SEO: Three Things To Consider When Hiring SEO Assistance

In this article I offer guidelines on how to measure SEO, search engine optimization, or SEM, search engine marketing, services for your website or blog. At one time or another you will be pitched to hire someone. Now you are gonna know what to look for in hiring someone.

It’s the century old story. You can buy a dress shirt at the box store for a lot less than at the men’s store. But, the shirt at the men’s store is custom fit to your shape and the actual shirt material is a different quality.  You always get what you pay for. Hopefully, after reading this article, you will have a better understanding of the characteristics being offered to you for SEM and SEO work.

Make no mistake, SEO and SEM are critical to the success of any website or blog. There are millions of web sites and blogs out there You must consistently provide quality SEO and SEM to your pages in order to stand out from the herd; show up on the front page of the search engine results. I have covered the six common errors to kill you SEO previously.


What Assistance Can They Provide You With In PageRank?

Since April this year the PageRanks have been dipping, diving, and rising. There has been shakeout as the PPC, pay per click, sites get identified from Google’s Penguin update, thereby lowering those sites with any assortment of those PPC links. 

Right now, a stable and average site is a three or four from what I can tell.  I have talked with hundreds of web site owners over the last 10 years. You don’t get an honest traffic measurement from those PageRanks (PR) either. In other words, two sites with a PR of four may have different web site visitor numbers.

Hopefully, the person you hire to help with boosting your SEO  has a strategy to enhance your PR. It won't happen overnight, but increasing your PR requires a methodical approach.


What Assistance Can They Provide In Building Your Back Links?

Like it or not, back links are a standard measurement of inbound activity by Google. And, forget about any PPC links you have accumulated because Google won’t count ‘em, they may even ding you for having them.

Look for organic links from reputable sites. I think it’s better to have one link from a thousand sites each than 1,000 links from the same site. The more sites linking into your site communicate to the search engines that you have a broader interest in your material/products/services.

The person you hire to do your search engine optimization or search engine marketing needs a web site or blog with 10K to 15K back links. Ask to see the list. Are the links from one site or many sites? Hey, time is not a factor here. When you know what you are doing, organic back links can be established in a timely, methodical manner.


What Content Have They Written?

This person you are about to hire must be doing writing for you. The attributes of that content will be educational, persuasive, or analytical depending on your marketing strategy. Ask to see some of their articles so you can imagine how they will be writing for your products and services.

Do they have an understanding of where that writing will be placed and how to do it?  Talk with them about how they plan to distribute your material once it is written. Just placing it in a reputable article bank won’t cut it. A link to that article has to be placed into other locations that have a PR of five or better. Your written material will create a sphere of influence around the web that leads readers back to your web/blog pages.

Hope this helps to improve your website presence. If you want my Free SEO Guide, click here. Let me know if you have any questions.