What to expect from a Search Engine Consultant

There are many self-proclaimed SEOs out there and it is difficult selecting someone suited to your business needs. Apart from hiring someone who knows some technical aspects of the business, an SEO must also be intuitive. Understanding the business makes an SEO more successful than someone who deals with their clients with a "one size fits all" attitude.

There are several ways to get ranked higher and quicker. There are fast ways of doing it, where you fall down faster too or you can do it the slow, hard and longer lasting way.

Here are some tips on what to expect

Building links from your site is important. The links you have per keyword, the higher your rating in the eyes of a search engine. Beware of link farming. The idea of link farming is to have reciprocal linking with other sites. The quality of these sites are important. If the link quality is not good, Google can label you as a 'bad neighbourhood' which means that Google has determined that you are swapping links in order to manipulate page rank. Adding links that your visitors can use is a good way to avoid this tag.

For example, if you are selling clothes, it does not make any sense to link to a website selling cameras, would it? Moreover, outbound links are always better than a link exchange. Of course, linking to a complementary site is good, if it drives some traffic your way. A partnership is better than linking to just anyone.

Before building links, it is important to optimize your website for certain keywords. Remember, one keyword per webpage. It is not always nice to find out that you ranked high in the search engine for words like "free" or "welcome to our site".

Relevant keywords are important and over time, you will come up higher.
Search engine optimisation is still a growing field and as long as Google, Yahoo and MSN is used to search for websites on the web, it will always be an important exercise to follow.

It is always better to have a website designer with SEO knowledge design your website, as it goes a long way in increasing your website's visibility to search engines.