4 replies to this topic

[PileBuck]

I'm obviously very new to SEO work. I hired someone to configure my website a few months ago, and it eventually occurred to me that, if I have no knowledge about SEO, how do I know they did their job?

 

This motivated me to start learning at least the basics of SEO. I might even hire another professional down the road. In the meantime, I have a basic question:

 

My blog is packed with articles and photos related to [some specific] industries. For each post, I always enter keywords into my SEO plugin as well. However, when I search "my keyword blog", which is a pretty small niche, my blog isn't even on the first page. Can someone explain this to me? Thank you.

Edited by Jill, 30 January 2013 - 01:21 PM.
website and industry/keywords removed

[qwerty]

I'm obviously very new to SEO work. I hired someone to configure my website a few months ago, and it eventually occurred to me that, if I have no knowledge about SEO, how do I know they did their job?

Before you can determine whether or not they've done their job, you need to know what they considered their job to be. It's pretty helpful to have your consultant or agency provide you with a list of tasks they plan to perform and some explanation as to why it's important that the work be done.

 

Obviously, it's too late for that now, but I think it would make sense for you to ask them to provide something similar: a list of the tasks they've performed and why.

 

Whether or not they did a good job of it is another matter. Depending on what they did, and what the site was like before they did anything, you may not see results in your site's traffic right away, so if there's anything on the list that doesn't make sense to you, you can always come back here to the forum and ask about it, along with maybe giving us examples of specific changes they made so we can give you our opinion on whether those changes are real improvements.

 

Regarding the rankings on your blog, if all you're doing is putting phrases like "[my keyword]" into a plugin that populates the meta keywords tag with them, that's not going to help. Search engines pay no attention to that tag. You need to have the important words and phrases in the body of your posts, in their titles, and in the anchor text of links pointing to them

[Jill]

Here's the best way to measure your SEO success.

[imexperttools]

It is really a very difficult situation since you are oblivious about the SEO. The most reasonable course to proceed would be keep track of the ranking by yourself. Do not rely entirely on the report provided by these SEO guys, you have to randomly check the ranking results from time to time in order to see whether it is accurate or not.

 

Also, try to urge them to provide you with clear information and insisting them to explain everything that they are doing to you no matter whether you would understand it or not.

 

Do not worry, you will get the hang of it little by little, it is not that difficult. Good luck.

[torka]

Just about the last thing you want to do is turn into an obsessive rank-checker. For many reasons, rank-checking does not (cannot) give you a full indication of the true success (or lack thereof) of your site's optimization (or lack thereof).

 

Read the article Jill linked to and follow her advice there.

 

If you're already checking rankings yourself, stop. If you haven't started yet, don't. In the words of King Lear, "O, that way madness lies..."

 

--Torka