Choosing a SEO company is not an easy thing to do for most small to medium sized business owners. Little is known by the general public about what is actually involved in SEO and how to tell the difference between a dedicated SEO company that fights hard for results, and a mediocre one can be difficult. After all, just like with the TV, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Some of the main tips that I would recommend to anyone searching for an SEO company that has little experience in the field are listed here.

My first tip is to speak to more than one company. The easiest way to find companies that at least have the ability to promote their own website high on Google, and therefore maybe yours, is to search for the service in your area. For example, if a company can rank their website highly for a term like, SEO Melbourne, then they must have a sound knowledge about how SEO works.

If you call a few different companies after doing this, then you will probably get a very different feel from the different people you speak to. You should ask questions about what they do, why their system works and how long they think it will take for the rankings they expect to deliver will take to materialise.

One thing I recommend not to do is to buy into an SEO deal because they offer a guarantee. The problem with guarantees is that they take the focus away from what is best for your business. The evolution of how people use Google makes it more and more important to be in the top few places on the first page, rather than just anywhere on the first page. So often, it will be better to be number one for one keyword, than on the bottom half of the first page for ten different keyphrases. If a company is more focused on meeting a guarantee of having your website rank for some many phrases on the first page (like many guarantee sales model offer), you are tying their hands from concentrating on what might be a better strategy for your business to make the most money.

I would also avoid a contract fixed over a set period. You should be able to see positive movement on Google for your website in the first month of a good SEO service. Likewise in future months, you should see progression, or at least proof that your SEO company is busy working on your project, with a sensible expectation for the future. As a business owner I would hate to be locked into a one year contract with any SEO company, because how would I know they were any good?

Finally, my advice would be to choose a company that only offers Google optimisation and maybe Adwords management or a few other niche online marketing strategies. If you want to wire up a new room in your house, you get an electrician, not a handyman. The same should go for SEO. A web developer or general marketing company will most likely not offer the same dedication for a few reasons. Their focus is divided on many different tasks, and their revenue is not solely dependent on the success of their SEO results. A SEO company has to get results; otherwise they will fail as a business.

There is no doubt that in the past couple of years there has been a growing interest in Social Media and its relevance to SEO and Search. In the last year however, there have been exciting developments regarding social media and its potential in search. Google has signalled it is making social media much more of a consideration – by its acquisition of PostRank and its Google Social algorithm.

Believe the hype?

Facebook has immense power, allowing a brand to connect with their fans in real time and able to deliver quick bursts of information to their base.  Now it is an established social media tool, marketers are much more able to utlitise its potential much more efficiently and successfully.

Google and Bing have definitely upped the importance of social media signals and interactions in the last year. Google has created Google Social Search which is a new search algorithm which allows you to create a ‘Social Circle’.

A Google user logins into their Google profile and lists their social online profiles such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Friends of friends and your Twitter followers are then added to your Social Circle and Google then takes regular web indexed data in a search and annotates it with social updates and information.

Google’s Matt Cutts has emphasised that it is only publicly available information that is included and that you can choose what content to make public. One aspect of this though is that you must be logged into Google to see these social results. So it is not something that is available to regular searchers that are not logged into Google. Yet.

Could it be signalling that organic SEO and link building will one day not be as important as working on a social presence that is more personal?

It is still early days in many respects with regards to just how much influence social media will have on search results, but there is a definite move from search engine’s to start integrating social signals slowly but surely.

It is also worth noting that more and more brands on television, radio and print are highlighting the fact that they not only have a website, but are also on Facebook or Twitter – many of them realising a large percentage of their target market are using these social sites.

The informative blog SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011 report revealed that most SEOs in this survey agreed that social aspects are beginning to form a major part of the search engine algorithms, especially Google’s.

The benefit of social media as part of search is that it can provide very fresh and up to date information. Twitter in particular is definitely a real-time source of information. Relevance does not necessarily mean the newest content – but everyone knows how frustrating it can be to search for something and find articles from 2005 – particularly if that is not at all relevant to your query.

Social content also allows Google and search engines a much broader range of content types to work with in order to give the user the most relevant answer to their query.

So in that respect social media forming a part of search has definite plus points. However the difficulty of privacy in terms of making search and social media completely integrated is both a technical issue and also an ethical one.

Fancy some link juice?

The importance of link building through social media channels will definitely increase traffic, built a circle of followers/consumers and also help to build and solidify your brand online. It will also increase your page rank, which is an important indicator of authority, particularly with Google.

Although Twitter links are no follow links – it does not mean they are not as important. The more popular you are on Twitter, the more that people follow you, read your posts, retweet and aggregate them on other sites the more likely you are to have your links pass on search engine value. Icons such as ‘Tweet this’ on webpages means that particular page is more likely to increase the links that those pages receive. URL shorteners such as Bit.ly and tinyurl pass 301 redirects which is also important.

However, with all social media, it is important to remember that it is about engaging with your audience, sharing information and building social networks – and that anything extra (such as social media rankings) should really be a benefit of these sites, not a reason to use them in the first place.

2011 is an exciting year in the world of search, and with social media integration becoming more and more hyped by both search engines and its users it could turn out to be one of the most game changing for SEO.

Article by Kelly

Article by Dejan SEO

When it comes to large-scale link building we can easily call it an art, provided that it is done the right way. And the right way for large-scale link building campaigns is based on research, planning and to the point implementation. If you are working for a large company with thousands of pages to build links or if you are supervising a link building team you need to know everything there is about competent implementation of link building on a larger scale.

Team selection / allocation

proper planning and research is essential for any job, but every team or project manager knows that if you want something done you need to get the right people working on the project. So before you give the link building randomly, think about which teams can do the job best and make sure you allocate both time and assignments the right way.

Personal interests of people

when it comes to allocating time and assignments the best place to start is by giving your link builders the tasks they are most comfortable with and have experience working with. That way you will ensure good results from the start.

Streamlining workflow:

Tools

There is nothing as good as manual link building, but to manage a large scale campaign you need to think of time consumption, so using proper tools for research and data can save time and improve your results.

Advanced search queries

By doing research in advanced and providing some advanced search queries for your link builders to start with you will cut your work in half and you can easily assign certain query/queries to each link builder on your team.

Link database

Of course, without proper management of data you cannot run a large-scale link building campaign. If you are an SEO company you probably already have a large database of links, if not it is time you start building one, it will save you time and money and will enhance your link building efforts.

Quality of emails / quality control

Although you need to have trust in your link builders and your entire team there is a need to monitor the quality of everything you do, especially the link request emails your team members send out. Don’t use plain templates that sound like spam, make sure all of your link builders take a personalized approach to new link opportunities.

Awareness of impact of link building on brand and PR

Knowing how a certain type of link will influence both rankings and your brand’s PR is crucial. A single link can drive massive traffic and create a great buzz around your brand, so keep that in mind at all times and don’t just build links blindly wherever an opportunity shows itself.

Listening for new opportunities

Link building in one direction can easily become a problem, especially for large scale link building that is niche oriented. Following the buzz, setting up alerts and monitoring social media is always a part of a good link building campaign.

Watching for disappearing links

Not all links you and your team create will be there forever, so you need to schedule link monitoring and make sure that all the links are in place with the right anchor and right target.

Fixing incorrect links

Like the previous one, link consolidation is one of the first things you need to do with a large scale link building campaign. In fact this is one of the ways to get great quality out of existing and aged links as well as to score new ones. Monitor which links have no anchor text, images without ALT tags, non WWW and WWW targets, no-follow links and everything that can consolidate your links to maximize your efforts.

Balancing targeting of phrases to match campaign size

This part is always hard, whether it is a small project or a large one. But going out for too many phrases and targets can easily become a problem with large scale campaigns. Make sure you know which are the most important ones and when to branch out or branch in as you might be wasting your time building links for too many phrases without much success with any of them.

Measuring success & adjustments

When it comes to the ongoing process of a large-scale campaign we cannot get anywhere without stopping to see what our efforts have achieved and tweak them a bit according to the results we see. If something is not working it is time to change it, and if something seems to be working maybe a bit more of it won’t hurt.