A company that you select must have a good track record in achieving top positions in the major search engines. Obviously, your first choice goes in picking an SEO company that can show that it’s got a good appreciation of your industry and your client base. It must be ready to show that it can find the correct buying search phrases that your clients are using to find your products or services. S.E.O is a long-term commitment, short term tricks no longer work.

SEO is a steady process, not a one off effort and as such you’ve got to have the confidence that you’ll be able to work with your selection over many months and years. Research the company’s customer base and the age of the client-company relationship, this could give you a fair idea of the organization’s capability to handle customer relations. You can ask prospective companies for customer references and their contact numbers.

This practical approach can go a good way in setting your selection standards.

Search engine algorithms change from time to time and a good SEO company makes certain that it keeps itself tuned in to these changes.

Be wary of SEO companies that guarantee fast, unrealistic results. Too many corporations will use black hat practices that are scorned by the search engines. Today they are very smart at detecting methods that are being employed to trick them. Confirm that your selected company works in accordance with search engines guidelines and uses white hat methods. Choosing a company using black hat techniques could, at worst, get your website banned at best you might find that you have simply wasted all the money you paid to that unethical search engine marketing company.

Get a project schedule from the S.E.O Company for the contract period. Before signing any contract you’ll need to have the work the search engine optimisation company is going to do specified in a clear way that you understand, don’t let yourself be baffled by jargon.

Web site content is now a key component for ranking in search engines. You will need to define who is going to add new content and update existing pages.

Ask for a definite time schedule with attainment milestones and times of payment. An SEO company must be ready to offer you a verifiable way of measuring the number visitors to your website. Nowadays this is mostly achieved by using Google Analytics which gives you a detailed analysis of your traffic hourly, weekly and over longer periods. Such reports at length help you to get the proper picture of how SEO is benefiting you and your organization.

The above is a sound basis to your search to find the right search engine optimization company for you.

Searchers can broadly be divided into those looking for information and those who are researcing to buy. It is the latter that we need to get to our website and complete with a purchase.

When targetting our search terms we need to take into consideration the following factors.

• Predicted traffic - an estimate of how many searchers will be using the search term in a given period of time. We need to assure ourselves that there are sufficient people using the search term to make our effort to attract them viable. On the other hand high traffic numbers indicate that the competition may be too strong for us requiring too high an investment of either time or money. High traffic numbers are often associated with broad search terms such as “wedding” where it is more difficult to judge the searchers intent.
• Customer Value - how much is your customer worth to you. If you are in a high ticket business, such as real estate or cosmetic dentistry one customer is going to be worth a lot of money. As such, very low traffic but highly specific search terms may still be worth going for.
• Competition - the number of competing websites or web pages. If this is too high it probably means that the cost of getting to the front of the queue is going to be too much and we would be better advised to target less competitive and more specific search terms.
• Commercial intent - are searchers looking to buy or merely looking for information? This can often be judged by the specificity of the search term being used. For example, searchers using brand names or model numbers are much more likely to have commercial intent. Compare “digital camera” and “canon eos 450d prices”.

Once you have analysed each of these factors you can make intelligent decisions on the search terms to target.

Generally, when starting with a new website it is best to target lower competition terms and as your website ages and the number of backlinks grows you can become more ambitious and go for terms with more competing pages.

Now to really confuse matters carrying out the same search on google.es (really a Spanish language site) results in 18,100,000 competing pages, roughly 180,000 times more pages than on google.com. Total confusion. Repeat the search using the “pages in Spanish” option results in 45,000 competing pages, this is more understandable. Again repeat the search in “pages from Spain” results in 24,200 competing pages.

The website www.spanish-inland-properties.com, has the following results.

As spanish-inland-properties is hosted in the UK you might think that it would have a lower ranking in google.es “pages from spain” and that is certainly the case. It does not appear on the first four pages. Yet to confuse matters www.spanish-country-holidays.com gets a mention on page two because it has “spanish inland properties” mentioned in its description - yet is hosted on the same server as Spanish-inland-properties.

Why is this? No one outside of Google knows the exact answer but it probably boils down to a combination of factors.

1. Where web sites are hosted. This has the greatest influence on the results returned. Google probably gives a higher weighting to web sites hosted in the UK when a searcher is looking for results from the UK.
2. Differing algorithms. There is anecdotal evidence that Google UK uses a slightly different algorithm to its .com relation. The results from pages from the UK certainly seem to have more anomalies than those in the US.
3. Using different data centers. Google uses a large number of data centers scattered throughout the globe and the data held on each differs slightly.
4. Local search results. Google has been rolling out a system that takes into account the IP address of the searcher. The systemr serves results that include businesses that are local to the searcher. This is set to become more important as time passes.
5. Top level domain extensions. Years ago this was more important but nowadays has little, if any, influence on the results.

It should be born in mind that only about one in seven searchers using www.google.co.uk select the pages from the UK option, see this survey.

This can be defined as the degree to which the web pages returned from a search match the searcher’s search term and intention. Search engines consider a page to be relevant if the phrase used by the searcher shows up several times throughout the page and occurs in the page title or important headlines or subheaders within the page itself and in the pages meta data.

Search engines also take into account other pages on the web site to see if those pages are displaying content that is related in some way to the page selected i.e. the search engine is looking to see if the website has a particular theme.

Popularity

The popularity of a given web page or web site is measured by the number and quality of the inbound links to that page. Search engines look at which site is linking to a page, i.e. the authority of the linking site (e.g. .edu and .gov sites) and they also count what is being said within and around the link

The above is a gross oversimplification of the process. Today, search engines, use extremely complicated and far reaching algorithms to determin who gets to the top listing for a given search term. The days of fooling the search engine by keyword stuffing and other forms of spamming are over.