Hiring a search engine optimization and submission company

Preparatory work

Yes, you can do your search engine optimization work yourself. If you look around the Pandia site, you should be able to find the information you need. Still, if you can afford it, you may consider hiring someone to do the work for you. After all, your main task should be to build a content rich and useful site that visitors would like to come back to, not to satisfy the demands of the search engine companies.

Still, even if you do hire some positioning experts, you cannot just stop reading about search engine optimization and submission. In order to select the best positioning service, you have to know what to expect, and the minimum requirements for a successful search engine optimization strategy.

We therefore recommend that you read about search engine optimization on Pandia and related websites. You should also buy a book or ebook on how to get good search engine rankings.

There are actually quite a few crooks out there who will ask for exuberant fees for doing close to nothing.

Warning signs

Here's a warning sign: If the company promises you top search engine rankings by writing good meta tags only, get out of there! The meta tags (i.e. hidden codes in the webpage HTML) are actually not that important any longer, and some search engines ignore the keyword meta tag altogether.

Some search engine optimization companies will develop several so-called doorway pages optimized for particular search engines, and ask you to put them on your website. This may work if they know what they are doing. Be aware, though, that search engines like Google and AltaVista hate plain doorway pages for which the only function is to rank high in search engine results.

These are normally pages with no or few graphics, containing no significant information. They have only one objective: to lure visitors into other sections of your site. Some of the pages might be quite similar, the only variation being the main keyword phrase (i.e words from the searcher's search query). If Google find such pages, your site might be banned from their index. You don't want that, as Google is the most important search engine to be listed in these days.

Please note that some SEO companies will suggest that you "cloak" your pages, i.e. using computer scripts to serve the search engines doorway pages different from the real pages shown to your regular visitors. It is not worth the risk!

On the other hand, if the search engine optimization company suggests that you should fine tune your regular pages while targeting specific keywords, or that you should make new content-rich pages that can be used for this purpose, do go along! The search engines are looking for useful content.

Please note that some search engine optimization companies will put doorway pages on their own servers. This may sound as a sensible idea, as it will appear as if these pages do not belong to your site. In this way the search engines will not punish you if they find them. On the other hand, if your relationship with this company ends, you will also loose all the traffic generated by these pages.

Costs

Hiring search engine optimization experts does not come cheap. Still, good rankings may lead to a large increase in visitors, and -- hopefully -- new happy customers.

According to promotion expert Susan O'Neil, author of Maximize Search Engine Traffic, a typical small or medium business may expect to pay USD 5,000 to 30,000 per year depending on the size of the site and the competitiveness of the keywords.

On the other hand, if you are going to do this in-house, it will require two to four months' full-time effort by an inexperienced person (plus cost of training), and 5 -15 hours per week maintenance during the ensuing 6 months. (see About interview).

We will add that you may get away with less if you already know a bit about search engines, and are willing to follow the "pragmatic" approach to search engines, i.e. you optimize your pages for search engines in general, and do not try to target the individual search engine.

Robin Nobles, Director of Training at the Academy of Web Specialists, says that "Actually, there isn't a 'typical' fee structure, since charges can range from a couple of hundred dollars to over $50,000 to position a site."

He adds that "some positioning packages include purchasing additional domains; hosting pages on their own server; using cloaking strategies; creating numerous doorway or information pages; offering continued maintenance; and so forth, where other positioning packages only offer to make a few doorway pages and slap them up, not even worrying about the ranking."(*)

Indeed, some search engine optimization companies will offer lower fees, especially if you are willing to do some of the work yourself.

When calculating the effective costs of such an effort, remember that your optimization program must be considered part of your advertising campaign. The question is: How much can you afford to spend on marketing all in all?

Your contribution

If the search engine optimization company is to succeed, you must offer your co-operation. They will do most of the work, but unless you are willing to give them free reins on your website (risky!), you must at least spend some time on this project.

The "optimizers" will normally have to re-write some of your webpage copy, and probably also write some more. If they are good at what they do they will tell you and your writers how to write keyword rich text without spamming the search engines.

If your pages are heavy with graphics, Shockwave and Flash plug-ins, the optimizers may ask you to take some of them out.

You'd better listen. It is text that brings you pages to the top in search engines, not fancy animations. By the way, visitors also normally prefers information to slow loading designer show-offs.

Where to look

There are so many ranking and submitting services out there, that there is no way we can list them here. You will find a large number in the Pandia Plus Directory, and you may also take a look at our list of selected search engine optimization companies.