Saturday, February 27, 2010

Potential SEO Company - questions to ask

Search is a growing industry, and it seems that each day is a new search engine optimization company in the game. However, the skills of many of these search engine optimization companies are questionable - staying on top of the knowledge curve can be overwhelming, and get up to speed more daunting still. Moreover, there is a wide variety of tactics, "safe" and "unsafe" practices (in terms of risk of criminal activities), and other important business considerations that you should think about before deciding on a particular search engine optimization company. The following is the first of a three-part series that provides a list of questions to help you decide if the company you are considering deserve your trust. In this installment, we will focus on the tactics that search engine optimization companies can use that can put your site at risk of punishment or removal from the major search engines. Ask your potential search engine optimization company the following: "Can you show search engines anything that a visitor does not see?" There is a common tactic that some search engine optimization companies use called "cloaking". In simple terms, these companies use technology allows your website to recognize when a visitor to your website is a spider, and then feed that spider specialized content designed to rank high in search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of every major search engine. Sites that are caught cloaking are routinely removed from engines. Therefore, depending on your tolerance for risk, you may want to find a search engine optimization company that does not use this tactic. "Do you create pages, either on my server or somewhere else that is not built into the navigation on my site?" Another common technique that some search engine optimization companies employ is to create "doorway pages." Since the term "doorway page" now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies have their own names to these pages: "gateway pages," "bridge pages", "targeted into pages," "specialized content pages," and so on . Whatever they're called, so the pages are rarely effective, and also make websites risk of punitive measures, as this is another tactic that violates the TOS of every major engine. If your potential search engine optimization company does not give you a definitive "no" to the above questions, you may want to look elsewhere. If you are looking for SEO or SEO Testimonials Testimonials of success or SEO Testimonials News - So you're in the right place.

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