The industry of searches is growing fast. As a result, if you are looking for a search engine optimization company, you may feel slightly overwhelmed by the various results you are presented with. In reality, however, only very few of these companies are truly able to deliver results. This is because staying on top of knowledge when it comes to SEO is a full time job. Professionals must be fully aware of safe (‘white hat’) and unsafe (‘black hat’) practices as well, something that changes frequently.
As a result, finding a good SEO company is actually down to asking the right questions and receiving the right answers. Below are a number of the questions that you should ask. One of the main things you should look into is that the company doesn’t engage in practices that could get you penalized. After all, if they do something wrong, they won’t notice its ill-effects. You, on the other hand, could see your site barred from the search engines long after you have paid for your SEO services.
Question 1 – Can a visitor see everything a search engine can?
A lot of SEO companies use a black hat tactic known as ‘cloaking’. This means that they fill invisible pages full of content that the Google spiders love to see. This is in direct violation of the Terms of Service of every search engine, not just Google. If you are caught, your site will be promptly removed and often permanently banned from the search engines. If your SEO company uses these tactics, they should be avoided.
Question 2 – Do you create any pages anywhere that are not actually in the site’s navigation?
This is another sneaky tactic used by poor quality SEO companies. It is known as creating ‘doorway pages’. Search engines call them ‘bridge pages’, ‘gateway pages’, ‘specialized content pages’ or ‘targeted entry pages’. Whatever their name is, this black hat tactic is not effective and your site could be seriously penalized as a result. This question, therefore, must also be answered with a firm ‘no’ if your SEO company is any good.
Question 3 – How do you build links? Do you use reciprocal links or is it automated?
If your SEO company is any good, they will make sure they garner high quality inbound links. This is because the quality and popularity of links plays an important role in ranking your site. If your SEO company does not build links, you should not work with them. In fact, you should go so far as calling them lazy before you move to the next one. Link building is a time consuming practice, but it will also always remain one of the most effective SEO tactics. Furthermore, SEO companies are not cheap, and the reason for this is that you pay them to do a time consuming job, building links. If you find yourself an SEO company that claims to achieve excellent results without link building, then you need to move on straight away.
