Fact #1: Never hire a SEO company that guarantees a number one placement in Google. There are lots of â€come and go companies†promising to get your site number one in Google. First, they guarantee top placements and their cost is very low. For anyone who has been in the search engine industry for a while, knows how much time and efforts it takes to get top placements in Google for the most competitive terms. Therefore, no professional search engine optimization company will offer their services for cheap as it takes lots of hours and continuous efforts to gain the desirable positions. Some companies hire a whole team to take care of the search engine marketing efforts. At least one full time employee with lots of search marketing experience is the minimum investment that you should consider if you want to see some tangible results. This requires technical skills, the latest search engine information knowledge and great writing skills in English as Google looks for quality of information. This comes with a price tag. Fact #2: Never hire a company that uses out-dated search marketing strategies. First, they are not effective as the search engines changes all the time. Second, it will cause your website’s spam score index to increase which will lower your rankings (in worst case scenario your website could be banned in Google). So what are outdated strategies? If a search engine optimization company uses link exchanges to aggressively promote your site, Google will boost your spam score. Although this strategy used to work well many years back, it is not against Google’s guidelines. Moreover, linking with irrelevant industries will also boost your spam score with Google. Another popular technique that search engine optimization companies tell their potential clients is submissions to search engines. Although this was true back 8 years ago, there is no need to submit your site anymore. Google will find your website if you are linked up with highly quality sites and they will index your website fairly quickly (as well as update it on a regular basis). When a SEO company mentions submissions to search engines, websites, social bookmarking sites or article websites etc, you need to get a confirmation of your URL (your website address) where your link is located. Submissions are useless unless they get indexed and confirmed. If a company mention submission and no confirmation that will tell you that they are using an automated software to blast out your website to thousands of search engines, article websites or directories. This is a sure way to get your website’s spam score to drastically increase which will cause your ranking to slip or being prevented by Google from gaining better positions. Fact #3: Only hire a SEO company where they themselves show up for their targeted terms. If they cannot show up themselves, chances are that they will not be able to help you as well. Fact #4: Off-site optimization is now the single most important strategy you can employ in your search marketing strategies. On-site optimization means the keywords that you place on your page in the title tag, meta tags, header, links, alt tags and visible on the page. Off-site optimization means optimizing your website â€outside†of your website. Why is this important to Google? Because every company wants to be ranked number one and everyone tries to include many keywords on the page that Google needs other methods to more accurately rank the most relevant sites in the top. This means your website has to appear on highly quality websites, which have high Google Page Rank but also high Trust Rank. Highly trusted sites are governmental, educational, and also websites with â€expertise†in their own area. Usually these are sites have lots of quality content and many users. Trust rank technology is getting more and more popular as the Google Page Rank system is being abused and therefore not so important anymore. With the web 2.0 entering the internet industry and revolutionize the way websites work, it is crucial that you embrace these new technologies such as video marketing, social media websites, article syndication, and building quality and quantity links to your website. As you keep working on these strategies, Google will notice your site growing and will eventually give your website â€some love†and rank your site highly for many competitive and popular terms. Fact #5: Getting listings in Directories used to be a very effective method as the search engines considered them very important. Nowadays, directories are being spammed and abused. Therefore, submissions to directories are not important and not effective anymore in your search marketing efforts. The only three directories that I would consider important are Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, and BOTW directories as they are highly trusted and recognized by Google.
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