| Keywords
are at the heart of achieving high search engine rankings.
Search engine spiders look for the keywords in several places
on a web page to determine what the site is about and index
it accordingly. Once the site is indexed, the search engine
will use its ranking algorithms to place that site in a certain
position when a keyword search is performed.
There are a
limited amount of high-traffic, high-ranking keywords on
the Internet. Some search engine optimization companies
(SEO companies) disregard this fact entirely and in fact,
have built their entire business around letting their customers
pick their own keywords and optimizing the customer websites
for those keywords.
The trouble
with letting customers pick their own keywords is that unless
the customer is well-informed and has the correct software,
newsletter, or tool to pick high-ranking keywords, most
likely the customer will choose low-ranking, low-traffic
keywords. This is just what some SEO companies are looking
for!
When a customer
comes to an SEO company with a handful of low-ranking keywords
they want their site optimized for, this makes it 100 times
easier for an SEO company to make good on its guarantee
(if it has one) and makes it easy to show high-ranking results
to their customers after optimization, leading to initial
customer satisfaction.
This customer
satisfaction is in the initial phase only, when the SEO
company presents the customer with a graphic display showing
them that 7 of their keywords are ranked number one, 15
are in the top 10, and 42 are in the top 20 on some of the
search engines. The customer can do a search on these search
engines and verify these results.
The problem
with this method is that most likely, these 64 top 20 URL's
only collectively gain a few hits a month, whereas one well-chosen,
high-ranking, high-traffic keyword, that a page is optimized
for may gain thousands of hits per month. Without information
on what the high-ranking keywords are, the customer's site
will be optimized but will not gain the traffic they are
seeking.
Now it is true
that if all the SEO companies would go after all of the
high-ranking, high-traffic keywords, then the competition
between SEO companies would drive some out of business.
In order not to be involved in head-to-head competition,
some SEO companies choose to let their uninformed customers
choose their own keywords, stay in business and let their
customers suffer disappointment and disillusionment with
SEO companies when their optimized site does not perform
up to expectations.
When shopping
for an SEO company it is important that customers ask for
recommended keywords for their websites and approximately
how many hits per month these keywords receive in the search
engines. This way the customer will see the potential hits
for their site in regards to the chosen keywords and will
have more realistic expectations upfront before paying for
search engine optimization.
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