With the broadening of the search engine optimization and positioning industry, there has been a flood of new "practitioners" promising to move you to the top of the search engines. While I believe that competition is good in any industry, many of these newcomers make promises that are simply not realistic and their submission practices could actually impair your current positions. This week, I wanted to outline the services you could expect from a reputable firm and give you some of the warning signs to help you in weeding out the less reputable ones.

Further, there are a lot of you out there that are currently doing your own positioning and search engine submissions. Being a do-it-yourself kind of guy myself (although I do draw the line at home repairs and anything that occurs under the hood of my car) I think this is a very viable alternative to using a professional firm like ours. What I also wanted to do in this week's NetProfit is objectively lay out the pros and cons of doing it both ways.

The Good

First of all, there are a handful of good positioning firms out there, ourselves included. These are companies that have been doing it for awhile, have gained an excellent working knowledge of the major search engines and directories and offer a valuable service. Here's how to recognize them.

Setting Realistic Expectations

A reputable firm will not lead you down the garden path, promising you number one rankings for highly competitive keywords in every engine in 3 weeks. That's just not possible. No one except the search engines has absolute control over rankings. A reputable firm will explain that achieving good rankings takes some time (generally a few months at least) and that top positions for highly competitive keywords are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to achieve.

Picking the Right Words

A thorough keyword analysis MUST be part of an optimization company's package. If the company doesn't offer them, ask them why. It's the most important part of the whole process. If you're not optimizing for the right keywords, you're wasting your time. If the firm does do a keyword analysis, press them for details on how it's done. A good firm should use human intuition and the client's suggestions, backed up by tools such as Goto's search term suggestion list and WordTracker.

Submitting to the Right Engines

Look for a firm that concentrates on the big search engines and directories. These generate 95% of the traffic and it's where you should be spending your time. You also want a firm that offers ongoing optimization, monitoring and submission programs. One shot deals usually aren't effective in increasing your visibility.

Tools of the Trade

Ask the firm how they achieve higher positions. If the entire strategy relies on doorway pages, think twice, especially if those pages are hosted on the firm's server. We've found that the home page of the main site is the most valuable real estate when it comes to search engines. Optimization and content building of your existing site should always be included in any positioning firm's strategies.

Also ask if the firm uses cloaking. If they do, this will be a judgment call on your part. We do not use or recommend cloaking, for reasons I outlined in a previous NetProfit article. However, we have talked to other positioning firms who do use cloaking and have found it to be effective. If a firm does use cloaking, ask specifically which pages will be cloaked and on whose server. Remember also that search engines have called cloaking a form of spamming and you run the risk of being banned from a major search engine.

Link Building Blocks

Determine if the firm has a link building program. There's three ways to build links. First, you can take the easy route and join in a Free For All (FFA) links program. In return for putting a gazillion links on your page, a link to your site will be put on other sites participating in the program. It's fast, it's free and it's worth every cent you paid for it. We've found these programs to be largely ineffective.

Secondly, a firm can have a link exchange program with its existing customer base. While not the ideal link building program in terms of building relative or quality links, this can be quite effective in increasing the number of links to your site.

Finally, you can continue to prospect and build quality links to your site from other relevant sites. There's no shortcuts for this approach and it takes time, but it will bring you the kind of links you and the search engines are looking for.

A good optimization firm will offer at a bare minimum the second option and preferably option two and three.

Directory Submissions

Well thought out directory submissions have to be a part of any positioning program. Ask if directory submissions are part of the program and which directories are submitted to. Also, submissions have to be done by hand and the writing of appropriate titles and descriptions is an art in itself. Ask specifically to speak to the person doing these directory submissions. Ask them how they would handle a Yahoo submission (this being the most important of all the directories). Here's some of the answers you're looking for:

• First, a determination of what the most important keywords and phrases are

• A thorough understanding of Yahoo's submission guidelines (feel free to quiz them on this)

• Knowing which categories to submit to (ideally ones that have some of your words appearing somewhere in the category path)

• Knowing that if all the words in an important keyword phrase appear in the category path, at least one of these words also has to appear in either your site title or description in order for your site to show up.

Further, ask if anybody on their staff is either a Go Guide or Open Directory editor. This will show that they would have a good working knowledge of both of these volunteer directories.

Finally, look out for firms that charge exorbitant fees to handle directory submissions over and above the submission fees charged by the directories themselves (we include directory submission co-ordination in our regular fees). For your reference, the business express submission charge is $199 US. Realistically, you might expect to pay anywhere up to double this amount (including the submission fee) for a professional to handle the submission of your main site. Anything more than this and I'd consider shopping around.

The Bad

Any industry has its share of charlatans. Ours seems to have more than it's fair share. At least twice a week we receive an unsolicited bulk e-mail or fax promising to shoot us to the top of the search engines or offering to "unlock" the secrets of the search engines. Newsflash. There's no magic formula or secret back door. It's knowledge and hard work. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

Here's some things to look for:

• First of all, if they're soliciting business through bulk e-mail or faxes, that speaks volumes about their business ethics. Don't go down that road.

• Some of these companies use an automated spider that crawls your site, pulls out random single words, runs a ranking report on these words and then send you a fax or e-mail saying they can't find you anywhere in the search engines. No wonder. A site that sells prepaid long distance phone cards could have the report run on "phone", "long" and "cards". Is it any surprise they're not showing up? Again, a company that uses this marketing tactic probably isn't a firm you want to be dealing with.

• If they say you'll be submitted to 300,000 (or some astronomical number) plus engines and directories monthly, run fast and run hard. First of all, it means they're using an auto-submit tool and search engines hate that. It also means your e-mail in-box will suddenly be flooded with junk mail. Most importantly, over submission to engines can wipe out your existing rankings.

• Look carefully through their site. Does it offer any information on search engines or is it just hype? Can you order online and is the order page secure? Does the site design look professional? Look up their Whois Records and see how long the site has been up.

• Finally, and this is a big one, see how they've done positioning themselves. The phrases to search under are "search engine positioning", "search engine optimization" and "web site promotion". Check on 4 or 5 of the major engines and directories, including Yahoo, AltaVista and Google. See if they appear anywhere. If not, don't even consider using them.

Doing It Yourself

There are a lot of very smart webmasters out there who have done an excellent job positioning themselves. Who am I to say you shouldn't do it yourself? But I did want to lay out the pros and cons you'll run into if you make the decision to go this route.

Pros

Time - If you've got the time to spend, you'll be able to devote a lot more attention to positioning your site than a professional firm would (unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars monthly).

Knowledge of Your Business - No one knows your business better than you. This will help you in keyword analysis and adding content to your pages.

Accessibility to the Site - If you're the webmaster, you have constant access to your site and can tweak pages and add them at will.

Cons

Lack of Knowledge of Positioning - There's a lot to learn about positioning. It could take months or even years to gain enough expertise to make the time you spend positioning your site truly effective. It also takes a huge amount of time to stay on top of changes with the engines. This factor usually eliminates the Time benefit factor I mentioned above under "Pros".

Frustration - We work with the engines day in and day out and we often scratch our heads wondering what they're doing. It can drive a newcomer insane.

Cost of Tools - If a Webmaster was to purchase the tools and subscribe to the information services we use, it would end up costing thousands of dollars per year.

Lack of Benefits of Scale - Every day we deal with positioning hundreds of sites. When trends happen, we can identify them quickly. Also, a large number of sites give us the option of including clients in link exchange programs.

Lack of Research - We're constantly running tests, trying out new positioning strategies, accumulating data on search engines, identifying trends and building our Knowledge Base.

Whichever route you decide to go, just remember that improved search engine visibility should be considered a fundamental part of your online marketing program. There's no secret formulas or magic bullets. It will require a lot of work and expertise on somebody's part. So when you decide who that somebody will be, take the time to make the right decision.