Working with Your SEO Consultant
by Jane McLain
Remember that search engine optimization is an ongoing process, and you and your SEO expert need to work together over time in order to achieve the best results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a high priority for every webmaster these days, and many are hiring SEO specialists in the hope of boosting their search engine rankings. Understanding the process and keeping the lines of communication open will go a long way toward developing a good working relationship.
Help them understand your business.
Before any changes are made to your website, educate your consultant about the nature of your business and your business goals and priorities. The first step in the SEO process is identifying the best keywords (or more often, two- or three-word keyword phrases) for which to optimize your website. In order to choose the best keywords to target, your consultant needs to have a clear understanding of your business, your products or services and your main competitors.
Be realistic in your expectations.
The ranking your site can ultimately achieve is dependent on a number of factors, some of which are beyond your control - new competitors who target the same keywords, changing search engine algorithms, the number and quality of links to your site and the link text they use, etc. You and your SEO expert can modify your site to increase the probability that it will rank well for certain phrases, but it's not reasonable for them to guarantee you will get a particular ranking on a particular search engine. Also, search engine rankings inevitably change over time and a top ranking today is no guarantee of a top ranking tomorrow. All an SEO specialist can do is improve your odds.
Have a clear understanding of their methods.
Make sure you ask what your SEO specialist plans to do and what results you can expect. In particular, ask them what keywords they're planning to optimize your site for, and make sure those keywords actually make sense for your particular business. There's no point spending time and money to attract visitors who aren't likely to become customers - the "quality" of traffic is just as important as the "quantity". You also want to reassure yourself that they're not going to use any unethical tactics that would misrepresent your company or products, or get you penalized or banned by any search engine.
Don't ask them to break the rules.
In their quest for high rankings some webmasters pressure their SEO specialist to engage in practices that violate search engine rules or guidelines. Maybe they've heard of or read about some new "trick" to boost rankings by using unorthodox techniques. Whenever you use any technique or scheme that deviates from SEO best practices, there's a very good chance your pages will get penalized by the search engine and possibly banned altogether (and that means that all pages from your domain will be dropped from their index). The people who try to trick the search engines may see a temporary boost in their rankings but sooner or later they get reported as "search engine spammers". It's just not worth the gamble. Stick with tried-and-true methods that conform to search engine guidelines.
Don't tie their hands.
Search engine optimization always involves making changes to a website, often major changes. These might include changing the page layout and navigation scheme, reorganizing pages and rearranging page content. Your SEO specialist may want to remove that fancy Flash animation and replace it with a simple text alternative. They may want you to drop some Web pages altogether and create others. Some of their recommendations may seem radical, but if you don't allow them to make fundamental changes your site, your search engine rankings will stay the same. There's no point in hiring an SEO consultant if you're not going let them do their job.
Conversion is your responsibility.
A skilled SEO consultant can help you get more traffic to your website, often significantly more. And this additional traffic will be targeted traffic, in the sense that a person has just searched for keywords that are relevant to your website content and chosen your site from the search results. But it's up to you to convert those visitors to customers once they get to your website. Make sure they'll find an attractive and informative page that is obviously related to their search terms. Your SEO specialist will probably not be focusing on these other "selling" factors (such as writing effective sales copy) so you might want to hire a designer or copywriter in addition to an SEO specialist.
Don't make changes on your own.
Once your SEO specialist has optimized your site, don't make further changes on your own without consulting them. Search engine optimization is painstaking work, and sometimes the smallest change (like deleting one word from the page copy!) can mean a big drop in your rankings. If you think you've got an idea that will get even better results, run it by your SEO consultant to see what they think. Do keep in mind, though, that any time you make a change in your site it could result in a lower, not higher, ranking. If you've achieved a fairly high ranking already, you may not want to want to risk losing it by making further changes.
Give it time.
Don't expect immediate results after changes are made to your site. Search engine spiders will find your new improved pages and index or re-rank them, but it's going to take time. Google will probably spider your site within a few weeks, but most other search engines will take longer. And just because they've indexed the new version of your website doesn't mean they've recalculated its ranking yet, since those are two different processes and don't happen simultaneously. You just have to be patient.
Measure the results.
Keep track of your search engine rankings for your targeted keywords before and after optimization. If you don't see much improvement, talk to your SEO consultant to see what further changes they recommend. A little more tweaking might get you the rankings you want. It can easily take two or three rounds of changes to get the best ranking possible. If you still can't get a good ranking for a page after several tries, you might decide to target different keyword phrases.
Check your rankings periodically.
Once a page is highly ranked, it may move up or down periodically but will generally stay within the top rankings for that keyword phrase. It shouldn't really be necessary to do "monthly maintenance" on the site or resubmit it periodically. However, if you notice a dramatic drop in your rankings, it's time to investigate. You may find that your competitors have now optimized their sites and pulled ahead of yours, there may be new competitors for that keyword phrase, or the search engine may have changed its ranking algorithms. Your site may have to be re-optimized to get it back into the top listings.
Related articles:
An SEO Checklist
|
