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

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