SEO Buyers Guide!
25 April 2008

• Give you a high level understanding of what SEO's do.
• Give you the tools to monitor what a typical optimiser is doing on a monthly basis.
• Give you a list of questions to spot the con artists or misinformed wannabe.
• Above to give you the tools to make an informed - sensible business decisiton in a field that has been described like finding a good car mechanic by some!

What do we do with the time you buy?

Search engine Optimisation companies will split your campaign into 2 primary areas.

• On-Site (All aspects of how a search engine reads your site)
• Off-Site (Everything that happens away from your site)

On-Page Optimisation:

This is the part of optimisation that most companies will know a little about, you may be familier with the indusrty terms like, Keywords, title tags, description tags etc. Regardless of this techno bable, they are just a few elements that make sure your site is:

• Structured so that the engines can visit each page, if you have a cms system this may not be happening!
• Your SEO should offer advise on ways of keeping your site up to date (Engines like this)!
• Make sure each page is created so that certain keywords are prominent, these are usually the terms you are most keen to be found under.

To make sure the above happens their are quite a number of elements and checks an seo will go through, listing all of them is beyond the scope of this article, but the following are deffinitely elements that you want to hear your seo asking about.

• Other domains you have
• How they are redirected
• Those who have CMS or Ecommerce sites should be asked, if the software is propriatory or off the shelf.
• Are their any duplicate sites
• Have you used an SEO before or udertaken link exchanging
• You would expect them to ask if they would have access to the site.
• WC3 / Accessability is important now, do they mention this?
• Do they mention keyword density or how your content is made up on the page
• They should ask about the sites history

Most SEO's can check a lot of these charateristics without talking to you, but should ask never the less as you may have other sites that could couse problems if not flagged. Whilst the above are items that should be talked about the following is a list of words that should you here them you should run a mile!

• Keyword stuffing:
  creating long lists of keywords
• Invisible Text:
  Inserting lists of keywords in same color as the background for the purpose of attracting more search engine spiders.
• Tiny Text / Alt Text:
  The placing of keywords and phrases in the tiniest text possible all over a website. While most people can't see them, spiders can.
• Mirror or Duplicate Sites:
  Duplicating a website, renaming it, and submitting it again, often done without realising it is bad. Search engines will know and act accordningly!
• Submitting Repeatedly:
  Submitting a website to a search engine is not even required, so dont pay for this service!
• Doorway/ gateway Pages:
  A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. Doorway pages are simply HTML pages customized to a few specific keywords or phrases, which are programmed to be visible only by specific search engines and their spiders. These doorway pages are designed for the purpose of tricking the search engines thereby giving these sites higher rankings. Sounds good, so what’s wrong with that? Well these doorway pages are not static destinations they are targeted towards specific search engine spiders. As a result when a searcher lands on a doorway page, they are instantly redirected to the "actual" website.

SEO's use a lot of tools to check out your websites content, if you are curious as to what they see when they visit your site visit the following address, this software emulates the search engine spiders, from it you will see what the spiders see, its called a keyword density check. The higher the density % the more important that word is to the search engines. If the word appears to often then beware, it will be seen as keyword stuffing, a spammy technique highlighted above.

http://googlerankings.com/kdindex.php