Anyone can say they’re an SEO consultant these days. And while anyone can say this (and very many do), not every one of them can follow through when it comes to your business. That being said, it is very important you choose an SEO consultant, like Golden Gate SEO – St. Louis SEO Company, that can help you take some of the time out to ensure that your website and internet presence is highly ranked on Google and other search engines.
What exactly is an SEO Consultant? Why Should I Hire One?
Generally, an SEO consultant gives advice just like any other consultant, but
they are an expert at engine optimization and a business hires them in order to
help get higher rankings on search engines, more original generated traffic to
their web pages, and this gives their websites a higher profitability rating as
well. But it’s not easy. As mentioned earlier, anyone can say this. Those who
do should be able to have enough knowledge for you to answer questions about
these topics and areas:
On-Site Search Engine OptimizationThis form of SEO is a result from your direct website work. From being mobile friendly, building and promoting social media outlets, ensuring your website is SEO friendly (search engines don’t see our websites they way we do – they just see plain text in general). That being said, in order to get your rank as high as possible, a consultant you are hiring should be able to advise you in what you need to do in order to prepare your website so you can get the best rankings when you launch or revamp it. While this article won’t get into too much about the things your SEO consultant can do (it would take too much of your time), here’s a little list of things that your SEO consultant should do for you. (Note: If they can’t do these things, or they don’t think about it and analyze it in full detail, then they weren’t being honest about being an SEO consultant anyway).
- Page Titles
- Meta Tags and Descriptions
- Quality of your Website Content (written displayed content)
- Keyword intensity
- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing – aka Synonym checking)*
Remote SEO (Also known as offline SEO)
This involves the things that search
engines check in order to see how valid your website is and how public it is.
Some of the things like backlinks to your website (external pages and sites
linking to you), SMO (social media optimization, and other social media pages
that are sharing your website’s address), YouTube or other content (this alone
can be a big selling point because the more content you have that links back to
your site, the better), online marketing tools, such as banners, commercials,
e-mail adverts, and more. Be careful with things like e-mail, as most of the
time this is a somewhat dying field (you can however incorporate them into your
video’s content in order to market better).
What is Black Hat?
If your SEO consultant wants to do anything that involves overly optimizing
your page (using a keyword to spam your page with it), hidden links on your own
page, or back to your page as external links, spamming your users with links all over your page, low quality of
your linked content (this goes hand in hand with keyword usage), or short
links. Sometimes people seem to think it’s easier and love using shortlinks,
but some of these methods are unhealthy for your website in the long run,
because it can direct your SEO somewhere else rather than your site, and you
run the risk of things such as a link shortening service to have malware on
advertisements, popups, and more. Plagiarism is also very, very bad. Worse than
just having horrible content (which is bad too).