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Search is a growing industry, and it seems that every day there is a new search engine optimization company in the game. On the other hand, the skills of many of these search engine optimization companies are questionable — staying on top of the knowledge curve can be daunting, and getting up to speed more daunting still. Moreover, there are a huge variety of tactics, “safe” and “unsafe” practices (in terms of the risk of penalization), and other imperative business considerations that you should think about before deciding on any particular search engine optimization company. The following is the first of a three-part series that provides a list of questions to help you to determine if the company you are considering is deserving of your trust. In this installment, we’ll center on the tactics that search engine optimization companies might use that could put your website at risk of penalization or removal from the major search engines. Ask your potential search engine optimization company the following: “Do you show search engines anything that a visitor does not see?” There is a common tactic that certain search engine optimization companies use called “cloaking.” In simple terms, these companies use knowledge that enables your website to recognize when a visitor to your site is a spider and to then feed that spider specialized content designed to rank highly in search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of every major search engine. Sites that are caught cloaking are routinely removed from engines. Therefore, depending on your tolerance for risk, you may want to find a search engine optimization company that does not employ this tactic. “Do you make pages, either on my server or somewhere else, that are not built in to the navigation of my site?” One more common technique that some search engine optimization companies employ is the creation of “doorway pages.” Since the term “doorway page” now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies have their own names for such pages: “gateway pages,” “bridge pages,” “targeted entry pages,” “specialized content pages,” and so on. Whatever they are called, such pages are rarely effective and also put websites at risk of penalization, as this is another tactic that violates the TOS of every major engine. If your potential search engine optimization company does not give you a definitive “no” to the above question, you may want to look somewhere else. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: How To Pick Out An SEO Company, SEO Best Assessment On Google Top No-No’s, Get an SEO Firm Or DIY

We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization) can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer is always a qualified “yes”– you can achieve professional SEO results using existing talent. However, for every company we have known that has met with great in-house SEO success, we know of many more that have seen their in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits. If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are some critical questions that you should address before you proceed. Do I have the proper resources at my disposal to achieve professional SEO results? Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal – especially at the project’s outset when target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes are first being established. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and service areas are added. Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business. Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative is likely doomed to fail. • Do I know which departments of my company should be involved, and will they work with an insider? As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website. Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot. • Will someone be held accountable for the results?This may seem like a small consideration, but it can have a tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If you have added this responsibility to some poor soul’s job description with the direction that he or she should “do the best you can,” you’ll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed. If you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization, you can read through the following articles: SEO Certification Considerations, Selecting An SEO – Musing On An Endeavor To Trademark SEO, 10 Reasons Why You Should Pay for Search Engine Optimization