9 Questions to ask yourself before hiring an SEO

Posted: 06 Jul 2009 06:01 AM PDT

When you have the budget and are on the lookout to hire someone, one normally plunges in when you see an interesting profile. But the wise will do their homework before signing the contract. Here are 10 questions you must ask yourself before hiring an SEO, or even before thinking of hiring one.

1. Does your site have a target audience?

This is probably the most important question you must ask. Do you have a target audience to match demand with ? If your users are searching you online, what are the possibilities by which they'll find you. This largely depends on what type of online entity you are and how "potential users" see you.

2. Would people search for your product/service/brand online ?

If they do, are there others who're already doing it right ? If they don't search you online and rather find you through TV ads and offline publicity, then you might not want to go that aggressive on SEO.

3. Do you have the budget ?

Are you in that period of time where you have the extra budget to hire someone ? If you don't you might want to discuss things with your designer/developer and fix things out. Otherwise you might be making a big mistake of pouring in the funds at a difficult time and then looking for quick returns which may not happen son enough.

4. Do you have the resources ?

In case you're hiring, do you have the resources to support SEO. You might not want to hire an SEO when you don't have the resources to build content / revamp the site.

5. Can you do it yourself ?

Smaller sites can do their SEO themselves most of the time. So why waste your money outsourcing ?

6. Do you need a redesign ?

Check whether you can afford a redesign now. Because most of the time, SEOs demand a redesign if you're pages are too old type (tables and all that).

7. Will your users/readers accept change ?

Many a times people tend to forget the changes that come in during SEO'ing the site. Like changing the URL structure for example. Always..always cross check if such things would annoy your users, if they will, discuss it well with the SEO to minimize the trouble.

8. Can you develop new content ?

Content development is something many SEO's resolve to while SEO'ing the site. Most of the time its crucial because competition demands it. Make sure that your SEO company understands your product/service and develops content accordingly. If they can't, try to arrange it from your side with the SEO guidelines in place.

9. Do you expect quick results ?

If you do, you're on the wrong page. Nothing happens overnight in SEO, and things take their time. Be patient and discuss your site inside out with an SEO before signing the contract.

The best practice to avoid confusion and assuming things is to discuss well with your outsourcing SEO partner as to what your expectations are, what resources you have and what time frame you're looking at to complete the process. Quick judgements often will make you regret later. So do your homework before you hire an SEO.

Now, all that makes sense right ?

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9 Must-do WordPress SEO Tips that you might have missed

Posted: 05 Jul 2009 08:53 PM PDT

I'm not going to talk about the much repeated permalink editing or heading changes here. Instead, I'm going to share with you some SEO tips for WordPress that you might not have bothered to check, the fine details that is. Keep in mind that some of them are the result of recent updates from Google. Let's go.

1. Nofollow your RSS feeds

We don't need the bots to crawl them. Google is clever enough to discard them but you might want to keep other bots awy.

2. Nofollow your Archives and Tags

They make the content show up at more than one place (the original article) and thus may create duplicate content on the blog. Why take chance ? Nofollow them.

3. Change the Post title to H1 from H2

Normally, all WordPress themes comes with the post title as H2. In my opinion you should change it to H1 as it could be the most important title on the page.

4. Add Titles and ALT tags to your smaller images

Many a times, you miss the smaller images. Tag them well with ALT and Title tags.

5. Test your page load time and keep it under 3 secs

Most of this depends on your server and code. Its not easy, but if you can keep it as low as possible – just great !

6. Take off any signs/characters from your page titles/ Change the page title format

Many a times, themes comes with fancy character signs like ">>" in the page title. Rip them off, you're wasting SEO real estate there.

7. Change the blog/site name to H2 or H3 from H1

Most themes come with the blog/sitename in H1 on any page. Change it to H3 or so, and use the CSS to make it appear visually big. We need post titles to be H1. (Ref: step 3)

8. Fix your default 404 error page with a plugin

We don't need them. They're ugly. Use a plugin to show up a custom 404 error page. Alternatively the best thing to do is to find and kill all the broken links.

9. Make your meta descriptions unique and not a repetition of your content (snippets)

If you took the easy way, then you might have not touched the meta description. Instead of pulling the first few lines from the post itself, its always good if you can make them unique and descriptive so that it appeals to anyone on the SERPs and draws in a click.

So, it doesn't matter if you use a SEO plugin or not, make sure these silly looking metrics are taken care of, because in the long run, these "silly" things could make a difference.

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06 July, 2009