| 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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