Finding Your SEO Mate
Tuesday July 10, 2007
For small business and home businesses, a web site that attracts traffic and converts to sales could mean the difference between success or failure. Small business entrepreneurs are beginning to get educated about the need for and benefits of good organic search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns that will get their sites listed high in the search engine results pages for keywords related to their products or services.
This article, from Entrepreneur discusses whether you should hire an SEO specialist or try to handle the tasks on your own. The extent of your knowledge of search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques is, of course, very important in making this decision. You should remember that search engine algorithms - the formulas search engines use to determine your web site's ranking in search results - change frequently. Additionally, search engines may suddenly start imposing penalties on those sites they decide are using tactics to artificially improve search engine results. In most cases, the search engines won't directly reveal which specific tactics it suddenly considers distasteful.
In search engine optimization, such distasteful tactics are generally referred to as "black hat techniques" that can result in your site dropping in the rankings or worse yet, removed from the search engine's index altogether. Staying current in this field requires a daily commitment so you can avoid problems before they arise and so you can get the most from your efforts. From personal experience, I can tell you this is challenging enough for someone who is a search engine optimization professional, let alone for a home business owner who is trying to focus on his or her own business.
Additionally, because there are both tasks that directly involve your web site - "on page techniques" and those that need to be performed through other web sites - "off page techniques" - in order to reap the best benefits from you efforts, you'll need to be fairly handy and knowledgeable with respect to coding web pages in HTML. Again, if you're not maintaining your own home business web site as it is or you are making all of your site updates in a WYSIWYG editing tool, such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, you really shouldn't be attempting to implement SEO changes yourself.
Finally, it all comes down to time. Could your time be spent more productively focusing on the core needs of your business? If you are already using someone else to maintain your web site, does that person or firm have sufficient knowledge of search engine optimization to handle that task for you as well, or will you need to call in a specialist? While many SEO specialists, especially smaller concerns, can easily handle the bulk of any webmastering tasks needed to keep your site up to date, it does not follow that most webmasters are highly knowledgable in SEO.
The Entrepreneur article likens finding an effective and ethical specialist in search engine marketing to finding a soul mate - someone you can trust for the long haul. After all, effective search engine optimization campaigns aren't handled once and then forgotten. As algorithms change, as new opportunities develop and old methods fail, adjustments need to continue to maintain your site's rankings. Any SEO campaign needs to consider the long haul, which means you'll need someone who is honest, reputable and in it for the long haul. The article correctly warns that you should be very wary of any search professional who will guarantee you instant results as it is very hard to guarantee much of anything, other than long-term improvements in the rankings over what they were before SEO techniques were applied. If it really were that easy to obtain a top search ranking overnight and keep it there, especially for only a "few" bucks, everyone would be doing it. Instead, those who do buy into the promises end up getting ripped off.
Just achieving top search rankings isn't the end of the story. You'll still want to engage in web site promotion activities on a regular basis and your search engine marketing consultant needs to know how to get you the targeted traffic that will actually result in sales by using appropriate conversion optimization techniques.
Related topics:
This article, from Entrepreneur discusses whether you should hire an SEO specialist or try to handle the tasks on your own. The extent of your knowledge of search engine marketing and search engine optimization techniques is, of course, very important in making this decision. You should remember that search engine algorithms - the formulas search engines use to determine your web site's ranking in search results - change frequently. Additionally, search engines may suddenly start imposing penalties on those sites they decide are using tactics to artificially improve search engine results. In most cases, the search engines won't directly reveal which specific tactics it suddenly considers distasteful.
In search engine optimization, such distasteful tactics are generally referred to as "black hat techniques" that can result in your site dropping in the rankings or worse yet, removed from the search engine's index altogether. Staying current in this field requires a daily commitment so you can avoid problems before they arise and so you can get the most from your efforts. From personal experience, I can tell you this is challenging enough for someone who is a search engine optimization professional, let alone for a home business owner who is trying to focus on his or her own business.
Additionally, because there are both tasks that directly involve your web site - "on page techniques" and those that need to be performed through other web sites - "off page techniques" - in order to reap the best benefits from you efforts, you'll need to be fairly handy and knowledgeable with respect to coding web pages in HTML. Again, if you're not maintaining your own home business web site as it is or you are making all of your site updates in a WYSIWYG editing tool, such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, you really shouldn't be attempting to implement SEO changes yourself.
Finally, it all comes down to time. Could your time be spent more productively focusing on the core needs of your business? If you are already using someone else to maintain your web site, does that person or firm have sufficient knowledge of search engine optimization to handle that task for you as well, or will you need to call in a specialist? While many SEO specialists, especially smaller concerns, can easily handle the bulk of any webmastering tasks needed to keep your site up to date, it does not follow that most webmasters are highly knowledgable in SEO.
The Entrepreneur article likens finding an effective and ethical specialist in search engine marketing to finding a soul mate - someone you can trust for the long haul. After all, effective search engine optimization campaigns aren't handled once and then forgotten. As algorithms change, as new opportunities develop and old methods fail, adjustments need to continue to maintain your site's rankings. Any SEO campaign needs to consider the long haul, which means you'll need someone who is honest, reputable and in it for the long haul. The article correctly warns that you should be very wary of any search professional who will guarantee you instant results as it is very hard to guarantee much of anything, other than long-term improvements in the rankings over what they were before SEO techniques were applied. If it really were that easy to obtain a top search ranking overnight and keep it there, especially for only a "few" bucks, everyone would be doing it. Instead, those who do buy into the promises end up getting ripped off.
Just achieving top search rankings isn't the end of the story. You'll still want to engage in web site promotion activities on a regular basis and your search engine marketing consultant needs to know how to get you the targeted traffic that will actually result in sales by using appropriate conversion optimization techniques.
Related topics:
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