10 Questions you need to ask any SEO (Before working with them)

As more and more businessmen and businesswomen are turning to the internet as a route to market their product or service, as a result more businesses are in need of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation/Optmiser) services to help with generating targeted traffic and a strong on-line presence.

As with any industry, there are SEO’s that are worth every $ and there are many that are just interested in your money.

In order for you not to get burned if you decide to seek an SEO, here are 10 excellent tips on how to determine a SEO is worthy or not:

1) Ask what in-house sites they promote and where they rank in Yahoo and Google for which keyword terms. Any SEO who knows his stuff will have there own portfolio of sites, if he doesn’t this is immediately a red flag.

2) Check his sites by typing the keyword/s in each search engine, take note of the amount of results/competition (In Google, you will see the amount of results in the top right hand corner of the search results) In general, the higher amount of searches, the more difficult it is to reach to the top. Above 50,000,000 is a good sign.

3) Ask the SEO why he wants to work on client’s sites rather than his own. Does he want to gain more experience within different industries or doesn’t he like the commitment of working on his own sites?

4) Find out what techniques they use to generate in-bound links – Manual or Organic? Anyone can manually build in-bound links (There’s nothing wrong with this technique) however a good SEO will concentrate more of his efforts on generating organic links via quality content, social media/book marking sites. Find out what ideas he has for your site. Ask to look at his previous link building strategies and results.

5) If you have a set of links in your navigation bar, ask him what order they should be in and why. This will show if the SEO puts the end-user experience first, and you will also see some of his marketing thoughts/styles.

6) Find out exactly what you get for your money and the time lines they will be delivered in.

7) If possible, try to arrange a face to face meeting or at least a telephone conversation. Does he sound enthusiastic about SEO, on-line marketing? Has he got good ideas that will help grow your on-line presence? Do your personalities match?

8) Ask how many other clients he is currently working with, how many staff he has (If any) This will give you a good indication if he will be able to put the required level of commitment/effort into your project.

9) Are his rates to low? This may sound crazy, but any SEO worth his weight in gold will not offer rates lower than what he can generate by promoting his own portfolio of services. Why would he?
10) Ask the above 9 questions to at least 3 SEO’s, more if time permits. You will get a good feel on what SEO’s can add value to your business from the questions above.

I hope the above will prevent you selecting an SEO that is just out to make a quick buck from in-experienced webmasters.

Good luck!

Original Posted by: http://www.seobangkok.com/blog/

Google TrustRank

There has been an ever increasing awareness to the value of Google's "TrustRank" algorithm. While there are many factors that are "Off-page", there are a number of simple actions you can take to make sure your site earns the trust from Google by employing these easy techniques.

The best way to think about Trustrank is to compare it to if you were to purchase a product or service in the real world. There are many built-in factors that we use to pre-qualify a business to see if we are willing to part with our cash for their goods or services.

This is the same approach Google takes in order to measure the quality of a site, and doing this will get you out of the so-called "Sandbox" much faster than the typical 4-6 months.

While in no particular order, some are most costly than others, but all are worth doing.

• Register your domain for 10 years. If you can't afford the $70 it costs at GoDaddy then are you really serious about your site?
• Buy a SSL certificate - this tells Google that you are a legit business since they know you have to have a verified checking account to get a SSL cert. (And buy it for as many years as you can at a time, at the very least for 2 years)
• Have a privacy policy that tells in exact detail what happens to the information about the visitor that is collected from the site.
• List a mailing address (no P.O. Boxes) - Just as in real life, you feel better purchasing a service or product from a place that has a physical location.
• List your contact information - telephone, fax (if needed), email & name.
• If you have a bigger budget, use any of the "Hacker Safe" services and place those icons on your site. Again, this tells Google that you are seriously committed to protecting your visitor's experience on the site.

Those are simple techniques that you can directly apply to your site, and are signals to Google that you take your online presence seriously.

As far as the "Off-page" factors, it's really about linking to quality sites that are relevant and sometimes considered "authority sites" by Google. Also, getting links from those trusted sites will help re-enforce the quality of your site in the eyes of the Google spiders.

To your online success!

Paul Bliss

www.SEOforGoogle.com