What Confident SEOs Know

Once you bring in an SEO, ideally your site soars in the rankings naturally, and you start to receive higher traffic and more importantly higher conversions. This isn’t always the case though and when it isn’t you need to be aware it isn’t happening and you have to question why? Unless you were watching, how would you know? A recent conversation in a forum we monitor frequently makes the point. The two involved were an SEO and a freelance writer.

The recent online conversation centered around payments being received. The original poster was shocked that the SEO had provided a service and was patiently waiting for payment instead of demanding instant release of funding provided. The SEO in question kept saying. ‘No – it’s cool. They’ll pay me when they see the results’.

The writer couldn’t wrap their head around the idea that the SEO was willing to let their work be judged by its results. The SEO knew that what they had done would deliver the desired result, and that the proof was in the pudding. He was confident of his work and knew the client would see the results.

SEO can be tricky if you don’t have a firm grasp on the ins and outs of what is and is not supposed to be happening. The sad fact is that most webmasters only understand a little bit about SEO and then more or less in theory rather than in practice. The truth of it all is that even if you are not doing your own SEO, you need to understand it because it is your money you are spending on it and it is your site and livelihood that are on the line when you outsource your SEO.

The same principle applies to SEO. An SEO knows what works and doesn’t, and how to win the game, but it’s no huge mystery – they are just trained to do it and can do it better than you, which is why they get paid to do it. If they try to tell you it’s a big trade secret and just to ‘trust them’ – that’s not a good SEO! As said above, you pay an SEO to do it because they can do it better and faster, not because it’s a secret how to do it.

Of course, you want to be sure your SEO is delivering REAL results. Ask for reporting. Take a look at the SubmitEdge website and click on some sample report links to see what a good, transparent report looks like!

You can also look at building a back link portfolio by talking people into giving you links, if you are a social network butterfly, which is the perfect addition to a SEO campaign according to experts. What you need to watch here is the quality of links over the quantity of them. Research PageRank to see where you need to focus your efforts. A quick SEO campaign to get the link juice flowing will teach you valuable things about how link juice travels. Just make sure it always remains focused on getting relevant links, not just any old link.

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