Questions to Ask SEO Companies

Ask for a reference from current and/or past clients. If none can be provided, ask why? If one or more can be provided, but sounds fishy, make sure it is a real and unrelated business.

Ask what keyterms they themselves have targeted and search for them . If they are not coming up under those terms, then you might want to start being suspicious.

Ask if they can guarantee your results. If the answer is yes, and your campaign does not involve keyterm bidding through Overture (or similar pay for placement engines), you should be very concerned, as the only ones who can guarantee position are the search engines themselves. Conversely, search engines keep it this way to retain their credibility as a third-party provider of the internet information share.

Ask how quicky you might expect to see results. Typically, due to the nature of cyclical updates in the search engines, it takes between 30-90 days to begin to see marked changes in your positioning in any search engine marketing campaign. However, many engines have paid partnerships that can produce faster results. In the case of SEO companies who have partnerships with Inktomi, the result might be in as little as one week (similar times are expected with AskJeeves and Teoma)and those that have partnerships with Altavista and Looksmart you can expect 1-3 weeks.

Ask if their company participates in link farming. Link farming is the practice of acquiring several inbound links to a website by using automated linkbuilding software or participating in bulk "link exchanges". These techniques are quite often hazardous to your site and while sometimes creating instantaneous results, will overtime depreciate your value with search engines and can oftentimes get a website banned from a particular search engine. Ask the company for examples of their work and look for links (sometimes hidden in regular text or linked with images) to large lists of links that are completely unrelated to the subject matter of that site. Sometimes the file name of these pages will be something like, links.htm or lynx.htm and will have references to "Link Exchange Network". If you find such content or find links to other sites that have no content, other than long lists of hypertext links, be wary as this is integral to "link farming" strategies. "Link building", on the other hand, is the careful process of linking a website to similar sites with relevant content that are of equal or better quality and should be differentiated from "link farming".

Ask if their company uses techniques such as zero second redirects, invisible text and links, zero size frames, invisible layers or doorway pages to optimize for keyterms. These are all very unethical and very damaging to your SEO campaign. They involve utilizing workarounds and devious "backdoor" techniques for stuffing links and keywords in a site that are not visible to a regular user. As search engines and evangelists of ethical search engine optimization catch on to these practices, websites utilizing these workarounds will find themselves banned, de-listed and penalized in the search engines. While more difficult to spot to the average user than other unethical search engine optimization techniques, search engine companies are becoming more aware through spam reporting of these techniques and are implementing filters in their algorithms that will keep websites that use them out of their indexes, and for repeat or blatant breaches of ethical search engine optimization, search engines have been known to ban or exclude such sites entirely.

Webplaceone.com, in an ongoing effort to maintain high quality services and ethical standards, will never participate in any of the techniques listed above. At Webplaceone.com, we stake our reputation on being an ethical Search Engine Optimization and Website Design company. We hope that this information will help you to become a more informed consumer. If you think that your current Search Engine Optimization campaign is being conducted by another company utilizing unethical practices or are not sure and would like us to help you determine whether such practices are being implemented in your website's optimization, please feel free to contact us through our online inquiry form or by calling us at +1 831 239 9975.