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.

Social Bookmarking Your Website

The answer – Social Bookmarking. Why is Social Bookmarking so powerful and different from other web promotion tactics? 

Social Bookmarking websites are sites that organize and store “bookmark links” (links which take one to a specific website). Millions of web surfers visit these Social Bookmarking sites to search for information saves and organizes it. Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website.

Social bookmarking is a growing phenomenon at the speed of a flying bullet.  Social Bookmarking is no rocket science and can be performed by anyone; you can easily bookmark your page to 25-50 Social Bookmarking sites. 

Here’s a short list of Social Bookmarking sites:

• Digg: http://www.digg.com
• Delicious: http://www.delicious.com
• Sumbleupon: http://www.stumbleupon.com/

There is also a very long list of these sites here: http://www.bookmarkingdir.com but you can stick with the 3 most important ones already listed.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking:

1. Lots of Targeted Traffic
   The bookmarks for your site are categorized into different tags; you will get more targeted traffic from people searching within a particular tag. They will click on your bookmark and visit your site. There is a very good chance your tags will rank well in the search engines due to the authority these sites have.
2. Better PageRank
   Having popular Social Bookmarking sites linked to your site will improve your site’s exposure. With a higher exposure, you can link to your sites and improve their ranking too! You can even monetize on it by advertising links from your site.
3. Lighting Fast Search Engine Crawling
   Most of these Social Bookmarking sites are very popular sites that sit well in Google’s Page Ranks. The search engine spiders visit these sites so often that your links will be crawled almost immediately.
4. Higher Search Engine Ranking
   Getting one-way incoming links is the main factor to higher search engine ranking. With Social Bookmarking, you can get virtually unlimited ‘keyword’ links to your site. Having more keyword links that are relevant to your site will result in higher ranking.

The main idea of bookmarking is to post links back to your web page from these Social Bookmarking websites. You need to specify some keywords (called TAGS) which categorize your bookmark.

This allows others to search and even vote for your bookmark. Social Bookmarking is in a league of its own because of its ability to generate traffic by sharing links.