When you are trying to find a company to provide local SEO services, there is one thing that is important to remember above all else. Quality of work. This may seem obvious, but it is very easy or someone to get suckered in to buying an SEO service from a smooth talking professional salesman without actually knowing the quality of the work they are getting. Quality of work is important because high quality work means that your site will be search engine friendly while still selling your customers. In addition to quality of work, any good SEO company will provide you with an SEO plan for your site. It is important that they include analysis of your site to prove that they have actually gone over your site and are not sending you a plan that they send to every prospective customer because it sounds good. What works for one website may not address the needs of another. Some areas that the plan you are provided should cover are:
1. On page SEO. Some local SEO companies will try to tell you that the optimization of your site and its contents no longer matter to the search engines. This is false information. On page optimization is not as important as it was a decade ago, but it is still very important to help the search engine spiders know exactly what your site is about and which pages on your site need to rank for particular keyword. This is one of the biggest areas that an SEO service provider can get wrong. Proper onsite optimization will not include any of the “illegal” or “black hat” techniques such as hidden text, door way pages, keyword stuffing, and “special” code. An SEO company should always be willing and able to tell you how they will optimize your site.
2. Link building is very important for the search engines today. It lets them know how popular your site is and what it is about through the anchor text for the links. There are many ways of creating links and there are many different types of links. Most of the good link building activities requires having a team of experienced and capable people and additionally they also use some common proprietary software which plays a big role in submission of links. Videos are a very popular and effective way of building links and driving targetted traffic to your website, so the plan provide by your local SEO services provider should include at least one video.
3. Site Submission. While it is not necessary to submit your site to the search engines anymore, it is still a good idea to submit a site map to Google, Bing, and Yahoo to make sure that the spiders find all of the pages you want them to find. It is also suggested that you submit your robots.txt file as well. It is not a good practice to submit your site to 1,000’s of search engines. It does not look natural and can actually hurt your search engine positioning.
4. Site speed. This is something fairly new that Google in particular is focusing on. There are many things that can slow your website down and hurt your positioning. It is very important that optimizing the speed of your website and usability for your customers is part of the plan submitted by your SEO company.
These are just a few of the areas involved in SEO and internet marketing. If your local SEO company covers these three areas and the local search submission, especially with Google maps, your site should be bringing you all of the local customers you need which will give you an excellent ROI.
If you are trying to get your small business to the top ofGoogle, check out the local SEO services, and small business SEO services offered by I.A.N. MediaGroup.
