As a web design company in we often come across businesses that have invested heavily on building a website/SEO but the quality they have been offered are sub standard. Strategizing a web project is as important as making a long term investment (Like buying a house).Website are essentially your web/virtual properties.If you have a house with a broken roof then it is as good as not having a house. There are a lot of things that your website can say about your business. A website now is not only a key tool in order to generate enough interest but also a “must-have”  tool in your marketing arsenal.

So before you go hiring a website company or a company that will do both your website and search engine optimization here are a set of questions you need to ask.

Understanding search engine optimization

The myth with search engine optimization and with most of the fellow small business owners we talk to here in Melbourne is that SEO is an ardent task and requires quite a lot of time and resources. Even more some companies charge you exorbitant prices / bill you hourly. Although we will agree SEO is a complex process there is nothing about SEO that a “lay-man” cannot understand.before you go and sign up with an SEO company for your website optimization or for keyword results there are a few important things to know and consider.Every SEO company needs to be assessed about their knowledge. Most often than not you will be talking to a sales person , rather than a search engine optimization consultant and thats where if you asked the right question ; you will find them failing miserably.

1) Link Strategies

Apart from link baiting and scoop linking/sharing , most other exercises of link building are just useless exercises.Most search engines clearly say that submitting to thousand of user directories is a useless exercise.A official Google webmaster answer quotes

Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines.

Never let your SEO company put other people’s link on your website.Sometimes SEO companies also hide links on your page by using a different font color.This will definitely get your website to fall in the search engine rankings.

2) Search engine optimization WHW

If your search engine experts or people who do your search engine optimization are not clearly telling you what they are doing then its time to smell the coffee. If you have arranged a meeting with an SEO expert or are looking to get some SEO done for your company website here are three golden questions that you can ask them.

• What do you intend to do with my Website ?
• How you are going to do that ?
• Why are you going to do that ?

All these questions require elaborate answer and if they cannot provide answers to these questions it is time to rethink your SEO company.

3) The Basics

While we were kids we were taught that letters are the building blocks of words. Imagine if you did not properly knew each individual letter you will never get a spelling right.If you did not know what 2+2 equates to the you cannot calculate the area of a triangle or solve a differential equation.If your search engine expert does not know about web design or have the basics of web design right then you are going to fail miserably.

4) Conversions / Results and Step up.

SEO is an ongoing process and if your SEO company quotes you a fixed price then that is for particular keywords and for a particular time.SEO is not about optimizing your website for certain keywords only. Here is a very very interesting post by Stephan Spencer which lists some interesting arguments.we specifically like the point 15 which says that all advanced techniques build on the basic ones. If your SEO company has promised you an advanced proprietary technique that no one else knows then chances are they are “SELLING” you up.

While you should keep your eyes on conversions and results you should take the next step of “Multivariate testing”. For example the keywords you are optimizing for may go out of the trend pretty soon.20 years ago Blog was not even a word.It emerged from Web log.

A/B testing can be catered in house.You can hire a part time graphics designer or get a web design company to whip up different versions of your pages and set up a multivariate testing for you.The whole process can take about 5 hours and you can be aggressively testing your design.You can find out wonderful things using analytics and bring about change both to your business and within your organization

5) Invest – Calculate ROI

As a web design company it is in our interest to say that you as an Australian business invest in Search engine optimization.Looking past that page you should look at some other costs you incur that are not as effective advertising medium as search engine optimization.

Yellow pages /White pages – you may put a few thousand dollars in this medium but can you really track where people are coming from. You may argue that we set up a different telephone line to track visitors from these pages but think about other factors such as “Life of a customer to your business” , average spend and a lot more.You may be able to track all these but it requires dedication and resources to happen. With SEO this process is relatively simpler using analytics tools in the market.

ROI is important to calculate because 1)You can look at your future strategies and adapt 2)You know whether its worth the time.

Set up an experiment 1)white pages 2) Search engine optimization and calculate your ROI.