SEO: Google Gives Go-to Guide for SEO Greenhorns
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 2, 2008 | Share This
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Google’s Q & A page on SEO has been a first destination for plenty of folks looking to dip their toes in the SEO water. Until now the section on SEO firms mostly covered the myriad ways they could totally mess you up. The picture it painted of SEO was like the Lifetime movie version where the firm you hire ends up tanking your site rankings by getting banned from Google for link spamming while sleeping with your husband and pimping out your teenaged daughter. Not that some firms wouldn’t do all that.
Clearly someone at Google realized that perhaps a more helpful approach might be to supply the potential victim…er…user with some simple questions that they can ask a prospective firm to determine whether they are indeed adulterous drug smuggling baby-napping site manglers or if they are legitimate SEO purveyors. We suggested something similar in our recent post on this topic when we quoted the mantra of Reprise Media’s Manager of SEO Mark Pilatowski: Ask Questions. Here are the key questions Google came up with – and we think they’re pretty sharp.
- Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
- What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
- What’s your experience in my industry?
- How long have you been in business?
Of course you need to evaluate the answers carefully. A key tip from our previous post: there are no guarantees with SEO. Anyone who tells you that they can guarantee a ranking has tailored cargo pants on fire. Also, snickering, snorting and staring back at you menacingly whilst cleaning their fingernails with a paring knife are all bad signs.
Part of why a trustworthy SEO firm is important isn’t just to avoid the obvious horror stories. Search engines constantly tweak and improve the way they index and crawl sites and a good SEO agent needs to be on top of this. Earlier in the week we pointed out ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s website as being weak on SEO because of their reliance on Flash animation. Between posting that on Monday and today Yahoo, Google and Flash-maker Adobe announced that Google and Yahoo would now in fact be able to crawl and index Flash-based sites. If your SEO doesn’t keep up with those kinds of changes, initially good rankings can melt away like the icicle Tori Spelling used to stab cheating husband C. Thomas Howell with in Lifetime’s A Chill in My Heart: Murder in
Topics: Google, SEO, Search: How-To, Yahoo! |
Your comparison to a Lifetime movie is pretty classic. We agree, if an SEO is not up to date on all the changes of the search engine algorithms, they are virtually useless.
To: Search Engine Optimization Journal
It’s always great to hear from an information source that we visit daily. On the Lifetime tip, when I was looking for the image I used in the post I got looped into a series of “Best Lifetime Movies Ever” lists on Amazon.com It’s disorienting to get a glimpse into an alternate social-media universe…