Search Engine Businesses & Consultants

What should a search engine business or search engine consultant do to my website?

First and foremost they need to address any issues that are causing your site not to be found by search engines for your search words. They may help you research search words, if you haven’t done so already. After they’ve fixed your website they should track how well your site performs in search engine listings. They may manage a search engine advertising campaign for you. They may get links for your site, such as a Yahoo directory or DMOZ listing. They may submit your site to search engines (at least Google, Yahoo and MSN.)

How do I know if my search engine business has done any of this?

Search engine businesses can throw a lot of terminology around to make you think they are doing something for your site when, in fact, they aren’t. Your best defense is to know enough about their business to ask them some specific questions, audit your site, track your site's progress, and know the warning signs of an unscrupulous search engine business.

1. Ask questions

They should be able to answer the following questions for you. If their answers don't match your answers, dig a little deeper - there may be a reasonable explanation. Warning sign: they don't know what you are asking or can't answer your questions clearly.

• What type of navigation does my site have, and is it good for search engines?
• What phrase is my home page "optimized" for?
• How many pages of the site has Google indexed?

2. Audit your site

After a search engine business has worked on your site, check their work. Are your most important search words on the home page and topic pages in the title, description, h1, h2, and content? Have you checked whether search engines have even indexed the pages of your site? If they haven’t, have you checked whether they can find the pages of the site with your site’s navigation?  Warning sign: they are changing terminology on your site monthly without noticing search engines can't find your pages.

3. Track your site's progress in search engines

Another good defense is to track how well your site is doing in search engines.  There’s great software available that will check your site in search engines for you. Advanced Web Ranking is a professional tool that will automatically check a list of search words against several search engines and create a report at regular time intervals. MarketLeap is a free online tool that will allow you to enter one term at a time and see how well your site matches it in search engine listings. If your search engine business is not tracking your site’s progress for you, you may want to track it yourself. Keep in mind that your competitor’s are also making changes to their sites. Your site could go up or down because the effect of other sites changing position. Expect variation over time.

4. Know the warning signs

There are a lot of unscrupulous search engine businesses out there. Watch out for promises to submit your site to multiple search engines (worthless) or get you hundreds of links (damaging). If they can’t explain what they can do for your site without lots of confusing terminology, be wary.  Google's page about unscrupulous search engine businesses is a must read.

What if my site doesn't improve?

If your search engine company answers your questions about what they've done to your site clearly, and you can see the right changes have been made to the site, don't hold them to blame if your site doesn't dramatically improve. How well your site does in search engines is dependent on multiple factors, first and foremost the quality of your content. You also need links from other sites to your site, and possibly paid search engine advertising. The efforts of your competitors to raise their site listings also has an effect. You may be up against another site that has been working on improving their site for many years.  Search engine businesses cannot control Google, Yahoo, and MSN and make them list your site first. 

What do I need to know before a search engine business or search engine consultant begins working on my site?

Find out if your site needs substantial changes that are not within the scope of the service the company offers. Before any changes are made, ask them to review your site and let you know if there’s anything that needs improvement on the site which is not part of the service they are offering you.

For example, a five page site with one paragraph per page will have a tough time competing with larger, content-rich sites. If you need to write more content for your site, or perhaps redevelop the navigation or site architecture, that work must be done before the search engine business makes any changes to your site.