There are a lot of “SEO companies” out there.  A search on Google for the term “search engine optimizing” will return over 35 million results.  It’s safe to say not all these results are going to be reputable companies.  We are writing this article mainly to help people not only choose the right SEO company for them, but also to in an effort to stop people hiring these companies to mess up their websites.  It is a lot more work to fix a site that has had some black hat SEO done, than it is to get a website in the search result legitimately.

Spam Emails

When choosing an SEO company, the first thing not to do is reply to an email (or even some phone calls) where somebody is telling you they will guarantee top ten results for your website.  Here is why;

1. No SEO company can guarantee results unless they are using black hat SEO methods.  That will get your website in the top, but banned when the search engine discovers how you got there (which is just long enough for you to lose money to the SEO company who you can’t sue because they did what you wanted just not for as long as you would’ve liked).

2. Most legitimate SEO companies don’t need to market themselves, as their clients should be able to find them on search engines.  That is what they are suppose to be able to do after all.

Look at the SEO Company’s website

This is the easiest way to tell how they plan on getting your website in the top ten.  If their website is full of black hat SEO techniques, then you can be sure that’s how they’re going to optimize your website.

What to look for;

• Gateway pages - These are pages created with search phrases.  If you see a website that has a page called SEO and then another page called Search Engine Optimizing and yet another page called SEO services and so on, they are doing this to try and show up for each of these key phrases.  This will damage your website when the search engines catch on.

• Key phrase linking – As with above, if you come across a site that is using multiple search phrases as link text to the same page all over the site, this can also get you a penalty.

• Read their content – If the text reads something like this:  “We are a Bay Area search engine optimization company located in the Bay Area, we offer SEO services, search engine optimization services to our Bay Area clients.” This is called keyword stuffing and it will also get you a penalty.

Bottom line is, when looking at the SEO companies website, if it looks like its optimized, then its over-optimized.  A good SEO company will make a site for the end user and not for the search engines.

Find out how they plan on getting you in the top ten

 If you are talking to a SEO company or reading their website, look for how they plan on getting you listed in the top ten.  The things you don’t want to see or hear are:

• Link exchange – This is a method where they will have your site listed on 100’s of other websites in an effort to increase your page rank and make it look to the search engines that your site is more popular than it is.  This is breaking the search engines rules and can get you big penalties.  We do use link exchange, but not to increase page rank,  but rather to put you in a good link neighborhood with other sites like yours.

• Meta Tags – These are tags in the code of your site that tell the search engine about your page.  A lot of SEO companies will use these to stuff with key words to push your site up the search engines.  The problem with doing this is, if overdone, the search engine will not trust your meta tags and start ignoring your pages.

• Gateway pages or sites – These are pages that are created with lots of search terms in them just for the purpose of SEO.  These will get your site banned.

The right way to optimize a website is to build a website for your users with lots of unique content that is easy to navigate.  Most anything you do just for search engines is going to get you in trouble.

Look at their Samples

Most websites will show up in specific searches.  For example, if you search for a restaurant by name in the city you know it to be in, it will most likely appear in the top ten.  As a SEO company, you should be able to put that restaurant in the top ten for people searching for the type of restaurant like “San Jose Italian restaurant”.  So when looking to see if the SEO company is doing it’s job, the samples you’re looking for should be as follows:

• Logical searches – The results should be searches that people who don’t know what your business is called will actually type in the search bar and not some random key phrase.  A bad example is “network equipment for sale”.  A good example is “network equipment” .

• Number of returned results – If they give you examples, check to see how many other sites came up in the search.  If the key phrase is only competing with 5,000 other results, this proves nothing.  A good example is 1-10 of 23,300,000 results returned.  Anything under a million results is not a good example.

• Number of examples – Make sure you see at least 5 different sites with at least 4 good results for each site.  Anyone can get one site into a good search result.  Few can get many sites into many searches.

Before calling any SEO company, make sure you know what to ask them before calling and, if you don’t like even one of the answers hang up.  You always have the other 35 million results to fall back on.  Oh, and never take a FREE site analysis.  It is always going to tell you your website needs a lot of work.