How to choose the right SEO company for your business?
Deciding on an SEO consultant to optimize your website can be a difficult one. One of the main reasons why this is, is that the work being performed is very technical. Chances are, you as the business owner, have very little idea of what exactly will be done to your website to make it 'rank better'.
How are you to distinguish between SEO firms if you cannot really understand what exactly they will be doing?
One of the most important aspects of how to choose an SEO company is to make sure that they are using ethical, or whitehat, techniques. It might be necessary to learn about SEO so that you are able to spot an ethical company from one that will be using unethical SEO techniques.
You don't need to become an SEO yourself, but you need to at least educate yourself enough to be able to make an educated decision in selecting an SEO firm.
Obviously references are important, but it is also important that you are able to discuss with the potential SEO contractor what your goals are. If you are not sure what your goals are, the SEO company should be able to help you determine what they should be. Then you should do your own research to see if those goals make sense.
If you are unsure about hiring me as your SEO contractor, I recommend reading this very informative SEO article from Google that will help you in your decision making process.
Avoiding Blackhat SEO
The most common SEO blackhat or unethical technique is the use of shadow domains.
Aside from the work that is done on your website, an important aspect of SEO is the creation of backlinks.
Backlinks are a measure of popularity. The more backlinks, the more popular your website is seen through the eyes of a search enngine. This has the effect of increasing your rankings.
An unethical SEO company will not point these backlinks directly to your site. They will place a shadow domain between these links and your website.
This means that all the popularity that is coming from all the backlinks points to a another site, a shadow domain, that the SEO company owns. They pass all the popularity through to your site, and so you get the benefits.
However, all the popularity from the backlinks is still controlled by the SEO company. It is easy to see how they can pull the rug from under your site very easily. Even wore, they can give the benefits to a competitor if they are willing to pay a higher price.
Bottom line, if backlinks are part of your SEO contract, make sure that they point directly to your site.