What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

 What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is short for search engine optimization or search engine optimizer, which translates to "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer".

Seeing an SEO specialist is an important step. Search engine optimization can improve your site and save time, but you risk damaging your site and your reputation. Be sure to analyze all the potential benefits of search engine optimization as well as possible risks.

Many SEO professionals, agencies, and consultants provide useful services to website owners, including the ones listed below.

• Analyzing the content or structure of your site.

• Technical guidelines for website development such as hosting, redirects, error pages, JavaScript.

• Content creation.

• Online Business Development Campaign Management.

• Keyword analysis.

• Search engine optimization training.

• Consulting on specific markets and regions.

Even if there are links to your site in the ads that you place using our services, this does not affect its position in the search results.

Google does not charge a fee for listing sites in search results or for showing them in a specific position.

We provide developers with several free resources, such as Search Console, the Webmaster Center official blog, and our forum, which contain a wealth of information on how to optimize your site for organic search.

Beginning of work

If you have a small company, then you can do almost everything yourself. Listed below are some resources that will help you.

• A half-hour series of video tutorials on how to promote your online business.

• Google's Webmaster Guide.

• Google 101. Information about how Google crawls websites indexes them and displays results.

• The Introduction to Search Engine Optimization is fairly detailed on the topic.

• While this guide is not necessary to study if you are looking to hire a specialist, it can be helpful to know what optimization techniques are available. So you can understand in time that the specialist is going to use an undesirable or even prohibited method.

Please note that search engine optimization results do not appear immediately. The wait usually takes four months to a year.

If you still want to get professional help, skip to the next section.

Choosing a Search Engine Optimization Specialist

If you decide to use this service, contact a specialist as soon as possible. The best moment is when you are about to redesign or create a new website.

This way you and the SEO specialist can ensure that your site is fully compatible with the search engine. However, a good specialist can improve an existing site as well.

1. Take the recommended changes seriously. Implementing them will take a lot of time and effort, and if you are not ready for this, you should not hire a professional.

2. Interview with a specialist. Possible questions for discussion:

• Can he give you examples of his previous work and tell you about the successes achieved?

• Does the Optimizer follow Google Webmaster Guidelines?

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• Does it offer any web marketing or consulting services to complement regular search capabilities?

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• What results and in what time frame does the optimizer expect to receive? How is work efficiency determined?

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• What experience does an optimizer have in your industry?

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• Has he already worked in your country (city)?

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• Does he have experience in the development of international websites?

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• What are the main techniques used by the optimizer?

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• How long has he been in the industry?

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• How will the communication with the optimizer be carried out? Will the optimizer report all changes to the site and provide detailed information about the recommendations, as well as provide their rationale?

• Find out if SEO is interested in your business. If not, then you need to look for another. The specialist should be interested in the following:

• What is the uniqueness and value of your business or the service you provide to your customers?

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• Who are your clients?

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• What brings you income and how to increase it by increasing the site's position in search results?

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• What other promotion channels do you use?

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• Who are you competing with?

3. Try to find out what is the experience of the optimizer. Ask his former clients if they were satisfied with the quality of the services provided if it was difficult to work with him and if you managed to get positive results.

4. Ask the SEO to review your site and determine what changes are needed, why, and what results they plan to achieve. Most likely, such a check will be paid. Alternatively, a technician can request read access to your site's data in Search Console. Editing access should not be granted at this stage. The optimizer you choose should outline the steps that can be taken and give a realistic forecast of the expected improvements. If the candidate claims to guarantee you the first position in the search results, look for another specialist.

5. Make the final decision on cooperation.

Precautionary measures

While SEO can provide useful services to their customers, some dishonest individuals have damaged the reputation of this activity by taking overly aggressive marketing steps and using unauthorized means to manipulate search results. Actions that violate our requirements can significantly degrade your site's position in Google search results and even lead to its removal from our index.

When the SEO has provided their list of recommendations for changing your site, ask them to check with a trusted source such as the Search Console Help Center, our Webmaster Blog, or a Google-approved forum post.

Consider the factors listed below.

• A common fraudulent method is the creation of "shadow" domains, from where users enter the site through deceptive redirects.

• These shadow domains are often owned by the SEO itself, which claims to be acting on behalf of the customer. But if the relationship with the customer deteriorates, the SEO can change the redirect so that users go from that domain to another site or even to a competitor's domain.

• When this happens, it turns out that the customer is paying to develop a competing site that is wholly owned by the SEO.

• Another illegal method is placing doorways filled with keywords on the client's website.

• SEO promises that this will increase the number of searches to find a page. This is initially untrue, as individual pages rarely match with a large number of keywords. But the trick doesn't stop there: these pages often contain hidden links to other SEO clients.

• Doorways reduce link popularity and generate traffic to the SEO and other SEO customers, which may include sites with inappropriate or illegal content.

• You should also avoid engaging in link exchange schemes, such as buying links from other sites to yours to improve your ranking.

• This is contrary to Google's quality assurance guidelines and may entail manual action on your site or part of it, which will negatively impact your rankings.

On a note

• Beware of companies, web consultants, and SEO agencies that unexpectedly reach out to you by email
  Surprisingly, they send spam like this even to us:
  "Dear google.com!
  We visited your site and noticed that it is not registered in most of the major search engines and directories ..."
  Treat such messages with the same skepticism that pills for "burning fat while you sleep" and requests to help you withdraw money from overthrown dictators.

• No one can guarantee first place in Google search results
  Beware of SEOs promising high rankings based on a "special relationship" with Google and advertising "priority registration" on Google.

• There is no priority registration with Google. There are only two ways to directly suggest a site to Google for registration - using the add URL page or submitting a sitemap. Both can be done independently for free.

• Be careful if a company is secretive and refuses to clearly explain what it intends to do

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  If something is unclear, ask for clarification. If SEO creates misleading content on your behalf, such as doorways or “disposable” domains, your site may be completely removed from the Google index.

• Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to know exactly how they intend to "help" you. If the SEO has FTP access to your server, the SEO must explain any changes they make to your site.

• You should never be required to link to a search engine optimizer
  Do not go to SEOs that advertise free links and link popularity schemes, or offer to register your site in thousands of search engines. Often, all this is useless and does not in any way affect the position of the site in the ranking of search results of major search engines (and if it does, it may not correspond to your goals).

• Choose wisely
  Before deciding whether to use an SEO service, do a little research on the industry. Google can of course help with this. Although Google does not comment on specific companies, we have encountered firms that call themselves search engine optimizers, but operate outside the accepted business rules. Be careful.

• Understand what exactly you are spending your money on
  Google never sells places in its search results list, but some other search engines combine organic search results with sites that pay per click or pay per listing.

• Some SEOs promise high search engine rankings but place the site in the ad section rather than in the search results list. There are even those who change their bids in real-time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can take any place in the listings.

• In our case, this cannot be achieved, because the ads in Google search results are placed separately and are flagged. However, be sure to check with the SEO you intend to partner with about how much money will be invested in permanent registration and how much in temporary advertising.

• What else should you pay attention to
  There are several signs that you may be dealing with a scammer. This list is far from exhaustive, so if in doubt, trust your intuition. Refuse to cooperate with the search engine optimizer in the following cases:

• he owns shadow domains;

• he posts links to other clients' sites on doorway pages;

• he asks for money for the ability to enter keywords in the address bar;

• it does not differentiate between search results and ads on the results page;

• it guarantees a high ranking, but only when searching for confusing long key phrases, which, under any conditions, allow you to go to your site;

• it uses multiple pseudonyms or false WHOIS information;

• it receives traffic from fake search engines, spyware, and malware;

• he was experiencing a problem with sites being removed from the Google index, or his site is not registered with our search engine.