Outsourcing your site’s SEO is a big decision that’s made harder by the fact that there are so many SEO companies to choose from. When deciding one of the most critical factors to consider is of course the companies’ approach to SEO. Though everyone knows the hazards of using black hat techniques there are still SEOs out there that continue to use them in order to get “fast results” whether the client knows about it or not. Do not fall prey to these SEOs!

If you find that the SEO company you are currently dealing with or is considering employs any of these techniques then run away as quickly as possible. The list below is from Google Webmasters Help pages. If Google says run then run!

* owns/uses shadow domains
* puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
* offers to sell keywords in the address bar
* doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
* guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
* operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
* gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
* has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google
* requests your FTP account information or root access to your server

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SEO is great but once in a while you should pause to make sure you are not neglecting your non-SEO efforts done to promote your site. Some of the things you SHOULD definitely be doing if you are not already doing it now would include:

Using social media sites – There are tons of social media sites out there. If you are not a member of one you should at least consider joining the most popular ones like Facebook and MySpace. You should also look into industry specific social media sites and join those to develop contacts not only with prospective clients but also to keep touch with the latest developments in your industry.

Blog - Chances are you already have a blog but I can’t help but emphasise how much a blog can contribute to your site. It’s not only a way to get fresh content up frequently, which is the SEO aspect, but it is also a good venue for keeping your regular customers/visitors updated about anything you (and they) deem important.

Promote your site the old fashioned way – Do whatever you can to promote your site. Use bumper stickers, posters, give away your business card, sponsor a charity event, etc. Whenever you have an opportunity stamp your website URL to let people know they can find you online.

There are lots of other stuff you can do to promote your site. Feel free to give suggestions in the comment section!

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Images are very important. It not only helps your users determine the gist of what a site contains with a mere glance but also helps make any website look a lot less boring. Of course the proper use of images is important to achieve maximum effect. However, aside from the user side another important contribution of images to a site is its effects on SEO. Images can help any site’s SEO effort but again, only if the proper steps are taken.

Below are some tips to ensure that your images help your SEO efforts and do not merely sit there looking pretty.

Store images in a single directory – What this does is it makes it easier for search engines to index all your images since there will only be one path to follow to find where they all are. An added bonus is that the images will be easier for the webmaster (or anyone else who needs access) to find and replace or do whatever needs to be done since they won’t be scattered all over the domain.

Use keywords in the file names – We all know the rule here use short but descriptive keywords. Don’t use senseless characters!

Use Alt text – Describe the image in the alt text but again keep it short and use keywords. you can use the file name for the alt text. Do this especially if you will be using the image as a link. According to Google you should consider the alt text in this case to be the anchor text… and we all know how important the anchor text is!

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URLs are very important in SEO not only because they’re what search engine spiders crawl but also because they appear in the SERPs, meaning that the contents factor in when determining the relevance of the web page to the user’s query. To make sure that the URLs of your site are optimised here are some tips you should remember:

Start with the directory structure – If your directory structure is a mess then it is harder to come up with good URLs, this is especially true for nested directory structures that go really deep. Make sure you organise your site structure first.

Use keywords in the URLs – Not only should you use keywords in your URL but you should avoid using numbers and other senseless characters. For bloggers this can actually be easy because most of the time the post title is used automatically as both the page title and as part of the URL, which means that you only need to come up with a good post title. For websites what can be done is to just use the page title as well but then you should come up with a good descriptive but precise title with the most important keywords.

Use a 301 redirect - What you want to achieve by doing this is to point users so that they end up accessing a page through one URL. Choose the URL you prefer and redirect all the other URL versions to that one. Make sure you also stay consistent and point to the same kind version (i.e. URLs with www at the beginning) for all pages.

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