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12 Questions You Must Ask Before Doing SEO

Written by: Bill Sweetman

Article Overview: Thinking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Website? Before you go to the trouble and expense, here are 12 questions you must ask of yourself and any SEO vendor you are considering engaging to do the work.

12 Questions You Must Ask Before Doing SEO

Thinking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Website? Before you go to the trouble and expense, here are 12 questions you must ask of yourself and any SEO vendor you are considering engaging to do the work:

1. What are your timing expectations? When do you hope to see results? And (if dealing with a SEO vendor) what have you been promised in the way of timing?
2. How do you plan to measure the return on investment of this tactic? (What are your specific and measurable objectives?)
3. Are you aware of the technical, design, and content changes that you will need to make to your Website?
4. What specific tactics you or the SEO vendor will use?
5. Are these tactics legal now? Are you sure?
6. Are these tactics going to be legal 3 months from now?
7. Have you been guaranteed by the SEO vendor that the tactics are legal?
8. Have you been made aware of the 'risks' of SEO?
9. What will the SEO vendor do if you get blacklisted from the search engines?
10. Does the SEO vendor offer some sort of overall performance guarantee?
11. Will the SEO vendor provide you with ongoing support or is this a one-time effort?
12. What sort of reporting will be provided to you? What, and how often?

When done right, Search Engine Optimization can be a powerful tactic. But if you aren’t satisfied with your – or the vendor’s – answers to these questions, you may want to think twice about what you are getting yourself into.

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Article Tags: measurable objectives, ongoing support, optimization seo, performance guarantee, return on investment, search engine optimization, search engines, tactic, time effort



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Re: Marketing ideas? - Questions will set you free... And make you Rich [quote="KH_Global":349pds7c]Just ask ask ask. That is it.[/quote:349pds7c]
Re: Contact Information - Another idea would be to have an email form in place to accept "ticketed" inquires (if people are afraid of spammers seeing their email address). However, I hate how some sites try to persuade you out of sending an email by bombarding you with lists of "Frequently Asked Questions & Answers" as I find they're rarely helpful.
Synergy and Other Creative Insights - Truth is that there is [u:2iwgooi1]C[/u:2iwgooi1]ollaboration - on a formal basis and [u:2iwgooi1]c[/u:2iwgooi1]ollaboration which is informal. Let's say that you have a great new product. Before it launches you get loads of buddies in the same business as you to tear it apart and let you refine it. Creative people will get others in as well. people from outside the business - or those who are in the business who might not have anything to do with it and seek their input - listening hard. These aren't focus groups, they are way beyond this - they are real outsiders and thus have very open minds, asking the dumb, the stupid questions, which are often the most valuable. Questions like these help me be a good coach too! I once worked in a business where the backshop (the store room) was always untidy. They held a team meeting and had the cook in as well (you know the one who ran the employee facility). She knew nothing about the storeroom and its processes, but boy did she ask some tricky questions of them. Sometimes, little 'c' collaboration is real good at the mocro level, without which the big 'C' collaboration would be worthless.
Re: link exchange strategy - [quote="RussellWebb":2xvcpjwz]Questions that pop into mind... Does PR ranking effect 'who' you would exchange links with? Do you really need thousands of links to rank higher in the SE's? Are one-way links better than reciprocal links?[/quote:2xvcpjwz] Hi Russell, While I know you posed these SEO questions for Samin, I thought I'd help you get the conversation started by putting in my 2 cents. 1.) I think it's all about getting "quality" and high ranking/trusted sites (that are related to the content of your site and industry) to link back to you. 2.) While it's somewhat true that the more links you have the better, I'd suggest focusing on "quality" links rather than quantity. Poor sites and ones that aren't related to your field can actually hurt your rankings. 3.) Absolutely, it's much better if someone only links to you. However, reciprocal links are still good for those who have just launched a new site and are getting started. If I'm wrong about any of these comments, please feel free to correct me.
How to protect my trade mark? - Affirmative commercial action might be, for example, to increase spending on advertising, in order to make better known his use of the mark, or it might be to attend a national trade show associated with his business for the same purpose. Maybe he's just been lazy and hasn't had any serious lack of means. None of the questions was rhetorical. But I readily can imagine that you found the questions irrelevant to the legal discussion. I do not think that they are. Questions about the fairness of outcomes seem to me to be always relevant to legal discussions, with this reservation: that usually nothing can be done about clusters of unfair outcomes from within a particular legal system (ours, or canon Law, the Sharia, continental statute law, etc.) at a particular time. They need to get addressed politically first. In this connection, a lobby-related forum might be useful. Many patent and trademark related issues get very heavily lobbied. It's not that I found your points irrelevant to the legal discussion, it's just that most of your points missed the mark. I represent the "little guy" almost exclusively, and my clients have been very able to protect their marks against infringers large and small. You should educate yourself on the way things actually work, not how you think they might work, and then come back for a real discussion. I'd gladly discuss policy issues with you.


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