully allow you to gain a basic understanding of what is
involved in SEO and what to look for when hiring an SEO consultant or company.
What do
you see when you use a Search Engine?
Once a user has submitted a search query to
either Google, Yahoo or MSN they will see a list of ordered results that take 2
forms:
Pay Per
Click (PPC) Adverts
PPC adverts are how the main 3 search engines
make money, an advertiser chooses the search terms that will trigger their
adverts and whenever a user clicks on the advert the advertiser pays the search
engine. PPC adverts are shown down the right hand side and sometimes above the
other results that appear on the page. On Google, Yahoo and MSN these results
are labelled as either “Sponsored Links”, “Sponsor Results” or “Sponsored Sites”
respectively.
Natural
(Organic or Algorithmic) Search Results
The Natural (Organic or Algorithmic) Search
Results appear next to the adverts, and are served up based on the relevance of
each given page to the search query that was entered. It is commonly suggested
that these results enjoy around 75% of the clicks for any give term, but in my
experience this can vary greatly depending on the search term selected and the
competition.
What is
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimisation or (SEO) refers to the
process of improving the results of a given web site/page in the Natural
(Organic or Algorithmic) search results, using both onsite and offsite
elements. A good SEO will consider how search engines work in light of what
people have historically searched for, the relevance of the phrase and the
strength of the competition for each phrase.
What do
Search Engines want?
As established above the main search engines
(Google, Yahoo and MSN) make their money when users click on the adverts that
appear alongside the natural (organic or algorithmic) search results, when a
user clicks on the adverts the search engine in question makes money from the
click. The key word here is relevancy; if the results served up by the search
engines stop being as relevant the users will leave and try to find what they
need from an alternative search engine, and the clicks (and therefore the
revenue) will start to dry up.
What do
your Site Visitors want?
It is quite common for people to implement SEO
thinking that ranking for a given phrase is the only focus; this can lead to a
poorly designed site that doesn’t work for the site visitor. When implemented
properly SEO should lead to the addition of site content that will improve both
the standing in the search engine rankings and the experience of the sites
visitors.
What is
Black Hat & White Hat SEO?
As we have already seen, search engines attempt
to provide relevant results to their users, SEO’s attempt to manipulate these
results to place the pages of the sites that they work for high up in the
results. There are broadly speaking two types of SEO; White Hat & Black
Hat. White Hat SEO’s employ techniques that involve no deception and which
conform to the search engines’ guidelines, they also favour producing content
for users not for search engines’ alone. Black Hat SEO’s employ Black Hat SEO
or Spamdexing techniques, intended to manipulate the search engine results. The
search engines frown on these techniques and attempt to remove offending pages
as they undermine both the relevance of search results and the user’s
experience of using the search engine.
So what
does all this mean?
Excepting PPC there are no short cuts to getting
listed prominently in the Search Engines Search Engines are interested in good relevant
content Site visitors are interested in good relevant
content, served up on websites that are easy to use and navigate around Tricking the Search Engines can get your site
penalized or removed from the Search Engines
Further
Reading
Find out more about SEO by reading the following
articles:
SEO on Wikipedia.org
Wikipedia.org provides a brief explanation of SEO
and the history behind the profession:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
Google Webmaster Guidelines
The Google Webmaster Guidelines are a good place
to start if you are interested in hiring an SEO:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide
The page also contains a link to this useful
guide: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
The SeoMoz Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation
The SeoMoz Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation
provides an overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used
by professional SEO’s:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
Disclaimer
Justin March offers this set of instructions as “Guidance Only”. Therefore,
Justin cannot be held responsible for any work carried out by YOU and/or ANY
third party using the instructions. It shall be your own responsibility to
ensure that any
, services meet your specific requirements. Reasonable efforts were made to ensure that
the above detail was correct at the time of writing; some of this information may
contain inaccuracies and may also change over time.
Reprint Rights
Anyone may republish this article as long the content remains
unaltered and a link back is included to www.JustinMarch.com.
Article Tags:
Site Visitors, Algorithmic) Search, Engine Optimisation, Search Engines, Search Engine
Justin March is a Gloucester based SEO consultant working in and around Gloucester and Cheltenham.