The SEO consultant and SEO specialist is your Internet marketing expert. Taking advantage of the search engines is the biggest single portion of any Internet marketing program. Getting your website ranked high up in the search engine results is the primary job of the SEO consultant and SEO specialist.
Any knowledge able SEO consultant will tell you up front what he or she can't do. Unless you are going to be paying for positioning (such as with Sprinks or word tracker, keyword discovery, adwords and Overture), your SEO consultant cannot guarantee positioning. It can't be done. Getting quality positioning will depend on many factors. Your consultant ought to know what those factors are and be able to explain them to you.
A knowledgeable and ethical SEO specialist will have concern and respect for your business. He or she will not employ techniques that are dangerous to the health of your website. For instance, the use of cloaking to hide the page code (Google says straight out: "Don't cloak.") Another big thing with search engines is the use of what we call classic doorway pages. These are pages whose sole purpose is to redirect to another page, or that have no content of their own but present a link or button to click to transport the web surfer to the homepage of some other site. Classic doorway pages are considered classic spam. These kinds of things are not used by any knowledgeable or ethical SEO specialist.
An SEO consultant's job description? We view it this way:
1. The SEO specialist must provide real access, not just an E-mail contact. Real business people use phones.
2. The SEO specialist must understand the prospective client's needs and goals.
3. The consultant must outline viable options to achieve the client's goals. Honesty is essential.
4. The SEO consultant must provide insight to the process so that the client has a grip on what the issues are and how the proposed marketing solution will contribute to the bottom line. The client must have enough information on which to base sound decisions. Any competent consultant should be perfectly willing to provide an understandable explanation of his or her services. By this, we mean to say that if the consultant can't make the process understandable, he or she is probably hiding something.
5. He or she won't use techniques that will endanger the client's website, and thus endanger the client's business.
6. The SEO consultant must be honest about the timeline involved. When can the client expect to see results? Those who are willing to pay for inclusion or pay for positioning will probably see results much faster than those who are using "regular" search engines.
7. Execute the plan on time and keep the client informed of progress.
