Every business should be able to be found by potential clients as much as possible. This means that they should all be found by a relatively simple search, and there are a number of ways that a business can help search engines do so. An SEO expert can easily help a business be found in more places than they expected to prior to hiring the expert. It is just a matter of knowing what the expert needs and allowing them to have the access that they need.

The Sandbox

First off, keep in mind that any changes can take about a month or so to take effect. Search engines are used to people attempting to game the system, and so tend to get nervous when a site experiences a large increase of visitors, for whatever reason. They place these sites in what is called a “sand box” until the number of hits stabilizes. This, unfortunately, means that you will not see changes for about a month after the changes have been made. Keep this mind whenever hiring an SEO expert; it also means than an expert promising immediate change is one you should hesitate to hire.

The Process

An SEO expert will look over your site, looking at its organization, coding, and content. The expert is just trying to ascertain how hard it will be to modify the site to make optimize the site for search engines. Search engines love organized sites with lots of content; the better organized the site and the more content it has, the easier it will be to optimize your site. The coding is also important, both to make sure that you have keywords assigned to the site as well as that you are taking advantage of alt tags for images. The less of this that has been done will mean a lot more work will be needed in order to fully optimize the site, so be advised to hear a lot of advice if the site is currently poorly optimized.

Access Required

Once the expert has inspected your site, he will need access to the coding of the site in order to get in and do his job. While it is possible for him to work with your coder and switch out sections of code, for maximum efficiency the SEO expert needs to be as hands-on as possible. There are usually a number of changes that need to be made, and full access is usually the most effective way to ensure that all of the changes are made. This should not be seen as a possible security issue, but rather a programming one, and one that can determine how successful a business can be.

The bottom line is that an SEO expert can make a huge difference in how a site performs in a search engine ranking and that in earn helps to determine how successful a site can be and by extension the business. Take full advantage of the expert when you hire him, and you should see your site soon rise to the top of the results.

Joyce Laroche