[Admin]

Every day i see many people asking, How do i choose a SEO Company?

Short answer: The absolute best way is to know and understand SEO yourself, no different to any specialty trade for instance a fully qualified gourmet chef is able to examine the work of another chef and determine how competent he is by the quality of the finished product and the methods he used to achieve it.

SEO is no different, however this presents a Catch 22 because if you are looking for a SEO Company chances are you don't know a great deal about Search Engine Optimization or you would do it yourself wouldn't you? Also learning advanced techniques takes years, i have been involved in SEO since the late 90's when AltaVista was far more prominent than Google and i still learn new things.

Also there is a massive quality difference between the "Self Proclaimed SEO Expert" who picked up the basics a couple of months ago and is now running their own company and someone who has been studying SEO for many years. Unfortunately it happens far too often, every day i see people post on webmaster forum asking extremely basic questions like "What does SEO stand for?" and a month later they have registered a domain, started a SEO website and labeled themselves a "SEO Expert".

I'm going to show you some tricks to weed out these types of people, you don't need to know SEO so don't worry just follow along. These tricks that i'm going to show you are the most common ones the "SEO Experts" i described above faulter on when they throw up their overnight SEO Company.

Also if they have a couple of these attributes, it doesn't necessarily mean they are completely bad but certainly the more they fail on the more the alarm bells should ring.

Nose to Toes

I've also been involved in motor vehicle rescue for a number of years, when we assess a casualty we do a "Nose to Toes" and that is start at the head and work our way down looking for injury.. So why not a webpage? Lets go..

URL's

Canonical URL's

First up is Canonical URL's, if you need to know what it is you can read our Canonical URL's article but for now don't worry too much about the name.

Visit the SEO Companys URL's like so:

http://tareeinternet.com/forum/
www.tareeinternet.com/forum/
http://tareeinternet.com/forum/index.php
http://www.tareeinternet.com/forum/index.php

Do their URL's stay the same in the browser and load a page, or do the URL's all change to the one single URL? If they don't change, beware this company has Canonical URL's meaning they have "duplicate" home pages and links to the site can be split between these different URL's which is not ideal SEO.

Note: They may use index.html or index.asp extensions, so try those also if they are not using .php

It only takes a few minutes to configure a servers htaccess file to fix this, so if they don't realize the importance of this chances are they will overlook important things on your site as well.

Linking to Home

Similar to above, when you click their link to go back to the homepage does it add a index.php or index.html extension? If so they are further contributing to their own Canonical URL's, also many templates link back to the index extension so this may indicate they have used an "off the shelf" template and haven't even bother to modify it to improve the SEO.

Poorly Formatted URL's

Browse around their site and see what their URL's look like, are they a mix of upper case and lower case letters, or contain both hyphen and dashes as word seperators?

This shows bad URL naming convention, creating URL's like this is hard for the owner to remember let alone a visitor or other site that wants to link to yours. Also what if you company want to invest in TV or Print advertising down the line, which is best:

http://www.tareeinternet.com/faq

or

http://www.domain.com/Frequently-asked_Questions.html

If the SEO Company has rubbish like the second option, this poses serious questions as to their ability. Don't believe me people do this? Here's a real example from a SEO Company:

From their Homepage:

Yes that's right, a "SEO Expert" with countless years experience as he goes on to state all over the site. Note i have obscured his URL, the idea here is to inform and not to call these less than reputable SEO's out.

So if the SEO Expert does not have a well layed out URL structure, beware.

Meta Data

Meta data is in the <head> section of a page, and is designed to inform search engines what the page is about. The Title also informs users what the page is about because this is displayed in your browsers tab, in your bookmark of the page as default and it shows as the blue title in the search engine results along with the Meta Description.

So it's very important these describe what "That Particular Page" is about aka unique for every page, and are not spammy or loaded with unnecessary keywords.

First Check

Go to Google and type site:www.tareeinternet.com

Of course replace Taree Internet with your prospective SEO Company, or one of their clients pages. If you see this be warned:

All the page Titles and Descriptions are identical, this is very poor SEO. They do not reflect the actual page's content to users or search engines, and having all your pages with duplicate Meta Data is quite detrimental to your rankings.

As you can see, these guys are self proclaimed "SEO Experts" - Wrong, they have absolutely NO clue what they are doing. What you want to see is something more like this:

Notice how the Page Titles and Description are unique and reflect the pages content, so do the URL's and they are in short easy to read human friendly format.

To Be continued (I need to go shopping)

[pntglobal]

Great! You have analyzed very well about SEO Companies, i am waiting for your next post...