In this day and age, things do not have to be expensive to be good – right?  I suppose nothing is exempt from this kind of thinking, not even SEO.  And with SEO being a very popular activity these days, it is not a surprise that you see countless companies touting their expertise in the field.  Some focus on promoting the idea that they are the best while others focus on the concept that they are the cheapest.  So which one should you go with?

I read an article earlier today tackling the very same question.  It provided me with some food for thought:

There is a saying that ‘Cheap’ and ‘Best’ do not exist together.

The costs coming down do not reflect on the quality of the work however. With more and more channels of optimization in place, companies providing search engine optimization services are able to work on entire new strategies; Strategies that were not around a few years ago, like social networking, and video marketing. These new age strategies ensure that the exposure for a customer is maximum, while keeping the costs at a minimum.

Indeed, just because a product or service is cheaper than others does not mean that you are sacrificing quality.  So when you find yourself looking for an SEO provider, try to bear this in mind.  However, do make sure that the quality that you’re looking for is there – don’t be blinded by the low cost!

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Every single link counts. That’s my motto when it comes to link building. While it is true that some links pass more value than other in my opinion you still shouldn’t overlook opportunities to get a backlink, whether it’s just one or a couple or a whole load of links. This is also true whether the page rank of the linking page is zero or ten. A link is still a link.

However, when link building remember that while links always count it can count AGAINST you. We all know what I mean by this – those links that associate you to black hat methods that will get you penalized by the great Google and the other search engines. A clear example of such links is links that you got from link farms. Make sure you do not sabotage your efforts by joining link farms. Getting backlinks by paying websites to link to your page(s) is also a big no-no IF you do this to get link juice passed on to you. You can only solicit paid links if you make sure that those links don’t get to pass value to your pagerank. So I guess in SEO terms there’s absolutely no point in doing this. However if your motive is to simply generate traffic to your site or create awareness then there is no problem. Just make sure you specifically ask webmasters of the sites with paid links to your site to use the “no follow” tag.

Again, remember every link counts so make sure the back links you get count in the way you want them to.

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You might be quite happy with your current pagerank in search engine results pages (SERPs) but have you given consideration to your mobile presence? If you haven’t now is the time to act. We all know how rapid mobile web’s popularity is growing so think of all the opportunities you are missing out on by having no or limited presence in the mobile web.

If you are going mobile though keep in mind that you will need to go back to the drawing board. Phones and other mobile devices are very different from desktop/laptop computers, which makes mobile web design as well as mobile SEO also different. The difference in mobile SEO is, however, not as glaring as the problems faced by web designers because you will still need to stick to the basic SEO rules like the use of keywords, accessibility (both by users and search engine spiders), link building, etc. However, what you need to be more aware of is that mobile users have very different habits from desktop users. These differences are the very things that make mobile SEO challeging.

A couple of the things that you will need to adjust to when doing mobile SEO include:

• targeting lesser and shorter keywords – You need to be more picky with your target keywords because mobile users like to type a lot less than desktop users, which really affects the kind of search terms they enter.
• regionalization – Make sure you really pay attention to location-specific queries. The reason for this is that mobile users are usually location and/or task oriented. They go online for a very specific reason, which is why you want those in your business’ locale to be able to search you on their mobile devices.

There are lots more to consider when it come to mobile SEO. I’ll discuss them in future posts.

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