Yesterday I did a short outline of which SEO-services are most commonly offered and requested. Now we get to the decision of which service make the most sense to buy, which can be done yourself and which are not needed at all.

what do I need now?
Just as with so many things in life, there is no sure formula for success, so I will base the following on a standard case, a small website with an additional onlineshop that sells hand-laced presents. The keywordresearch should be the starting point for a searchengineoptimization and is a task where is usually makes sense to have both the searchengineoptimizer and customer work together. The searchengineoptimizer has the advantage to be looking in from the outside, they have a sense for keywords as well as the needed tools and techniques to evaluate the possibilities of keywords and keyword-combinations. Through their daily work, the customer has the ability to name other possible subject ranges that can be included into the research. The keywordresearch will often pass seamlessly into the evaluation of the competition because this is another place where you can find interesting keywords that, until that point, have been used only by the competition. Even though the evaluation of competitors is not a imperative part of the searchengineoptimization, it can often help with the success. The essential work on the on-page-optimization is summarized in the part about page analysis. At the same time, this is part of the searchengineoptimization process in which the customer can prepare much of the way if, during the creation of the site, he heeds generally known basics like clean URLs without session-IDs, proper sourcecode with title-tags and headlines and so on. This is not about the details – you have the searchengineoptimizer for those – but about the implementation of basics that any webdesigner should have internalized. If there is any ambiguity on this part it makes more sense to wait, seeing that the correction of mistakes usually takes more time and is more complicated than to directly take correct road of implementations. As far as linkbuilding is concerned, there are at least as many different approaches as there are searchengineoptimizers: some are buying links, others trade them, some are trying good content while others are giving linkbaiting a chance. The important point here is that the optimizer and the customer work together to work out a concept that fits the project at hand. The aforementioned site for hand-laced presents should certainly have the potential to get links by offering free downloads of lacing plans- and instructions and with a few emails to operators of similar sites, pointing out those perks, the links should come by themselves. The monitoring of the progress is a part where the customer usually does not have the chance to take over some of the work because each SEO will use their own set of tools.

what is useless? - beware of rogues!
Neither searchengineoptimization nor searchengineoptimizer are trademarked occupational titles. Everyone who ever heard something about the Internet and Google has the right to print in on their business cards. In Germany there is, at the moment, one searchengine: Google with more than 90 percent marketshare. Now, if someone wants to sell the registration to 10.000 great searchengines they will either be totally clueless about SEO or they just do not care for the results – just as long as the customer pays up. First catch-word that should lead to caution: registration with searchengines. A second point, where there is an increased need to advice caution, are meta-tags. The relevance of these tags for searchengineoptimization has declined drastically since the end of the last millennium and anyone who still puts increased focus on meta-tags is not worth their money. A third marker that often points to dubious SEO-agents is the way in which they acquire new customers. Reliable SEOs will not fall back upon such methods as cold-calls or unsolicited e-mails. Also, if you are promised that you have the chance to become reference-customer if you sign the long-term contract within the next few hours, it is imperative that you are cautious.

Tomorrow we will continue with the introduction of different pricing models and ultimately talk about the current prices.

What is the price of searchengineoptimization? - part I
What is the price of searchengineoptimization? - part II
What is the price of searchengineoptimization? - part III