Professional Search Engine Optimisation

Professional search engine optimisation is something that you would hope any SEO company offered. However, as with all industries, there are some firms that engage in practices that are either unprofessional or even amateur. How do you find out whether this is the case before you part with your money?

Start by finding out the techniques your short-listed SEO company uses to get results. Promises of increased search engine traffic are easy to make but need to be backed up.

A reputable SEO company should be able to justify the methods they use to increase your ranking in the search engines and should use methods that you recognise or can research to find out whether they know what they are talking about.

A lot of SEO methods can straddle the line between good and bad techniques depending on how they are implemented.

For instance, making intelligent comments on relevant blogs that add to the discussion can be a good method of getting both backlinks and traffic. But making hundreds or thousands of spammy "Nice blog!" type posts using automated programs is a usually a recipe for disaster.

Likewise with videos. There is a world of difference between an automatically created slide show video with some out-of-time background music and one that has been crafted by skilled video creator who knows how to properly promote your website. Videos are a great SEO technique - a lot of people use sites like YouTube to find information as well as for entertainment. You probably won't get millions or even thousands of views for your video per month but the people who watch your video will be highly targeted. You also stand a chance of your video coming up high in the search results, which is an added bonus.

Article marketing - using articles like this one - is another technique that can be used wisely but is often used to spread spammy spun articles far and wide across the web. It's a good sign if your proposed SEO company offers articles as part of the mix - they are a time tested way of getting your word out. But you need to make sure that any article they use to promote your website is well written. Ideally it should be written by someone with English as a first language and should be free from spelling mistakes and grammar errors.

A professional search engine optimisation company will ensure that this is the case, often having editors to oversee the process. A less professional service is likely to use writers who have English as a second language and then "spin" the articles so that they appear unique to search engines but approach unreadability if a human chanced across them.

Probably the best way to check whether your proposed SEO company acts professionally or not is to talk to them, either on the phone or in person. You'll get a feel for how much they know about their service and you'll also get a feel for those awkward moments when you ask the "wrong" question and they have to think how they should answer you without dropping themselves in something unpleasant.