Use of Relevant SEO Practices
This means putting in keywords, meta-keywords and meta-descriptions that have a relation to your website content and are not integrated forcefully into the SEO section of your web pages. The Google Panda and Penguin updates have specifically penalized webmasters that use irrelevant meta-tags and keywords to make their web properties rank higher. Demand to see a few websites already created by the agency and make sure that it uses tags and keywords having relation and relevance to the online content.
Putting Image Tags
Until recently, this was ignored by many SEO agencies – even some of the best ones out there. But repeated blog and video posts by Google CEO Matt Cutts has made it clear that having proper alt tags with descriptive keywords can make images rank higher on the search engines. Posting images on your website with descriptive tags will make them easily visible for the search engine robots or crawlers. Check whether the SEO services agency does this.
Merging of On and Off-Page SEO
Generally, companies and individuals let agencies their on-page as well as off-page SEO content and keywords. Make sure that there is a seamless association between the keywords and tags used in your on-page or website content and the content on social networking pages for your business. This is important, as a search engine query would easily throw up the best results about your business along with your website and social networking pages to potential clients.
Sending of Periodic Reports
The best SEO services agencies never hesitate to send you daily, weekly or monthly reports to their clients about the progress that their websites have been making. With periodic reports, you can easily find out whether the targeted SEO campaigns and practices are yielding the kind of results that you expect. Professional agencies also offer a break-down analysis of the results that they obtain for their clients. Look for an agency that is ready to offer such break-up details. Your job is to use free software apps such as Google Analytics and check whether the claims are true.
Use of proper link building strategies
It is also important for you to make sure that the agency uses proper link building strategies to achieve higher rankings for its clients. Check some samples of previous work done by the agency and ensure that it submits links of its client websites only to relevant high PR websites, blogs and forums.