As Internet search gains additional ground and companies realize the power of being found on Google, they seek professional help. However, since their knowledge of Internet marketing in general and SEO in particular may be limited, they are often faced with the challenge of how to choose the right company/consultant.

When it comes to smaller companies, most only have one shot at hiring the right SEO firm to make them successful. The investment, the waiting time and the possibility of being banned by Google are the reasons to make the right choice the first time.

Here are the questions you need to ask any SEO company before hiring them:

Success Rate:

How long have you been in the SEO world?
An SEO firm that has recently started, may not have the experience needed to get you on Google and most importantly keep you there.

How many successful SEO cases do you have?
- The more successful cases of SEO, the better the company. SEO success means only one thing: getting a client on the first page of Google for their important keywords.

What percentage of your clients do you get to #1 on Google?
- If they answer “All of them”, it is likely a lie. It’s impossible to get all of your clients to rank #1. For some clients/markets, being on the first page is enough to boost the traffic and sales, therefore, their objective is not the #1 spot. For some clients, Wikipedia ranks #1, and it is extremely difficult to rank better than Wikipedia. There are other examples.
- I’d say a really good SEO company can get at least 50 percent of its clients who target their local market at the top of Google. For international and very completive keywords, it’s enough to see they were able to get a couple of clients to the very top of Google.

How many of those successful cases can you share with us?
- If the SEO firm refrains from sharing their clients’ information with you and offers any kind of excuse (i.e. privacy of clients) drop them immediately. In the past several years we’ve been doing SEO, many of our clients are very happy to share their experience with the outside world. You can see a list here.

Search Engines:

What search engines do you get me ranked on?
- There is only one that counts: GOOGLE. Google receives over %75 of the US search market. If you rank well on Google, your business does well and if you don’t, it doesn’t matter if you rank well on Yahoo! or Bing. When was the last time you used any of these search engines?

Do you guarantee my rankings on Google?
- This is probably the most important question you need to ask. Although no one can guarantee Google results, there has to be some kind of a penalty for the SEO firm if they’re unable to get you solid results on Google (like a money-back guarantee).
- On the other hand, when you rank well on Google, you will certainly do well on Yahoo! and Bing.
- If the company says they do not guarantee placements on Google organic results, then find another firm that does.

Content:

Do you develop content for our site on a regular basis? Who writes them and how?
- Increasingly, Google is giving additional importance to content. Namely, how often a site is being updated and the quality of the content that is written. Text with grammatical or spelling errors on a site reflects a poor quality site.
- On the other hand, you need to be involved in content development because your feedback/approval is needed for anything that goes on your site.

Relevancy (Optimization):

How many times should my keywords be repeated in 100 words of one of my site’s pages?
- Most SEO newbies think the more the better. Some say 5-10 percent. But the reality of it is that Google can recognize a site’s relevance to a specific keyword even if the keyword is mentioned only once. Remember, the keywords are mentioned in a few important places of your site: URL, title tag, description tag, header tag, and finally, your site’s text.

How often do you update my site with new optimization?
- Most common people assume that optimization of a site is an ongoing task. And unfortunately, most SEO companies do not correct this misconception. Optimization of a site needs to be done only once. If the SEO consultant/company knows how Google algorithm ranks sites, he or she knows how to optimize the site to get the best placement on Google without over-optimizing it. As long as the site remains intact, there is no need for reoptimization.

Popularity (Link-Building):

Where do you buy links for our business?
- This is a trick question. Buying links is forbidden for those who want to be at the top for a very long time. If the company engages in any link-buying schemes, stay away from them.

How many back-links do you plan on getting for our site?
- The quantity is as important as the quality of the back-links. But if they refrain from answering the question directly, then they probably don’t have a method of acquiring links for your site.

What are the page ranks of sites you get links for us?
- The page rank could be from 1-9, however, this question shows the prospect that you care about the quality of the back-links they’re getting for you. At the same time, if all back-links come from PR 1-3 sites, then the SEO efforts will not have the best results.

Reports

How often do you send us ranking reports?
- Ranking reports show your site’s overall improvements or lack of improvements on Google search results. We send our clients weekly ranking reports for all of their main keywords. But even monthly ranking reports would show the results of the work and save you lots of time trying to figure out how your site is doing on Google.

How often do you send us a performance report?
- SEO, if done right, will bear fruit in three to six months. If the SEO consultant/company keeps you in the dark as to what they’re doing, then you may end up wasting your money and more importantly your time in waiting for the results that never come. High-end SEO firms always send performance reports to their clients on a monthly or quarterly basis.

TAMPA, FLORIDA— Our team of SEO consultants is researching changes to Google’s search algorithm that appear to have taken place in recent weeks.

While these changes adversely affected several of our clients’ appearance in organic search results for a short time, we feel confident that our SEO techniques continue to be viewed by Google as sound, because the lost rankings quickly were regained.

Courtesy of searchnscore.com

A drop in a client’s organic search ranking isn’t something we enjoy sharing, but we do so because it sheds light on three important facts to keep in mind:

1. We monitor our clients’ websites closely and are cognizant of even minor fluctuations. When we notice adverse changes, we work to fix them quickly.
2. Google changes its algorithm constantly and even the best SEO company isn’t capable of predicting when those changes take place and guarding clients from those changes.
3. These constant changes keep us on our toes and drive us to make sure we constantly employ the best SEO techniques for clients.

“We noticed the drops in rankings of some of our clients in the past several weeks and we began looking into the issue immediately,” says Master Google CEO Ali Husayni. “We updated our clients as we learned more.”

After Google announced on April 24 that it had updated its search algorithm (Penguin), several of our clients experienced a drop in ranking and traffic, says Saeed Khosravi, Master Google’s operations manager. It marked the first time in our company’s recent history that a Google algorithm update had negatively affected our clients’ rankings.

Master Google wasn’t the only Internet marketing and SEO firm that noticed changes as a result of the updates. Chris Ratchford, an SEO consultant with Prodentite, a Charlotte-based dental marketing firm, noticed ranking changes among some of his clients. But he isn’t worried.

“I don’t have a cause for concern right now,” Ratchford says. “It’s just something to be mindful of.”

He believes clients with geographical keywords are affected less than non-geotargeted keywords. For example, there are only so many Charlotte dentists, so there is a finite amount of businesses competing for similar keywords. Expand the competition globally to keywords such as “Invisalign” or “cosmetic dentist” and it’s easy to see how competing sites’ rankings could be more drastically affected.

“I haven’t seen a great deal of change, but some clients dropped a couple spots since February,” says Ratchford. “These algorithmic updates shouldn’t be viewed as a penalty; it’s more of an adjustment, from what I’ve been able to gather.”

These changes drive home- yet again- the importance of developing fresh content.

“It’s never a good strategy to just sit there and let things happen,” Ratchford says. “For clients who’ve been affected by this latest update, this is a good opportunity to identify what’s going on in their businesses and write about it on their website’s blog.”

Matt Cutts with Google’s anti-spam team explained recently that Google has rolled back some of its spam filters, particularly the one that once gigged websites for having URLs with long-tail keywords in them. Here’s an example:

Earlier this year, a website with a URL such as “bostoninvisiblebracesprovider.com” likely would have been punished by Google in terms of organic search results if that site wasn’t a site truly dedicated to providing invisible braces treatment and didn’t have lots of original content related to this topic.

In cities where low-quality sites such as this existed and we had clients competing for optimum organic search results for a keyword such as “Boston invisible braces provider,” our clients’ websites tended to rank higher.

But this latest change to Google Penguin appears to allow sites with this type of URL to rank high once again.

The experts over at WebProNews report that Google made another 39 algorithm changes in May. Among those changes, Google claimed it made “a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the Penguin algorithm.”

Google also said it has “algorithms in place designed to detect a variety of link schemes, a common spam technique. This change ensures we’re using those signals appropriately in the rest of our ranking,” according to a WebProNews article by Chris Crum.

“But some of our clients’ sites that had used “shady” link-building techniques in the past are now ranking better,” Husayni explains. “So, we’re not sure if this new round of algorithm updates truly changes the search results for the better.”

It appears that for the first time, Google has punished white-hat SEO companies by removing some of its anti-spam filters. But we won’t draw any conclusions until we further investigate this new round of updates.

TAMPA, FLORIDA- There’s something going on in social media that really bugs me. Too many companies claim to participate in social media simply because they have a Facebook Page or a Twitter account.

But you must do more than simply “be present” to win the social media game. You have to actually be social.

Courtesy of mediabistro.com

By being social, you can use Twitter to help improve your website’s appearance on Google. Google Search engine ranking and Bing is influenced by social networking websites, according to Pingler.com.

I’m a firm believer in using every tool in the SEO toolbox. We use guaranteed SEO techniques to help our clients appear in the top spots on organic search results, but the good news is that there is no finite number of techniques. Social media continues to create additional opportunities for those who use those outlets properly.

Here’s what several experts say about achieving better search rankings through Twitter and other social media.

1. Be Social
Kevin Gibbons over at Search Engine Land says it well when he explains that your SEO strategies have to include more than tweeting links to your own website if you want it to help improve your ranking.

“You need to enter conversations, respond to questions and queries, talk to customers who mention your brand, and interact,” Kevin says according to searchengineland.com.

2. Write Great Content
Here’s what makes me admire Kevin the most: like me, he’s a firm believer that creating quality content will help improve your ranking.

“This is the simplest rule for most SEO strategies, but it’s also one of the hardest to pull off,” he says. “If you want people to retweet your content and enhance your importance in Google’s eyes, then create valuable articles and tools that will make them want to link to it and share it with their own followers.”

Once you have great content, you need an attention-grabbing tweet to get people to click through. And remember, you only have 140 characters to grab their attention.

3. Optimize
Kevin also recommends optimizing your Twitter account by including keywords that you want associated with your business. Include them in your bio and in your tweets, he says. And don’t forget to make your tweets retweetable by leaving enough characters for them to add their own comment if they wish.

4. Quality Trumps Hype
Duane Forrester of Bing participated in a search engine roundtable at SXSW in March and he confirmed the need for businesses to be active in social media. He indicated that small businesses in particular can benefit from it, because if they have a product or service that has true quality, people are bound to talk about it in social media. And anything mentioned in social media that points to relevancy is given a “big thumbs up,” Forrester says. “Does the rest of the world think you have a great product? If so, and they amplify this on your behalf, we’ll pick up on those signals.”

Forrester went on to say that if you’re not engaged socially as part of your Internet marketing strategy, “you’re missing the boat,” because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content, whether you’re involved or not.

So get on Twitter. When you post something on your blog that is useful, unique and beneficial to others, post it to Twitter as well. Start conversations, reply to what others are saying about the post, and notice the conversation it generates. The number of retweets generated can be a good indicator of how well you’re addressing users’ search for information. Provide information that others deem useful, and chances are you’ll advance your website exponentially in the SEO game.

© 2012 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google is credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Because search engine optimization is an industry rife with jargon and a technical process that many people do not understand, some assume that there must be some secret formula for success. According to SEO Expert Ali Husayni, that is not the case.

“Search engine optimization boosts the visibility of a website by making sure that the site’s language gives the best possible chance for it to be found when a web surfer performs a search,” Husayni says.

A small part of the SEO process is on-page optimization, which is constructing the code of a website to be easily crawled by search engine spiders, according to Web Developer and SEO Specialist, Saeed Khosravi. A basic search about SEO will pull up a staggering amount of information and ‘How-To’ tutorials. Unfortunately, knowing which list has ethical SEO techniques, and which has outdated or detrimental ones can be a chore. Plus, it is constantly changing.

“Google’s search engine algorithm is updated on a regular basis, which means in order to make sure you are not using obsolete techniques, you have to find a reputable source that keeps you informed about changes,” Khosravi says.

Google wants to mimic the human behavior of reading, analyzing and organizing content, and so the system evolves as people do. According to Husayni, some changes to the algorithm are to block black hat SEO techniques, which include any techniques that use spam, cheap links and poor or irrelevant content just to get a higher ranking.

Panda was an update like this that Google released in the U.S. in February last year. The major change was that Google began “rating” websites on their content and user-experience. According to a recent Search Engine Land article, the focus of the update was to reduce and penalize websites that had thin, low-quality and duplicate content. It also targeted sites that came up short based on other site-quality metrics, such as high advertisement-to-content ratios.

Where To Get Started

Husayni has been committed to the Google-approved SEO methods that work with the search engine algorithm instead of trying to abuse it, since he started Master Google in 2004.

He has written an e-book of best SEO practices that he updates as the industry changes, and here he shares seven aboveboard methods he uses for his clients, ranging from the medical field and real estate to heating and cooling:

1. Navigation. Navigation includes the top menu, footer links, breadcrumb navigation and HTML sitemap of a website. It should be very user-friendly and easy to understand. Do not make content hard to get to or structure the site in a way that only makes sense to experts in the industry or the person who designed the site.
2. Sitemap. Set the XML sitemap to automatically update so that navigation stays current and keeps the latest information easily accessible for users and search engines.
3. Header Tags. Header tags are used to define HTML headings and organize page content. <h1> stands for the most important heading and <h6> means that information is the least important of the page. Headers make the layout of textual information easy for the reader.
4. Links. The purpose of website content is to serve the reader, so linking to other content within the site is beneficial for everyone: the company, the reader and the search engine. A page that expounds on a topic, issue or technique mentioned on a different page builds an internal link structure that Google loves and, as a result, boosts the ranking on SERPs.
5. URLs. Use a consistent URL version and redirect all the other versions to the preferred one. For example, redirect non-www to www, https to http, and the one without trailing slash to the one with trailing slash.
6. Keywords. Using short, keyword-rich URLs is another way to share information about the page content, as opposed to a URL that uses an ID number or another ambiguous parameter. Just make sure keywords accurately explain the page’s content succinctly. This information shows up in the SERs, and Google is also factoring this into their algorithm.
7. Metadata. Do not use duplicate page titles and descriptions in the code for pages. The page title shows up at the top of the browser window, and the title and description show up in the SERs. This is another opportunity to make information available to readers and search engines.

Using a Master Google website page as an example, a popular search term, Google Free Optimization, displayed on the first page of Google results when I entered it. Notice the URL that lists optimization, as the page title is Search Engine Optimization Master Google Free SEO Services, and the description said this: “Master Google offers Free SEO (search engine optimization) in a way which Google spiders could easily find your site, read its code and content, and rank it for your specific keywords.”

Keeping descriptions concise helps SEO efforts tremendously, according to Husayni.

“The person who did a search like this would have a very clear understanding of what the contents of this page are going to be and whether it will be helpful,” Husayni says.

Husayni also emphasized that these SEO tips are designed to benefit the user, not just make a page rank higher on Google’s search engine. The reality is that on-page optimization is a much smaller percentage of the total SEO work than it used to be. Today, it is five to 10 percent of the work an SEO firm would do for a client.

Husayni explains more on his blog about the SEO components needed to build a site Google will love.

Google offers companies a guide to use when seeking an SEO company – questions that should be asked of search engine optimization firms to ensure the best services are secured. The search engine firm’s help section says if you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm, the earlier the better. And it offers the following useful questions to ask an SEO provider. Ali Husayni, who is highly knowledgeable in Google ranking services, provides answers.

Q: Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?

A: Master Google’s search engine optimization service has many satisfied clients. Find out if your site qualifies to be ranked on the first page of Google by filling out the form on our site.  If your site qualifies, my administrative assistant will set up an appointment with you to speak with me directly. After our initial conversation, we will send you a formal proposal and a list of our current clients so you can contact them and hear what they say about our work.

Q: Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

A: Indeed. Google uses software called spiders to find your site, read its code and content and rank it for your specific keywords. We follow Google Webmaster Guidelines to optimize our clients’ websites. Website optimization paves the way for Google spiders so they can easily read your site and find your important keywords. The optimization process involves modifying the meta tags of each page of your site to insert your specific keywords where appropriate. Also, we update other back-end codes such as alt-image tags, header tags, etc. We then insert your keywords within the body of your site’s content. We stay away from “black-hat” SEO techniques, because Google can easily locate any spamming optimization technique and penalize your site for using such unacceptable techniques.

Q: Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?

A: We offer website copy-writing, blogging, SEM, SMM and other related services which will complement our organic SEO work.

Q: What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?

A: Each client and their needs are unique. We carefully assess their site, keywords and competition and come up with a plan of action with realistic results. Our goal is to rank our clients’ sites atop Google search results under the organic listings. This is achievable from one to two months, to up to two years for some international keywords.

Q: What is your experience in my industry?

A: We have helped more than 500 businesses worldwide, and that number continues to grow.  We have experience in various fields, including real estate, medical, restaurants, software and car dealerships.

Q: What is your experience in my country/city?

A: Our client base is scattered all over the world, but our main client base is the U.S., followed by Canada and the U.K.

Q: What is your experience developing international sites?

A: We have worked with a few internationally based businesses. We will share our clients’ information with those prospective clients who qualify for our services and are serious about SEO. We will share a reference list soon after our initial client consultation.

Q: What are your most important SEO techniques?

A:  In the initial consultation, you will learn some of our secret SEO techniques. These have been used to rank our sites and those of our clients in top positions for very competitive keywords. You will also learn what you can expect from your SEO campaign, based on your budget.

Q: How long have you been in business?

A: Master Google is seven years old and Husayni has nearly a decade of experience in SEO.

Q: How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

A: You will communicate with us by phone, email, and Skype. We have an open communication policy. We share all details of our work in monthly reports. After the initial consultation, you will receive an electronic package containing recent samples of our client reports, etc. We will share as much information about site changes as you would like.

© 2011 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Sinai Marketing dba Master Google are credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this press release is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.