First of all – familiarize yourself with basic SEO jargon like: internal/external links, meta tags, titles, pagerank, etc. 

This way at least you know what the SEO company is talking about when they make the sales pitch.

Personally, I noticed that the shady ones are often hiding behind geek lingo trying to paint you in a corner by throwing these words at you, thus proving that they know what they are talking about.

You can cut that conversation short and find out how credible and professional they are by asking 5 little questions. Here they are:

1. What kind of results should you be able to see and how long will it take to get there?
2. What experience do you have in my industry and how long have you been doing this?
3. Show/send me examples of your previous work and success stories. Can I contact some of these people?
4. Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
5. What other marketing services do you offer besides SEO?

Just keep this list by your phone and take notes while they answer these questions. I’m sure you are a pretty seasoned business individual so you should be able to spot the shady ones right away. You can download a quick and easy PDF document of “Questions to ask a SEO company” right here.

Generate Links to and from your site & Google will Rank you higher

Keywords and AdWords aren’t the only way that search engines score relevancy; links to other similar sites are another important factor. Keywords have been so abused by some webmasters that links are winning much more relevancy points. Google is said to love them.

 It might sound strange to suggest that your users should check out your competitors, but they probably know about them anyway. If your competitors have a higher ranking than you, linking to them can often give you a higher relevancy score with the search engines and the subsequent increase in traffic will make it worth your while. But here’s the best advice of all…

You can link to your own site by creating a subdirectory. This is like building another web page, but the URL will include your keyword. So if you painting houses, the new URL would be YourDomain.com/house-painting/house-painting-tips.html. You could then write a short paragraph on the home page, describing the new page and including a link. You’ll get big relevancy points for this!

This is all SEO Strategy – get more of SEO Killer Tips & Tricks here

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their web pages to yours. You give them a similar link in return.When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don’t reduce the quality or content of your own site.You don’t want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to buy firstOne way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a “Resources Page” and link to that page from your homepage.

This doesn’t take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners.
In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users.

Your Linking Partner

Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to determine where people interested in your product might be looking online.For example, if you’re trying to sell a book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers.

Online casinos then could be good partners.Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address of their webmasters. You can also identify your competitors, see where they trade links and then follow suit.

Webmaster Tips & Tricks

Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your home page or resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a high quality link. Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it. You don’t want them to think you’re message is spam. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will probably open and read it, thinking that you’re a potential customer.)

Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you. Tell them in detail where you have placed their link and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage.Tell them that if you don’t hear back from them within 2 weeks, you will consider that to be a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site.

Other techniques include posting free ebooks, newsletters, news stories and press releases at other websites, particularly industry specific and general portals. All of these would contain a free link pointing to your website, thus, promoting your website.

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Shorten Your Links

When promoting your site on Twitter you notice immediately that you are limited to 140 characters. If you can say everything you want using 140 characters – Congratulations! You don’t really need to read this.

But if you happen to have a very long URL for your web site (which I would not recommend unless they are main keywords for your website; and even in that case I would keep it to 2 or 3 words separated by a “dash”) I bet those 140 characters are not merely enough for a short and sweet message you want to put out there.

 
What about promoting a particular page from your site? I mean, look at this monster: “http://www.whateveryourbusinessnameisandacoupleofkeywords.com/products/go.php?r=31&i=l4?. That in itself eats up more than half your Twitter word allowance.

People will more readily click on your links if they aren’t long and scary. In fact they might find them quite cute…well – sometimes…

So what to do? Answer – shorten your URL link for your site. There are plenty of sites where you can do this at a drop of a hat.

Here are a few of them:

• http://www.trm.im
• http://www.Bit.ly
• http://www.Tinyurl.com
• http://www.u.nu

Using these sites will shorten your URL and improve your click rate; and that’s what you want, don’t you? Take every opportunity to grab attention and boost your presence on Social Media Sites. I highly recommend you use one of these services for all your digital marketing endeavors!