SEO Advice

When you hire an SEO company to optimize your web site and help improve your rankings, choose one that you have good communication with and that will explain to you exactly what steps they are taking to optimize your site.

There are a couple key reasons for this. First of all, it makes business sense. You should know what your hard earned dollars are being spent on. All too often, search engine optimization firms operate as a “black magic” entity charming snakes in a backroom to get your web site a higher search engine ranking. In actuality, the only optimization they have ever done is submit your site to Yahoo and the occasional web site change. Maybe the money spent doesn’t have as much value anymore when you know the specifics of what they have done.

The most critical reason is that you are ultimately responsible for any illicit practices that your SEO firm uses. If they use keyword stuffing or cloaking (more on these later) and your web site gets removed from Google, ultimately its your business that suffers. Imagine the scenario where traffic completely disapears from one of the major search engines; this has the potential to destroy your business. An example of this was with Traffic-Power.com who was de-listed from Google (and most if not all of their SEO clients).

Search engine optimization firms play an important role but you should be wary of their practices. Some operate on the up and up, some use black hat methods. Always know what your SEO firm is doing at all times and make them provide you with a synopsis of any optimization they do.