Selecting a Search Engine Optimization Company (Part 1)

A Search Engine Optimization Company can be a priceless
asset in your Internet marketing campaign. They specialize
in knowing how to elevate your search engine positions,
Supervising those positions on the recurring basis, and
altering their strategies to account for unfavorable
results in any given month. Since this takes a lot of time,
hard work, and expert knowledge, it can be in your best
interest to go to an outside resource rather than try to
retain high search engine positions on your own.

However, like all business, there are good companies and
there are lemons. Knowing the correct questions to ask and
the criteria to look for will help you in selecting  an
inexpensive, effective search engine optimization company.

When looking at different companies, start on by considering
the method they use to raise your search engine
positions. Steer clear of companies that use cloaked,
doorway, or bridge pages to raise your positions. These
practices abuse most search engine policy, and in the
worst case scenario, will only get your website harshly
penalized, if not removed entirely from a search engine's
index.

A cloaked page is a page that is created which is not visible
to the regular visitor to your website. The cloaked page is
coded to spot a search engine spider and redirect them to
this special page, which is set-up to artificially boost
your search engine position. Doorway or bridge pages
make use of the same concept, but often reside on a completely
different server. Google, one of the largest and most
important search engine on the Internet, will eliminate your
website from their index if they detect you have cloaked
pages. Never, never employ any company that uses this
method!

Another important element is to get an assurance that the
company you employ will not work with your competitors while
they are working for you. Obviously, this would fatally
compromise the effectiveness of the search engine
optimization campaign. Be conscious that some companies will
utilize the success they achieve for your website to sell their
services to your competitors. So get your assurance in
writing, and make sure it is legally obligatory.

Of course, one of the most important factors you want to
look into is the company's track record of results.
However, don't take the company's word for it. They will
certainly be slanting their results in order to sell
their services to you. To go beyond their simple statement
of success, ask them a few important questions, and authenticate
their answers.

Ask them which engines they have achieved the best results
on. The ones that are important are the most popular
engines, and these are the ones you want to see good
results on.

Next, find out what keywords and phrases they are claiming
great results with. It's easy to get high rankings with
unpopular words. For example, the keyword "cat leashes"
will get high popularity ranking because no one else would
think of using it. What you are looking for is good results
using popular keywords.

Next, look for good results over an entire site that the
company claims to have effectively worked for. You want to
see a wide range of positions over a number of different
search engines using different keywords or phrases for the
entire site. Ask for a report for any client the company
claims to have done well for. This report should show good
positions on a number of the most popular search engines
for a range of different, popular keywords and phrases.