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Understanding Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is vital for companies today if they want their website to stand out in the internet’s noisy crowd. There are two ways to approach positioning your company’s website to appear on the top of a web search result page. You can either learn SEO and become an expert or hire a company that offers SEO services as part of a program.

 

Unless you have a ton of disposable time, hiring an SEO service is the best option. These are the top 5 things to look for when deciding on the SEO program for your business:

 

1. SEO – The pages on your website all have built-in SEO options. If you designed the site yourself, you may not have known what content to fill in to make sure search engines crawling your site would tag a relevant. Even if you hired a web designer, this component might not be good enough to make your website wind up on page one or two of a web search engine like Yahoo!, Google, or Duck Duck Go. A firm will be able to make the recommendations that can get your site noticed. They will also make recommendations for content to add and keywords to use on your website to make it more search engine friendly.

2. Pay Per Click (PPC) – PPC search engines like Overture and Find can help you get your website in front of your ideal customers while other search engines rank your site. This can be costly when the keywords you want to rank for your site are in the top tier, but sometimes, with solid research, you can find keywords available for as little as five cents per click.

3. Monitoring – An SEO consultant or firm should provide you with an initial report within 4-6 weeks and then monthly after that. Based on the reports’ ranking, they should recommend changes to keywords and content to drive more traffic to your website. Your aim should be to rank in the top 10 -20 results in a search for your keywords.

4. Fee-based indexing – Sometimes, it’s advised to spend a portion of your SEO budget on fee-based indexing while you are waiting for other search engines to track your site. Since there are many options, an SEO consultant can recommend the ones best suited for your business and industry.

5. SE Directories – To rank well on Google, and some other search engines, you need to be listed in the Open Directory Project (ODP). Since this is a manually (human) edited directory, it can take up to 2 months to add.

 

While you may be able to get into some SE directories for free if you are a highly localized company, having a specialized consultant to advise you and create an SEO program is worth the cost. Look at this expense as part of your advertising budget, and make sure you find someone knowledgeable in your industry.