SEO agency

The increasing awareness around what SEO agency is and what it could do is a good thing. However, it's crucial to beware of "instant experts" who recognize a few things about what's going on, but don't get the whole thing. This ranges from major SEO firms dealing bad, and even very high-risk advice, to smaller firms that are overtly ripping people off.

A large Web-Impress customer that had just fired its SEO agency recently brought us in. The business firm was part of a much larger company, and the project related to moving the client's internet site from an existing domain to a new one. While the living domain was a valued internet site, with high PageRank, this was part of a re-branding move by the company.

The prior SEO agency had right recommended that they implement redirects from the old domain to the new one. But, they had explicitly suggested 302 redirects. It really, really hurt to see that. Any SEO agency with a basic amount of experience knows that the 302 is a message to the search engines to not transfer the link equity (link juice, PageRank, whatever) from the old location to the new one, and that the redirect of choice is a 301.

In addition, this SEO firm allowed the client to pick a CMS with basic architectural troubles that made it uncongenial toward search engines.

So while you're picking a SEO agency, make sure you pick one that can demonstrate its competency by reputation, references, or both. In addition, make sure they explain all their recommendations in detail to you, and be sure that they make sense. You are able to even use an external expert to poke holes in it. Challenging testimonials is never a bad thing to do.

Bad Advice From Articles, also

You are able also to discover not-so-good, or even risky advice posed in articles published online (but surely not this one!). One web blog recently caught my eye on Microsoft's Office web site, "Optimize Your Web Site For Better Ranking In Search Engine Results." There's some good info and advice in here, but there's misinformation as well.

One of the more interesting tidbits was the argument they make about putting text on your Web pages: "So do write text -- at least 200 words per page." This is excellent advice, but all the more interesting because of its specificity. While the post is from the Microsoft Office team, I wonder if there is something of a clue into Live Search here about how much content it would like to see on important pages.

The matter that was scary to me, altho, was the way the article began:

Keywords, meta tags, search phrases: learn the lingo. Meta tags are one or more important words we call "keywords" that are separated by commas into phrases and placed in your internet site code. Search engines use meta tags to index sites so that people could find what they are looking for.

The total 1st section was about keyword meta tags. We even get calls from people who believe that tweaking your keyword meta tags is all that's required for SEO. It harms to see that being treated as the basic recommendation on a web site that should be authoritative.

Finally, there's some possibility that keyword meta tags influence the rankings in Yahoo and Live Search, but the degree of influence they have is very, very, very, very small. And in Google, it isn't a factor at all.

The article proceeds with some good advice on titles, headings, and content. I was finding a bit at this point, when I got to the section called "Get Linked Up." The advice is 100 percent centered on doing reciprocal linking. Ouch!

Not too long ago, I used to encounter a dozen requests a day for reciprocal links. Every Webmaster who knew anything about SEO was out there trying to swap links.

Yes, reciprocal links with relevant internet sites can help your rankings. But if this is all you do with your link building campaigns, you won't get anyplace. Link swaps could be considered barter, which makes them a compensated link. Search engines may consider these for less than a one-way link.

If a large part of your links are reciprocal in nature, then you could be headed for real trouble. This was the issue of the BigDaddy update by Google back in early 2006. In that update Google did many things, but one of them was to discount the value of reciprocal links for sites that had a lot of them.

Summary

Just because someone calls themselves a SEO agency, or even if they're writing publically about it, doesn't make them an expert. Put your mental filters on what you hear and what you see. Here are some quick things you can do to protect yourself:

SEO agency

    * If you outsource your SEO agency, have someone in-house who has a basic level of competency.
    * If you hire a full time SEO agency, you should still have someone additional who has a basic level of competency.
    * Ask questions. Make sure you understand the logic of what your SEO agency is recommending. If your SEO agency won't answer the questions, or can't do so clear, it's time to get a new SEO agency.
Affordable SEO agency   * Validate advice. Do recognized experts provide contradictory advice?
    * Get references while you sign up an SEO firm, or hire an SEO to work for you.
    * Similarly, don't read one article, and act on it, without validating that advice as suggested above.

This may add some overtime and effort to your SEO campaigns, but it's your site, and it's well worth it.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to hire professional and reliable SEO agency!